I firmly believe NONE of the 74 young men I saw in that small boat should be free to roam our streets: NIGEL FARAGE in the English Channel

The events of the past 48 hours have been extraordinary. We voted for Brexit nine years ago to take back control of our borders and to make our own decisions about who should come into our country: not to accept diktats from European Union officials – or French presidents, as we saw yesterday.

That’s why I couldn’t resist the temptation to book a boat and go out into the English Channel on the very day that the increasingly arrogant Emmanuel Macron was due to sit down to dictate terms to Keir Starmer and the British Government.

The weather was set fair as we left Dover Harbour at 5am and headed out to the 12-mile territorial line. And, as expected, we barely had to wait long at all before the first dinghy appeared on the horizon.

This, of course, was being escorted by a French naval vessel, and UK Border Force soon came out from Ramsgate and waited to collect its cargo.

We watched as the French and British authorities conducted their now-familiar Uber-style boat-taxi service.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to go out into the English Channel on the very day Emmanuel Macron was due to sit down to dictate terms to Keir Starmer and the Government. We barely had to wait long at all before the first dinghy appeared on the horizon

On this occasion, France’s naval vessel gave life jackets to the migrants in the dinghy we saw – and then, astonishingly, as the migrants were being handed over to Border Force, the French took the life jackets back, presumably to use later in the day.

Just another typical morning in the English Channel. The sheer cost of what we saw was extraordinary. The large catamaran hired to pick up the empty boats alone costs £6,000 per day and burns thousands of litres of fuel. I’m told that the new Border Force vessels cost up to £4,000 per day to run, to say nothing of the staff, their training and the drones used to monitor the situation.

I suspect that when you add up the cost of migrant hotels, houses of multiple occupancy all across Britain, daily ‘rescue’ operations in the Channel, processing centres and all the rest of it, the final annual bill to the taxpayer of the illegal-migrant crisis is significantly higher than the £4billion-£5billion we are told.

When I first started drawing attention to this problem several years ago, nobody took much notice – until my videos out at sea and inside migrant hotels began to receive millions of views. Well, everybody is taking notice now.

And that’s why it’s so extraordinary that Starmer can seek to claim that yesterday’s deal was somehow progress.

The dinghy was being escorted by a French naval vessel, and UK Border Force soon came out from Ramsgate to collect its cargo

Under the Prime Minister’s pilot with Macron, due to start in a few weeks’ time, migrants who come across the English Channel will be detained and sent back to France, in return for Britain accepting other migrants who have not come by this route.

No numbers have been mentioned, though I suspect they will be very small indeed – and certainly a tiny fraction of the 44,000 migrants who have arrived by this route since Labour won the election last July.

In truth, I doubt anybody will actually be deported under this new agreement, because whatever is agreed between the French president and the British Prime Minister will be undermined by our being a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, now enshrined in our law by Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act 1998.

One thing I do predict: this will be a field day for our country’s Left-wing lawyers. Any deportations will be held up in the courts.

President Macron even insulted us as a Brexit nation yesterday, saying that the vote in 2016 had made it harder for the UK to deal effectively with illegal migration. In fact, it’s successive British governments who have failed to sort out this problem.

What Starmer should have done yesterday is to stand up for the national interest and say that Britain will not accept any migrant who crosses the Channel: they will be deported back to their home countries, and if necessary, to France.

I’m told that the new Border Force vessels cost up to £4,000 per day to run, to say nothing of the staff, their training and the drones used to monitor the situation

I doubt anybody will actually be deported under the new agreement, because whatever is agreed between Starmer and Macron will be undermined by our being a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights

The irony of Starmer announcing his new ‘deal’ with Macron at the same time the French navy were escorting illegal migrants into our waters will not be lost on millions of voters.

Quite frankly, this situation cannot be allowed to continue: our national security, as much as anything else, depends on it. Just a few weeks ago, three Iranian terrorists who planned to blow up the Israeli embassy in London and cause mass loss of life were arrested on terrorism charges amid claims they had all crossed the English Channel.

Indeed, research by the Migration Observatory says that 17 per cent of small-boat migrants were originally from Iran. When you consider that a parliamentary committee report out just yesterday found that Iran’s threat to the UK is on a par with Russia’s, you can see that we have a very serious problem on our hands – one that I don’t think many in our political class even dare to come to terms with.

Worse still, a report from Baroness [Louise] Casey in June explicitly linked illegal migration to some of those implicated in current investigations into grooming gangs in the UK. It stated that ‘a significant proportion of live police operations… involved suspects who were migrants and asylum seekers’.

More worryingly still, one analysis of official figures has found that those who come to Britain illegally are 24 times more likely to finish up in prison. We must end the system whereby people who come illegally are allowed to stay, work, get free healthcare, and then possibly go on to commit acts against the interests of our nation.

I firmly believe that none of the 74 young men I saw in that boat yesterday morning (only four were women and children) should be allowed to roam the streets of Britain over the coming days. They should all be detained, and we should find out who they are and where they come from.

Some of them could be very dangerous indeed.