Downing Street says 45 extra police officers are being deployed to French beaches in a “surge team” to tackle larger dinghies with more people packed onto them.
Earlier on Tuesday, Home Office Minister Anna Turley said the officers were “just part of the armoury” of more than 1,000 officers on northern French beaches who are now doing “actual intervention” in the water.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that videos in recent weeks “show them going to the boats, slashing them, pushing people back, being bombarded with stones and bricks and coming under a lot of challenge to do that, so they are intervening”.
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp has called for British financial support for the French authorities to be withheld until they prevent all embarkations in shallow waters on their side of the Channel.
In a post on X, external, in which he said he was “do[ing] politics differently”, Burnham laid out the latest small boat, returns and asylum hotel figures, describing smuggling gangs as a “shared European challenge”.
At the same time as Macron arrived in Downing Street, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch held a press conference to pile further pressure on Burnham to set out a timeline to spending 3% of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) on defence.
