The Criminal Empire Behind Britain’s Illegal Migration

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Winston Marshall Show

Episode: The Criminal Empire Behind Britain’s Illegal Migration
Date: August 4, 2026
Host: Winston Marshall
Guest: Mitchell Durden (Investigative Journalist)

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the vast and complex criminal networks orchestrating illegal migration into Britain, focusing on how these people smuggling operations function, the financial incentives at play, the routes taken, and the systemic failures enabling these activities. Winston Marshall interviews investigative journalist Mitchell Durden, whose reporting has exposed the inner workings and shocking adaptability of smuggling gangs, the exploitation of legal loopholes, and the consequences for British society.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Scale and Evolution of Britain’s People Smuggling Problem

• Existential Threat
  • Durden characterizes the issue as “nearly existential,” highlighting the involvement of Iranian and Albanian gangs, and emphasizing the links to the drug trade, firearms, terrorism, and the overwhelming of asylum systems (00:05).
  • “This is potentially...the biggest threat that we have as a country. Regardless what people say about climate change [or] cost of living, I’ll definitely put smuggling as the highest.” — Mitchell Durden (00:07)
• Increase since 2018
  • Shift from lorry to small boat crossings, accelerated during the COVID-19 period (2018 onwards, with massive increases in 2020–2021) (02:16).
• Major Gangs
  • Detailed investigation into 'Abu Hussein Al Araki,' an Iraqi kingpin running a vast transnational network, believed to be responsible for at least 1/5 of small boat crossings (00:51, 01:39).
  • Durden notes there’s no monopoly—multiple gangs, including Kurdish and Albanian groups, compete violently and adapt to enforcement actions (23:23).

---

2. How the Smuggling Networks Operate

Recruitment & Marketing

• Social Media as a Recruitment Tool
  • Gangs use TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram to advertise services, often employing young people (e.g., 14-year-olds) to manage Arabic-language posts (05:48).
  • Migrants already in Britain film their conditions to entice others:
    • “They film themselves in these hotels...saying, you know, look at all this stuff we’ve got...” — Mitchell Durden (06:34)
• Word of Mouth and Proof-of-Success Marketing
  • Testimonies and videos of successful crossings are distributed as proof, reinforcing the perception of Britain as a 'land of opportunity' (06:33–06:58).

Logistics & Routes

• Complex Transnational Routes
  • Gangs specialize in arranging fraudulent travel documents (fake bank statements, lookalike passports); key individuals like “Dr Watan” help secure Turkish visas for passage into Europe (07:49).
  • Entry points vary: via Greece (island hopping), the Balkan land route (dangerous, with use of thermal cameras hindering winter crossings), and direct flights using fake documents (09:04–14:36).
• Use of Cash & Human Collateral
  • Mostly cash-based payments, sometimes paid upfront at various nodes (e.g., in Egypt or Paris offices). Some pay debts by smuggling drugs, creating social media content, or agreeing to work in gang operations (09:50, 10:54).
  • A unique “shadow fleet” of yachts and small sailing boats run by Albanian gangs brings smaller numbers through less-monitored areas like Britain's southwest coast (12:32–13:59).

Integration with Other Criminal Operations

• Drug Trade
  • Migrants smuggle small amounts of various drugs (cannabis, meth, etc.), with gangs controlling distribution, e.g., in North London (12:14, 13:14).
• Debt Bondage & Exploitation
  • Smuggled individuals are sometimes forced to work in black market roles—e.g., using borrowed or fake Deliveroo/UberEats profiles to pay off smuggling debts (23:08–24:04).

---

3. The Legal Loopholes and System Failures

Asylum System Abuse

• Bedoon (Bidoon) Scam
  • Smugglers coach Iraqis to claim they are 'stateless' Bedouin from Kuwait—a small, real minority—using rehearsed answers to Home Office questions and fabricated stories of state persecution (15:43–20:59).
  • “There’s a 25-page Arabic document...lists every single Home Office question on Bedouins and the answers you should give.” — Mitchell Durden (18:16)
• Copycat Claims Among Other Nationalities
  • Ethiopians pretend to be Eritreans, Iranians pretend to be gay or anti-regime to bolster asylum claims (21:21).

Overstayers & Visa Abuse

• Student Visa Overstaying
  • Large numbers, particularly from Pakistan, overstay legal visas; minimal deportations despite high rejection rates for their asylum claims (04:50–05:22).
  • “Of [rejected] Pakistani asylum claims...only 4%...are deported back to Pakistan.” — Mitchell Durden (04:50)
• Reverse Smuggling
  • Exploitation of student visas to enter Britain, then using smuggling networks to move on to countries like Spain to exploit new amnesty laws (58:42–60:55).

Legal Smuggling via EU Settlement

• Exploitation of EU Family Settlement Schemes
  • Loopholes allow Portuguese passport holders from East Timor to bring in non-biological children or fraudulent spouses, overwhelming the system intended for legitimate family reunification (62:28–67:53).

---

4. Why Britain is the Destination

• Generous Benefits & Lax Enforcement
  • Britain’s asylum system is especially attractive—guaranteed accommodation, spending cards, and freedom to roam (15:43).
  • “You’re given that hotel, you’re given that luxury. You’re given a lot more than our counterpart in France.” — Mitchell Durden (15:52)
• Success-Oriented Migration
  • Smugglers advertise near-guaranteed success, especially with Bedoon claims (15:43–20:24).

