The Guardian reports that France will press the EU to negotiate an asylum and migration treaty with the UK in an attempt to deter people from making the dangerous Channel crossing. The French government, which last week took up the six-month rotating presidency of the EU council of ministers, wants the whole bloc to act, despite warnings that other member states have no appetite for a migration treaty with Britain.

A senior French government official said the purpose of an EU-UK treaty would be to open up “a legal means of immigration with Great Britain, so people can legally go to Great Britain to seek asylum”. The source added that “obviously that means reciprocity”, suggesting British authorities could send people denied asylum back to the European country in which they had arrived. “We would be prepared to consider this. The idea is to have a zero balance at the end of the day.”

There are good reasons to reject this from the get-go. It would likely end up a repeat of the Dublin regulations which saw the UK as a net recipient of economic migrants. Secondly, the arrangement is contingent on the Home Office actively identifying candidates for removal which it isn't doing. We could have returned more migrants under the Dublin regime but we didn’t. The Home Office is completely dysfunctional and is in need of breaking up.

Interestingly, The Big issue, reports today that the number of people deported on Home Office charter flights has tripled during the pandemic. Over 1,100 people, it says, were deported on the controversial flights – which “activists” say is part of a “broken system”.

It is true that the system is broken. Were it functioning, we would be deporting at least a thousand migrants a week. There are tens of thousands of economic migrants in the Asylum system and over a million illegal immigrants around the country with no right to be here. Enough to keep RAF Brize Norton occupied all year round.

Why exactly a magazine run for the welfare of homeless people carries propaganda for open borders fanatics is not explained. It’s almost as though it’s not interested in housing the homeless and has another agenda.

Elsewhere in the Guardian, it complains that Afghans who fled the Taliban risk dying in freezing temperatures in Calais, “according to NGOs”. People who left Afghanistan after the US withdrawal last summer have started to arrive in northern France in the hope of reaching the UK by crossing the Channel in dinghies. But "charities" have raised the alarm that conditions are deteriorating sharply, “putting thousands of lives at risk”. A combination of freezing temperatures, increasingly forceful evictions of refugees from makeshift shelters by police and cuts to funding for charities working on the frontline has created a perfect storm, “the organisations said”.

Charities say that at least 150 evictions have taken place by police in northern France since Christmas. Care4Calais has reported that some of the “refugees” they work with have been injured by teargas, rubber bullets and batons used by the French police during evictions.

The subtext here is that the French treatment of asylum seekers and economic migrants on France soil is somehow our responsibility. These same charities then have the nerve to criticise hotel accommodation granted to them when they enter the UK illegally. Nowhere do these organisations outline where we’re supposed to put tens of thousands more migrants who’ll undoubtedly be escorted in by Priti Patel when the weather improves. Are we to give over the entire hospitality sector to accommodate them? What happens when we run out of hotels?

But then we know the answer to that one. The NGOcracy will use its considerable government funding in the courts to outlaw the use of barracks and hotels, and economic migrants will be awarded free housing ahead of those who’ve been on waiting lists for years. They’ll be dumped in northern towns and cities where machete attacks and child rape are now commonplace thanks to mass immigration.

You should by now have worked out that this government has no intention of stepping up deportations or meaningfully resolving the Dover invasion. As our Southend candidate, Steve Laws, has reported, the border force is spending millions on upgrading the port reception facilities, in the knowledge that this is a long term fixture.

To fix this, Britain needs a radical overhaul of the asylum and immigration system, starting with withdrawal from the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is obsolete and not fit for purpose. The Tories won't do this. Labour won’t do this. But UKIP will. Join today.