French police stood by and in some cases actively helped migrants launch small boats toward England, according to a firsthand account published by The Australian, a claim that strikes directly at the rationale behind Britain’s nine-figure payments to Paris for border enforcement.
The paper’s Europe correspondent, Jacquelin Magnay, reported watching French officers assist as roughly 650 migrants crossed the English Channel in a single day. According to her account, the officers did not merely decline to intervene — they pointed out where the water was shallowest so the dinghies could come closer to shore and passengers could board more easily.
Asked why they did not take steps to stop the launches, such as puncturing the inflatable boats before they departed, the officers told the newspaper the situation was “complicated.” They cited the risk of endangering migrant lives, even though, as the report notes, the boats are boarded in water only about waist-high.
A Deal Worth Over a Billion Pounds
The scene described by The Australian sits awkwardly alongside the financial arrangement between London and Paris. The previous Conservative government committed roughly £476 million ($642 million) between 2023 and 2026 for patrols and related measures, a period during which about 100,000 migrants reached British shores. The Labour government that followed pledged an additional £662 million ($893 million) through 2029 for the same purpose.
Taken together, the British taxpayer has committed well over a billion pounds to French efforts that, on the newspaper’s account, have not stopped — and may in some narrow, practical sense have facilitated — the departure of boats from French beaches.
The report also describes a broader pattern along the coast. French railway staff, it says, look the other way as migrants travel without paying fares to predetermined launch points, while police make sure nothing interrupts the journey. Officers from the EU border agency Frontex and Spain’s civil guard were also observed in the area and likewise did not prevent departures, according to the paper.
Mahmood Points to Falling Numbers
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood pushed back over the weekend in a TikTok video, saying there was “a lot of noise” about the large boats used in the crossings. She argued that UK-French cooperation is “making it harder for the criminal gangs to launch boats,” and she pointed to a decline in crossings this year as evidence the approach is working.
That explanation is incomplete on its face. Crossings are highly sensitive to weather, and stretches of rough seas can suppress numbers independently of any police action. The Home Office has not separated out how much of this year’s drop is attributable to enforcement as opposed to conditions on the water.
The Australian’s reporting raises questions about the value of a payment structure that has now spanned two British governments and three prime ministers. Successive administrations in London have treated the French patrols as the core of their deterrent strategy, betting that intercepting boats before they launch is more effective than intercepting them at sea or processing arrivals ashore.
Farage’s Alternative: Pushbacks
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has proposed a different approach, vowing to turn the boats around rather than rely on French law enforcement to stop them. He has secured a Memorandum of Understanding with National Rally leader Jordan Bardella, widely seen as a likely future French prime minister, that would permit English vessels to push migrant boats back toward the French coast.
The model is Operation Sovereign Borders, the policy introduced by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, which combined on-water pushbacks with offshore asylum processing and effectively ended a comparable boat migration crisis from Indonesia. Abbott has argued that a similar scheme would serve French interests as well as British ones: if migrants understand the route to England is closed, the incentive to reach northern France in the first place diminishes.
Whether any of this translates into policy depends on politics on both sides of the Channel. On the British side, the Labour government shows no appetite for pushbacks and continues to defend the payments. On the French side, any arrangement with a British opposition leader is notional until the French electorate delivers a government willing to implement it.
What the Australian account does accomplish is to sharpen the terms of the argument. For two years, the central question in Britain’s Channel policy has been whether the money sent to Paris buys results. A reporter standing on a French beach, watching officers wave dinghies toward the shallows, offers an answer that no ministerial statement or social media clip can easily wave away.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/09/15/french-police-witnessed-assisting-illegal-migrants-cross-english-channel-by-australian-newspaper/