A senior MP from the ruling party in the UK has told migrants to “fuck off back to France,” in comments backed by the government.Lee Anderson, the deputy chair of the Conservative Party, made the comments to express.co.uk after lawyers launched legal action to prevent migrants from being forced to board a giant barge that’s moored off the south coast of England.
The government hopes to eventually house hundreds of migrant men at the Bibby Stockholm, but critics have said the vessel is unsuitable for traumatised people, and potentially unsafe.
The Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge is pictured moored to the quayside at Portland Port in Portland, on the south-west coast of England. Photo: BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
Cabinet minister Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, backed Anderson’s stance.“Lee is expressing in salty terms I think something that people well understand, which is that the British people have warm hearts, we also want to have a secure front door,” Chalk told BBC Radio 4’s the Today programme.Chalk then doubled down on this support while speaking to LBC News, saying: “Lee Anderson expresses the righteous indignation of the British people…His indignation is well placed.”
The Conservative Party is trailing massively behind the Labour Party in the polls ahead of a general election that’s expected to be held next year. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made tackling what’s dubbed the “small boats crisis” – migrants arriving in the UK from France via the Channel – a centrepiece of his pre-election campaign.But this week the government suffered further embarrassment when it briefly revived plans to send migrants to a volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean, as a potential back-up to its current plan to deport migrants to Rwanda.
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