Preventing dangerous small boats carrying migrants from crossing the Channel has exercised some of the UK’s finest minds, and Priti Patel, since numbers began growing in earnest in 2018.
Governments have suggested the expensive and unworkable Rwanda scheme, sending arrivals to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, using the Navy to blockade boats and even, in Patel’s case, inventing giant wave machines designed to push refugee dinghies back across the Channel.
Over the years, though, nobody has thought to ask the banjo-bothering former lead guitarist of Mumford & Sons. And yet Winston Marshall has come up with the solution: laying mines in the world’s busiest shipping lane!
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Marshall, son of GB News co-owner Paul, has appeared on the US’s Fox News channel to explain how he would stop irregular migration into the UK via the simple means of constructing an enormous and unprecedented highly explosive “floating wall” off the UK’s south-east coast.
The committed Christian conceded it “might sound ridiculous”, but went on: “This is an outlandish idea, but I think it’s actually feasible. We’ve got to build a giant wall across the channel. This isn’t being talked about much”. Possibly, you might think, with good reason.
Marshall continued: “I think if you consider that we spent £1 billion now for six years trying to deter small boat crossings, we could build a floating wall, that’s mined, across the channel.Now, that might sound ridiculous and it might even look ridiculous, but if it stops channel boat crossings…”
The Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the channel, is the busiest shipping lane in the world, but, despite, as a banjoist, having limited experience in the design of large-scale marine construction projects, Marshall insisted he had thought of that. There could be “sections maybe that are mined [and] sections that are open to allow a proper operation”, he explained.
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During his Fox News appearance, Marshall made a series of claims about the migrants making the crossings, describing them as “military aged men”.
“They are not refugees. They are not asylum seekers. They are economic migrants. And they are not fleeing a war-torn country. There are lots of reasons to flee France, don’t get me wrong, but war isn’t one of them,” said the man who last year asked White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt whether the Trump administration would consider granting political asylum to British citizens facing prosecution over speech offences.
Marshall Jnr also claimed the Royal Navy only had four assets “that are seaworthy”, other than its nuclear submarines. He also suggested the UK was “a tinderbox”, adding: “Actually, all of these things are piling up now and very fragile. The smallest little thing and I fear that the country will explode.”
And yet his dad still hasn’t given him a presenting job on his crackpot channel…
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