Our soft-touch policies led to this chaos, admits ex-Labour minister

YEARS of ‘soft-minded liberalism’ were yesterday blamed for the chaos at Calais by a former Labour immigration minister.

Phil Woolas made the blistering intervention as he demanded a British-run detention camp on French soil. The former Home Office minister said the illegal immigrants ‘wouldn’t come’ if they knew they would be locked up.

He blamed an absence of ID cards in Britain and his own party’s Human Rights Act – which he said had made it harder to remove foreigners who had been effectively given equal rights to those of British citizens.

Mr Woolas, who was an immigration minister between 2008 and 2010, said: ‘The mess in Calais is down to years of soft-minded liberalism and utter naivety.’ He added: ‘Many migrants are fleeing war, but once in France they’re safe. Others paid money to people traffickers in the hope of a good life. That’s not political asylum.

‘These people want to live in a rich country. This is economic migration. As for Calais it’s French territory but our border control.

‘A detention centre to replace the migrant encampments would send a signal. If migrants knew they’d be locked up and deported when they got to Calais they wouldn’t go,’ he wrote in an article on the Daily Mirror website.

Eurotunnel’s John Keefe said efforts by ministers to make Britain less attractive would not work in the short term. He said ‘as much as you reinforce security, you might keep them out for one night and then during the daytime they go away and rest but they’ll come back again the next night’.