By Janice Davis [ April 30, 2024 [ The Conservative Woman
DO taxpayers realise how much they are being ripped off by this illegal migrant issue, and our everyday life poisoned by government deception and cowardice? We need to, but you have to work very hard to get at the details. The media, in cahoots with national and local governments, plus the anti-British civil service, keep it well hidden behind a stream of undeliverable pledges.
Recent goings-on at Minster on Sea on the Isle of Sheppey, off the north Kent coast, have helped pull back the curtain. Kent County Council (KCC) proposed to house 50 child asylum seekers at the new but unoccupied Ocean Heights Residential Care Home in Seaside Avenue. Residents were outraged, fearing the project would disrupt their peaceful environment and pose risks to their vulnerable residents. A rumoured £4million was allocated to adapt and lease the property from the owners when regular social services were being cut, including shutting down a now shabby local care home and moving the residents away. Former town council chairman Matt Brown said: ‘We were made to feel like villains for not wanting to house these “poor orphans”.’ He said it was nothing to do with racism, but why should their own elderly residents be moved away, and a crowd of unknown young men moved in?
The residents mobilised and the proposal was dropped, but councils all over England are at breaking point.
Many of these ‘highly vulnerable children’ arrive without documentation, preventing age verification, and adults pose as children to game the system and access higher benefits. Between 2016 and 2023, the Home Office confirmed that there were over 11,275 asylum cases where age was queried; more than half were found to be adult males.
Meanwhile the government, devoid of the courage or political will to act, devises disingenuous and vastly expensive ‘Potemkin policies’ which will never stop the boats, nor deal with the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims.
Yes, it has passed its Rwanda illegal migrant deterrence Bill and expects the first flights to leave this summer. But deportees will have a convenient five days’ grace for their lawyers to get busy. ‘Do I believe that in ten weeks there will be planes taking off with significant numbers of migrants on board?’ Nigel Farage asked. ‘No, I don’t . . . I promise you, not a single person is going to Rwanda. This is a complete charade.’
Now for the costs. Even by the standards of previous spendthrift governments, they are truly eye-watering. A Whitehall watchdog has disclosed that the Rwanda plan will cost taxpayers £1.8million for each of the first 300 people to be deported to Kigali, and National Audit Office figures reveal the overall cost stands at more than half a billion pounds. About £20million has already been blown, and this is likely to rise to £28million under Home Secretary Cleverly. It makes the four-star hotel scam look almost affordable.
It doesn’t end there. The government has given £209million to ‘charities’ that have lobbied the House of Lords against the Rwanda Bill. There are 265 of them, focusing on refugees and migrants, and they claim the Bill is a threat to universal human rights.
And what about legal aid bills? Since the small boats crisis began, the taxpayer has forked out £135million in legal aid to the arrivals. The government admits that ‘funding for legal aid’ (for immigrants trying to evade being sent to Rwanda) ‘is on a demand-led basis’, ie. open-ended and unlimited, courtesy of the taxpayer. Overall, a total of £585million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on immigration legal aid claims since 2009.
It doesn’t stop there either. Last year PM Sunak agreed to pay France £480million over three years to invest in police, intelligence and technology to help reduce the number of asylum seekers arriving in the UK in small boats. More money down the drain. France could easily stop all the boats by accepting back any migrant boat intercepted by the Royal Navy, the Border Force or the RNLI. Belgium has successfully stopped the racket. In reality, the French authorities still turn a blind eye and are even in tacit alliance with the people-trafficking gangs.
All this is in addition to the jaw-dropping costs of the welfare and housing benefits for migrants already here. The government has an obligation to provide asylum seekers with a ‘basic level’ of accommodation, at our expense because they are not allowed to work. In 2023 it emerged that there were 175,000 people waiting for a refugee status decision (44 per cent higher than the previous year), and the Home Office has admitted that the cost of their housing has risen to £8million per day, or well over £1,000million a year. Nor should we forget all the additional costs – NHS health and dentistry services, education, social care, travel, clothing – there seems to be no end to it. Adding these basic expenses together suggests a broad-brush estimate of, at the very least, £2.5billion a year.
Of course the Home Office knows this. They just don’t want us to know. In their Resource Budget proposals, dated March 11 this year, they indicate annual administrative spending on asylum and migration up by 33.9 per cent on the previous year. The ‘main drivers’ of this increase emerge from areas such as support and resettlement, the Illegal Migration Taskforce, the Immigration Health Surcharge, the Ministry of Justice and Economic Crime plan (to tackle ‘anti-social behaviour’), costs relating to firefighting and policing, and so on and so on.
This should be headline news, but the MSM avoid shocking us with the total costs. Since the government will never end the incentives that drive the daily arrivals, perhaps we should consider withholding our taxes in protest. We never voted for this.
That’s a non-starter because we are shackled by PAYE, you will respond, but it could certainly be effective via council tax to local authorities, who depend for 52 per cent of their income on payment from the local population. A General Council Tax Strike rather like the Poll Tax protest may be the only thing to wake up politicians and officials looking forward to gold-plated pensions to listen to their populations.