Channel Migrants Given Free TV Licences, DOGE UK Audit Finds
Illegal migrants have been given free TV licences and trips to go trampolining, bowling and to the cinema funded by the taxpayer, a Reform UK ‘DOGE’ audit has found. The Telegraph has the story.
The Reform waste-busting team found that in 2022 at least £1,000 was spent by Kent County Council on paying small boat arrivals’ TV licence fees.
They were also funded for visits to go trampolining, bowling and to the cinema, according to an audit of the finances of the council which Reform now controls.
Reform estimates that the activities, alongside spending at JD Sports and PC World, have cost more than £24,000 of taxpayer cash.
It comes as the number of migrants crossing the Channel has passed 16,000, more than 50% above the same point last year. Some 1,500 have arrived so far this month, including the second highest daily total of 919 on Friday.
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s DOGE leader, said: “For too long, British citizens have been prosecuted for not paying for a TV licence, yet asylum seekers are having theirs paid for by taxpayers.
“The old Tory regime at Kent county council has a lot to answer for. Reform will fight for taxpayers.”
Reform won control of Kent county council and 11 others across the country from the Tories in May’s local elections.
Since then it has begun sending in auditors to identify and end waste in an Elon Musk-style cost-cutting drive.
Worth reading in full.
It comes as Starmer admits the obvious: that the small boats crisis in the Channel is getting worse, despite his pledge to ‘smash the gangs’. Maybe it’s time to copy Denmark (cut the benefits) and Australia (tow the boats, combined with offshore processing), rather than keeping on with half-hearted plans that repeatedly fail.
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No one will be compelled to refund the money from personal assets and no individual will be called to account. When that happens, we will know things have really changed. Still, it’s a start.
The boats could be stopped completely by the end of the week if the political will was there. The sad reality is that our treasonous politicians and bureaucrats don’t want it to stop. I can understand the how, but not the why – although I could guess.
Ban anything that people want, and it creates a black market for the goods or services in demand. Smash one smuggling gang, and this just leaves a hole for the next gang to occupy.
And there’s an absolutely simple answer, that works every time – just stop the demand for what the gangs provide. If the migrants don’t want to come here, then no smuggling gang needs to be ‘smashed’, the trade will collapse immediately. None can survive that simple fact. So just stop making this country such an attractive soft touch, and the boats will stop coming – or is that just too simple for our deranged politicians to understand?.
yep – that’s one way. Why we don’t just send them back to France – I don’t know. Surely things over there can’t be that bad that it’s not a safe country any more?
If the French won’t accept them back, we could try processing their asylum applications in South Georgia – with a 4 -5 year waiting list for a hearing alongside a 5 year moritorium from the 1951 Refugee Convention; that would stem the flow to a trickle PDQ.
Are there no creative thinkers or people with Cojones in the government?
The French don’t want them any more than we do. I imagine they’re only too happy to see them sail over the horizon… by the time they’ve traversed the whole continent, to end up on the shores of the channel, anyone who is genuinely searching for a better life, who is able and willing to work has already been whittled out… what’s left is really not the best of the best.
That’s the way to do it.
👍👍
This has nothing to do with “gangs.” The illegals have been coming for years and could be stopped within a week if the will was there.
Gangs? Another cheap con. And the “legals” outnumber the illegals anyway by about three to one.
Except of course the plans don’t repeatedly fail, they succeed exactly as they are intended.
If government were serious about stopping the boats, they would do it, and quickly.
exactly.
Exactly.
I was going to say is it because it’s apparently ‘Refugee Week’? But I think every week is Refugee Week in the UK, by the looks of it;
”Refugee Week 2025 is here, and the theme is #CommunityAsASuperpower!
At CAS, we know the strength that comes from building and supporting each other, especially for refugees.
Welcome to a week of empowerment and solidarity!”
https://x.com/CAS_rochdale/status/1934517302549991697
Interesting…
”Do a search on Cities of Sanctuary and you’ll find that virtually every Council in the UK has declared themselves to be a City of Sanctuary, without consent from the local electorate, and they’re flooding all available social housing with migrants.”
An effective means by which to familiarise them with British values.
Eh?
For the nth time, they’re NOT asylum seekers, they are economic migrants. Most of them are not leaving areas from which they need to seek political asylum.
From 1964 until today, each elected government has promised to reduce immigration while allowing/encouraging it to increase.
https://millennialwoes.substack.com/p/tgr-democracy
You wanted cheap labour and now you’re getting it. How cheap is cheap? When do you say this is cheap enough? Your greed and your appetite for cheap labour has no bottom and so the corresponding immigration numbers have no bottom. You already have cheap house servants, cheap nannies, cheap restaurants, cheap vegetables picked by the poorest people in the world. You could go into a care home in England and find not a single native English speaker. I bet your granny with dementia is thrilled with that. Do you want to go even lower? From the outside it looks like you do. The British governement spends tens of millions on advertising campaigns every year asking for people to come here. Please stop worshipping money because you will be left with no money and nothing else of value.
Its not us mate
Come on it is a joke. You thought you could make some easy money off these people with their limitless hotel stays, and not they are pissing on you because there is no way to remove them. Keep on filling your pockets and destroying your country I think that much of the world would breathe a sigh of relief if you did so. There is nothing pleasant about your existence these days. Bye bye please kill yourself and do it quickly.
Please add a link so that I can claim my free TV licence…..
I migrated here by birth in 1958…
However I do have a rubber dinghy…
I am curious about the Iranian aspect of the boats – apparently many were/are sailed by Iranians. What is the UK govt. doing with the young Iranian men with short hair?
Benedict Spence has just mentioned the processing in South Georgia or Ascension Island option in detention centres there. My option is for an islet in the Falkland Islands of which there are many where should you swim for it you will die in the cold sea. No mobile phones allowed and no snivelling refugee NGOs will be allowed in the Falklands. When they decide they have had enough they can be taken back where they came from or anywhere else that will have them. I suspect the detention centre will rapidly empty and the boats will cease as they are put straight on a ship when they are picked up.