The British government has allowed the French to use UK-funded trucks intended for small boat beach patrols for other police work, including ramming protesters. Granted – it’s nice to see them put to good use…
The vehicles in question are Masstech VEZIs (Véhicule d’Éclairage de Zone d’Intervention), which are heavy-duty Toyota Land Cruisers reinforced with protective grilles. They are paid for by British taxpayers meant – under the Sandhurst Treaty of 2018 – to be used only for immigration control, which means patrolling French beaches. One was filmed careening around Dunkirk on the worst day of protests in France…
Tory MP Ben Obese-Jecty asked whether the British government lets the French use the UK-funded cars for riot policing. The Home Office has admitted:
“The funding agreement requires that UK-funded resource be used for the purpose of preventing illegal migration to the UK, with any other use being kept limited to only unusual and urgent cases.
This is a common-sense allowance to avoid situations in which serious crimes go unprevented because law enforcement needed to change vehicles before attending the scene, or UK-funded personnel were not allowed to intervene, etc.”
And across go the boats…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”