The Home Secretary has said Britain is ready for sneaky attempts by hostile states to use mass illegal migration as a weapon to destabilise the West.
A source close to the James Cleverly reiterated that he agreed with Rishi Sunak’s assessment that mass illegal migration is being used by hostile states as a means of destabilising western countries.
The so-called hybrid war method was tried by the Russians against Finland and Norway like in the last month or two, with the former just joining the NATO alliance.
A source close to Mr Cleverly, who as Home Secretary has oversight of some of Britain’s intellignce network and was also recently Foreign Secretary, explained that the UK is ready for such tactics.
The source said: “Whilst we know hostile states will try this, and have tried it elsewhere we won’t tolerate it and we’re ready for any attempt to destabilise our country with this form of hybrid warfare.”
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The remarks come after the Prime Minister raised the issue when he joined a summit on illegal migration hosted by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.
Mr Sunak discussed how failing to tackle illegal migration is “destroying public faith in government and politicians.”
He went on: “Our enemies will see how unable we are to deal with this and so they will increasingly use migration as a weapon: deliberately driving people to our shores to try to destabilise our societies.”
Mr Sunak has made stopping the small boats one of his top five priorities with numbers coming down by a third in the last year.
However, he still has not been able to get deportation flights to Rwanda off the ground after being blocked by the Supreme Court.
Mr Sunak will bring back his Rwanda Bill in the New Year to try to ensure the deportation flights go ahead.
However, he faces significant opposition from the right of his party with many Tory MPs claiming he has left too many loopholes for legal challenges which will clog up the courts.
As well as accusations about Russia deliberately driving Middle East migrants into Scandanavia, Poland also made a similar claim against Putin’s ally Belarus.
With Russia and Iran also both involved in Middle East politics including Syria there have been concerns that the mass movement of people caused by them encouraging destabilisation in the region is behind much of the mass migration.
Putin’s Wagner mercenary allies also operate in large parts of Africa where many more illegal migrants are being pushed towards Europe.
