The News Comment: Never again - Portsmouth and Gosport must not be used as landing sites for Channel migrants

What happened yesterday in the Channel and in Gosport was a debacle and an embarrassment.

For those who missed it, a migrant boat left Normandy on Monday, the second recent craft to try to navigate the Channel, which at this point is 80 miles wide. It was escorted by a French ship to halfway - the French have since claimed the migrants refused help as they “wanted to get to the UK” - and then intercepted by RNLI vessels from Sussex.

At first the migrant group was to be taken into Gosport, landing at Fort Blockhouse. However, as the evening drew in and protestors gathered as close to Blockhouse and Haslar as they could manage, the plan changed and the migrants were taken to Dover, where they were brought ashore at 12.30am.

Let’s be clear. Our anger is not with migrants, concerned residents, nor the police nor the RNLI. It is with the decision - in the face of local pressure and all common sense - to select Gosport as a suitable location to bring asylum seekers into this country. Gosport and Portsmouth are wildly unsuitable for the task.

It is clueless governmental planning at its worst - and Gosport has borne the brunt.

Firstly, the secrecy. If you are going to establish a migrant landing area you do not announce it, as happened last night, when a convoy of police vans rolls through a town. This is inflammatory and offensive to those who live there.

Secondly, the choice of area. Less than three weeks ago we saw a migrant boat land at Eastney, which drew a crowd of protestors. The mood turned ugly, migrants and police were hemmed in on Ferry Road, and it led to several officers being injured. We have since had a high-profile march and counter-protest in Guildhall Square. Tensions have been inflamed in Portsmouth and surrounding areas; this sudden covert decision to turn Gosport into a landing area does not help anyone who lives here. The overwhelming majority stand for tolerance, decency and diversity - the level of disruption caused only fractures this.

Thirdly, the nature of that part of Gosport. It’s bad enough that the government planned this without talking to Gosport Borough Council, but if they had they would have been told that one of the lessons of Eastney should be that landing sites on a peninsula with one road in and out are to be avoided.

As detailed in a letter to the Home Office from Gosport council leader Zoe Huggins this week: "It is outrageous that government can review arrangements like this without talking to the local council.

“I had already written to the government highlighting this issue with Gosport being a peninsula. Not only have they ignored that, they have chosen a site located on a peninsula at the end of the Gosport peninsula, compounding the problem.

"If the government follows this plan it will create an easy target for protesters to blockade coaches, as they did in Eastney."

Portsmouth City Council has also pointed out to the Home Office how difficult and disruptive establishing anything near Portsmouth Port would be.

Compounding all this, we saw last night that the government did not even have the courage of its convictions to go through with its wrong-headed plans.

We saw the coaches lined up at Fort Blockhouse. We spoke to police who had been drafted in from London. Don’t tell us that this was a contingency plan, or just a possibility. The Home Office planned this then bottled it.

It shouldn’t have been countenanced in the first place but the fact the government chickened out means we have even less faith in its judgement than we did before.

Dover is set up for migrants. The processing centre at Manston is also in Kent. Creating new landing sites in Hampshire or Dorset will only encourage more crossings from the central and western end of the Channel - dangerous for migrants, dangerous for shipping, and hugely disruptive for local residents.

The most recent figures show that the number of people arriving on small boats is dropping. Last year from January to June 19,982 people were logged - the same period this year is 11,884. It’s ironic that just as the government appears to be getting the beginning of a grip on the issue it made such a catastrophic cock-up of judgement on Tuesday night.

So this must never happen again. Nowhere in or near Portsmouth Harbour - a military base, for crying out loud - should be used as a landing point.

The anger we feel today is not fuelled by anti-migrant sentiment, nor by those who turned out to “protest” - they are being whipped up by self-serving rabble-rousers, many of whom are far from patriotic. There is also no anger at the police - who go where they are told - nor the RNLI, whose task is to save lives at sea, and whose volunteers do so admirably.

Instead we are furious that the government imposed on our area a stupid plan, one in which Gosport MP Caroline Dinenage, Hampshire police and crime commissioner Donna Jones and council leaders from Gosport and Portsmouth had already pointed out flaws.

It was pushed through until the stupidity was realised at the eleventh hour - and all it has done has inflame tensions and embolden black-shirted “patriots”. This must not happen again. If it does the government and Home Office will have failed us.