Britain’s left-wing Burnham government unveiled plans to spread boat migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees across the country because middle-class communities haven’t taken their “fair share” yet.
Planting migrants in working-class areas — because housing there is cheap — has caused “a huge burden on local communities and created real civil unrest”, so the logical next step is to spread that to middle-class areas next, which haven’t yet taken “their fair share”, the British government has communicated. The extraordinary series of public relations flubs began on Monday when Prime Minister Andy Burnham was offered the opportunity to meet with locals from a small village about to be overwhelmed by a migrant camp three-times the size of their population, and turned it down, immediately pivoting on to how he believes more areas need to do their part to take on migrants.
The camps are part of a new strategy by the government to disperse illegal or irregular migrants — many of whom come to Britain by smuggler boat — away from the widely despised migrant hotels and into alternate accommodation such as homes taken off the private rental market with government money, or converted military barracks. There are now nearly 70,000 boat migrants living in homes rented by the government, something which critics say pushes up housing prices for ordinary Britons as significant stock is taken off the open market, driving shortages.
Speaking to GB News on Monday, Burnham said of his vision to spread migrant arrivals across the country: “I do have to say we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers. I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part, it’s a challenging issue we’re working at, we understand people’s concerns.”
The remarks instantly gained traction on social media, and Burnham’s immigration minister, Anna Turley, was deployed to television studios on Tuesday morning to clarify the controversial comments. Yet she doubled down and made it absolutely clear that the government’s position is that it is now time for middle-class communities to experience what some working-class communities already have.
Acknowledging that forcing migrants on working-class communities had already caused social problems, Turley told the BBC state broadcaster:
I think this is about fairness, and we won’t be asking anyone to take more than they can, it’s about their fair share. And we look across the country at what is appropriate to be able to take, what is the infrastructure, what is manageable with the local community. So this is about fairness.
What we’ve seen in the past is places like Blackpool, other communities around the country, where housing is perhaps cheaper and more plentiful, have had to take more than their fair share of asylum seekers, and that’s put a huge burden on local communities and created real civil unrest.
So we want to make sure that we’re managing the system much better, in a more sustained way, and that’s reducing the impact on local communities, like I said it’s important that everyone plays their fair share in that and it’s making sure no one community is more over-pressured or over-burdened than others.
Turley also addressed the specific concerns about massive migrant camps being set up in former military bases, which can outnumber the local villages three or four to one. Locals shouldn’t worry, she said in remarks to Sky News, because the new arrivals should have everything they need provided for them on-site, although she did acknowledge there would be no restrictions on residents leaving the bases and going where they liked.
At least some in Britain would prefer that the government, rather than trying out various migrant accommodation types to see which causes the least crime or public unrest, simply stop migrants from arriving altogether. Facing the suggestion that he might try this, Prime Minister Burnham himself insisted the government is getting arrivals down, but shrugged off the idea of ending the crisis, stating, “It would be wrong, I think, for me to make a prediction now based on a timeline”.
While the number of boats arriving is steadily falling, the boats themselves are soaring in size, taking the human trafficker scourge in the English Channel from what was properly called a small boats crisis years ago to a big boats emergency today. Reflecting on this development and the crime some say unvetted migrant boat arrivals bring, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said: “It’s not small boats any more, it’s big boats… as one of them brings 230 people in. Estimates are that boatload alone will cost taxpayers £25 million over the lifetime of those people.
“This is a national security emergency, and if Andy Burnham can’t see that, then he’s not fit to be Prime Minister.”
As reported by Breitbart News, the arbitrary plantation of migrants in communities has already caused considerable unrest across the United Kingdom. Last week, arrests were made in a small Norfolk town the same day that what is believed to be a group of migrant men were placed in a so-called House of Multiple Occupancy (HMO), instantly triggering several nights of unrest. This followed other protests across the country, including one in Nuneaton, where migrants living in an HMO raped a child, and another in Belfast, where rioters protested the alleged attempted beheading of a man in the city.
Last year, the town of Ballymena erupted into intense anti-migrant rioting. Although the immediate spark was a claimed sex assault on a local child, it was reported at the time that the social impacts of government contractors acquiring large amounts of residential property locally for migrants’ HMOs had already fuelled ill-feeling because locals looking for somewhere to live can’t compete with the deep pockets of the state. Despite this obvious and foreseeable outcome, the government’s direction remains to shut down migrant hotels and instead plant HMOs in local communities.