The UK government has ended its "one in, one out" asylum deal with France, a partnership that aimed to deter small boat crossings across the Channel. The agreement, which was in effect for 423 days, was described as having a negligible impact on its stated goal.
In response to the deal's termination, the Home Office announced this morning that it would be doubling the number of riot police deployed along the French coast.
The "one in, one out" policy, announced in July last year by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, was intended to make small boat crossings pointless by allowing a person arriving in a small boat to be forcibly returned to France in exchange for another person brought legally to the UK. Of the 40,000 people who arrived in small boats while the scheme was active, approximately 1,500, or 4%, were returned to France.
MI5 warned yesterday that right-wing extremists with anti-immigration views are increasingly likely to consider terrorist attacks against immigration centres and asylum hotels, despite a decrease in small boat arrivals over the last year.