Protesters Confront Police as 149 Migrants Land at Gosport
About 150 anti-migrant demonstrators gathered at a marina in Gosport to stop migrants being brought ashore, setting off flares and scuffling with police in a stand-off that ran into the early hours. The Home Office says 149 people were rescued mid-Channel by the RNLI alongside a French vessel and taken by coach to a processing centre in Kent. Hampshire Police imposed Public Order Act conditions and banned face coverings.
It is only the second known landing of large numbers this far west along the south coast in recent years, and the Home Office has refused to say why Gosport was used, citing operational processes. The local police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, is calling on the Home Secretary to intervene “urgently to ensure that UK Border Force has the capacity and vessels to transfer people on the water to Dover”, arguing that “no sites across the southern coastline of Britain should be used as landing sites. We are not equipped and we do not have the resources to keep policing this.” She puts the cost of each protest at £150,000 from her own budget, which she says means less officer time on the streets of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; the figure is her own and unaudited. The politics arrived three hours earlier. Shabana Mahmood had said in a podcast interview that “we’re not in control of this border”, that the sifting of people in northern France is done by criminal gangs who are also traffickers, and that “you can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey”. Of the masked protesters she said they should “sod off”. The Refugee Council welcomed the acknowledgment of sexual violence but said protecting women means “more safe routes, not fewer”. Watch whether Border Force changes its landing practice.