When Andy Burnham promised Brits growth in every postcode, did he really mean more illegal migrants?

ARE you playing your part? Are you doing your fair share? The Prime Minister wants to know. It turns out that going to work every day to put a roof over your own family’s head isn’t enough any more. And neither is paying thousands in taxes to fund other people’s families, too. A mega-dinghy carrying 230 migrants arrived on UK shores this week Credit: AFP PM Andy Burnham has instructed the country to do its ‘fair share’ when accepting illegal migrants into their towns Credit: Getty No, according to Andy Burnham, we all need to do more for the country by accepting our “fair share” of illegal migrants into our local neighbourhoods. Mr Burnham says middle-class families need to “play their part” when it comes to asylum seeker accommodation, instead of leaving the burden to fall on poorer parts of the country. Sign up for The Sun newsletter Thank you! He told the country this week: “We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers. “I do believe all parts of the country need to work to play their part.” READ MORE JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER No10 then doubled down, with a staffer insisting that the PM “feels the current system is unfair, and as a point of principle, he wants to see a redress of the distribution. “He acknowledges that it would cost more money to do it more fairly, but that is what we need to do”. Sorry, Prime Minister, but we don’t all have to play our part. We never asked for these people to come here and we don’t want them here. And it’s not a “point of principle” for us all to have to endure the arrival of thousands of undocumented fighting-age men from far-flung places into our local hotels and residential roads to hang around on street corners, take illegal work and sexually harass teenage girls. Most read in The Sun What the PM said is wrong on so many levels. First, Mr Burnham appears to think that better-off people need to follow poor people who have “accepted” these illegal migrants into their areas. They absolutely have not. Illegal migrants have been imposed against their very clearly expressed wishes, and often in the face of opposition from local councils, too. Apparently Mr Devolution doesn’t like local people power when it comes to asylum seeker accommodation. Or has he somehow managed to miss all the protests outside asylum hotels in Epping, Crowborough, Canary Wharf, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester, to name but a few? The PM also assumes that the middle classes aren’t playing their part already when it’s their taxes which foot the bill for the many billions of pounds spent on migrant accommodation. Many better-off areas are already sharing the burden, including my own local high street, where the only hotel now only houses asylum seekers. Only 17 local authorities out of 361 have so far been spared the arrival of illegal migrants in their areas, which hardly suggests most Britons have dodged that particular bullet. When Andy Burnham promised us “growth in every postcode” on his first day in No10, I don’t think most of us thought he meant that sort of growth. Migrants cross the Channel in 2018 in a noticeably smaller boat than the ones we see now Credit: AFP Migrants cram onto a packed dinghy in August 2023 Credit: Getty What was most illuminating from Andy Burnham’s comments, however, was his inadvertent admission that having illegal migrants in your area isn’t necessarily a good thing. Apparently it’s a burden that we all need to share rather than a blessing. Who would’ve guessed that all these young men paying people smugglers are not in fact fine, upstanding engineers and doctors desperate to pick up litter and help little old ladies across the road to show their gratitude to us for giving them refuge? And let’s face it, by calling on us all to share the burden, Andy Burnham was also admitting that he can’t and won’t solve the boats crisis. And he’s not even going to bother to pretend that he will. Fewer than 300 migrants crossed the Channel on dinghies in December 2018 when the boats crisis first emerged. It was such a big story at the time that then Home Secretary Sajid Javid had to cut short his family’s Christmas holiday to come home to deal with it. Eight years later, we see 230 migrants arriving on just one boat in one day and the PM decides to hold an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss . . . the weather and whether to ban disposable barbecues. Perhaps the only answer is for us all to follow in the footsteps of the Oxfordshire village of Piddington, where the 400 local residents have voted to hold a referendum on seceding from the United Kingdom to prevent 1,250 illegal migrant men from being housed just a few hundred yards away in Bicester barracks. Meanwhile, all the MPs, charity workers, civil servants, human rights lawyers, BBC and Guardian staff who insist every arrival is a desperate refugee deserving of our sympathy can happily take all these young men into their local communities. Or, better still, into their own homes. We’ve seen one illegal immigrant landing on Britain’s shores every 14 minutes since Labour came to power two years ago. And even though numbers have fallen since last year, most of the illegal boat migrant arrivals — largely fighting-age men from countries with alien cultures — are still here years later. Indeed, some 200,000 illegal migrants have arrived here since 2018. And we are still paying for most of them to the tune of some £4billion a year. It’s not only better-off folk who don’t want illegal migrants in their streets. NO ONE wants them. We don’t want them in four-star hotels or two-star hotels. We don’t want them in flats, barges or former Army barracks. We don’t want them, full stop. Spreading asylum seekers around a few more postcodes, shuffling them from inner city sink estates to leafy villages, isn’t the solution to this problem. The solution is to stop allowing more illegal boat arrivals into our country and to detain and deport the ones who are already here. The one thing Andy Burnham is right about is that the current system is unfair — but it’s unfair to all British people. The only “point of principle” he should be caring about when it comes to illegal migrants isn’t which postcode they live in but that people who have no right to live in Britain should not be here at all. Comment now