Mrs May gets voters’ message on migrants

IN a fit of pique, eurocrats threaten Britain with reprisals if the Home Secretary persists in refusing to accept a strict quota of asylum seekers who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats.

Theresa May is right to ignore their sabre-rattling.

Indeed, the worst that the European Commission can throw at us is a change to the Dublin Convention rules under which Britain can send migrants back to the EU country where they first arrived.

Yet that agreement, under which only 1,000 migrants are deported each year, is so full of loopholes that it’s scarcely worth the paper it’s written on.

By contrast, the EC’s plan to impose quotas of asylum seekers on member states threatened to land us with up to 60,000 claimants a year.

Don’t misunderstand the Mail. Nobody should underestimate the scale of the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, as today’s photographs of HMS Bulwark’s rescue work make clear.

But Mrs May is surely right to say the EC’s quota scheme, with its promise of a safe haven in Europe, will merely spur thousands more to risk the crossing.

Instead, every effort should be made to deter them from endangering their lives in the first place (though whether the EU is wise to suggest a military intervention in Libya is another matter).

Such questions aside, the truth remains that for more than 15 years, Britain has allowed in unprecedented numbers of migrants, putting intolerable pressure on schools, hospitals, housing and other public services.

Indeed, startling and timely new figures show that almost 2million workers from the EU alone have settled here, while more foreigners than British workers found jobs in the year to March.

As the Governor of the Bank of England points out, in a rare political intervention, this mass immigration has depressed wages – contributing significantly to the ‘cost of living crisis’ so often bewailed by the Labour Party that caused it.

Last week, UK voters signalled clearly that they’ve had enough of it. These are early days, of course, but Mrs May appears to be getting the message.