---

5. Failures in Response: Government, Law Enforcement, and International Cooperation

• Minimal Prosecution
  • Very few high-level kingpins apprehended; when prosecuted, sentences are low (25:07–25:52).
  • “I alerted [the Home Office]...they’ve done nothing.” — Mitchell Durden (26:03)
• French Inaction vs. Belgian Proactivity
  • French authorities are accused of turning a blind eye—even while being paid by the UK—while Belgium proactively intercepts boats at sea, achieving results without British financial incentives (27:51–28:31).
  • “There’s a video...He’s sitting on the beach with about six French police officers around him. He’s filming the boat going out and saying, 'I’ve just sent another boat out.'” — Durden (28:50)
• Media & Political Blind Spots
  • Manipulation of statistics, misclassification of asylum categories, performative enforcement for media optics highlighted (26:15, 29:48).

---

6. The Human & Societal Impact

• Local Community Disruption

  • Residents near asylum camps report rising disorder, property intrusion, and a sense of insecurity (71:26–74:18).
  • “They told us we used to live with our doors unlocked. We’ve never had anything like this…” — Mitchell Durden (73:41)

• Lived Realities in Camps & Towns

  • Overcrowding in both towns and new asylum camps, with social and infrastructural strain (75:56–77:47).

---

7. Policy, Enforcement & Solutions

Host and Guest Views on Enforcement

• Radical Enforcement Proposals
  • Mitchell Durden advocates a multi-layered response:
    • Utilize intelligence and counter-influence operations.
    • Deploy Royal Navy and, if necessary, special forces to intercept and return boats—with escalation up to the use of force if necessary, but ideally without loss of life (43:40–49:09).
    • “You need to take away people who could prosecute our navy, you need to leave the ECHR, things like that, which limit us...” — Durden (53:19)
• Marshall's Commentary
  • Marshall is highly critical of current government efforts, advocating even for physical barriers (“floating wall,” “mine floating wall”) and more aggressive tactics if required (54:08, 77:54).

Critique of 'Digital ID' Solutions

• Both Marshall and Durden are skeptical that proposed 'digital ID' systems would have any meaningful impact without robust enforcement and deportation (42:44–43:28).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Existential Threat:
  • “This is potentially...the biggest threat that we have as a country.” – Durden (00:07)
• On French Police Inaction:
  • “He’s sitting on the beach with about six French police officers around him...France to Britain. We go every single day. This was about eight days after we signed an agreement with France...” – Durden (28:50)
• On the Bedoon Loophole:
  • “There’s a 25-page Arabic document...lists every single Home Office question on Bedouins and the answers you should give.” – Durden (18:16)
• On Government’s Failure:
  • “They just seem totally incapable of doing anything.” – Durden (26:15)
• On the Scale of Gangs’ Profits:
  • “We’re talking about hundreds of millions here.” – Marshall (39:12)
• On Inaction’s Consequences:
  • “We’re losing our country. These people are not being deported, the smugglers are not being punished. They should be eliminated and I mean, they should be killed. This has got to be stopped...” – Marshall (77:54)

---

Timestamped Guide to Key Segments

| Timestamp | Key Segment/Theme | Speakers | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | 00:00 | The scale and existential threat of people smuggling | Durden | | 00:51 | Networks behind people smuggling (Abu Hussein) | Durden | | 02:16 | Timeline: shift from lorry to boat crossings | Marshall/Durden| | 05:48 | Recruitment via TikTok and social media | Durden | | 07:49 | Forged visas, Dr. Watan, operational logistics | Durden | | 09:50 | Payment schemes, cash vs. work vs. drugs | Durden | | 12:32 | Drug smuggling, shadow fleets, Albanian gangs | Durden | | 15:43 | Why Britain: Benefits, Bidoon scam | Durden | | 25:07 | Prosecutions, inadequate deterrence | Marshall/Durden| | 27:51 | French vs. Belgian approaches | Durden | | 30:25 | Terrorism risks, recent IS case via the Bedoon route | Durden | | 36:09 | Government 'smash the gangs' rhetoric, reality | Marshall/Durden| | 39:00 | Profits and laundering by gang networks | Marshall/Durden| | 43:40 | Durden’s multi-pronged solution, need for action | Durden | | 49:09 | Special forces, escalation, deterrents | Marshall/Durden| | 71:26 | Human impacts on British communities | Durden | | 75:56 | Policy mismanagement: hotels vs. asylum camps | Marshall/Durden| | 77:54 | Marshall’s concluding remarks: “We’re losing our country”| Marshall |

---

Tone & Style

• Language & Tone:
  • Blunt, urgent, with sharp criticisms of government and international partners (notably, French)
  • Marshall and Durden share a skeptical, sometimes exasperated view of political response; Durden relies on hard evidence and lived stories; Marshall interjects with provocative hypotheticals and policy suggestions.

---

Conclusion

This episode is a comprehensive, sometimes alarming, exposé of the criminal infrastructure, legal loopholes, and policy failures fueling Britain’s illegal migration crisis. Durden’s investigative fieldwork uncovers not just the routes and scams, but the profound social and political challenges facing the UK. The conversation equips listeners—especially those unfamiliar with the subject—with a granular, insider view of why the issue persists, what’s being missed, and what radical measures are being debated in response.

---

For further discussion, subscribe to the Winston Marshall Substack for Q&A sessions and additional reporting.

---

Transcript

[Winston Marshall]

So how bad is Britain's people smuggling problem?

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, I would class it as nearly existential. We have recently, very recently, allegations of Iran influencing smuggling gangs. I've seen Albanian gangs using it for the drug trade. We're being affected in all sorts of different ways. Drugs, firearms, terrorists, economic migrants. I'll say this is potentially or potential actually the biggest threat that we have as a country. Regardless what people say about maybe climate change, cost of living, I'll definitely put smuggling as the highest.

[Winston Marshall]

And you've done this investigation and you followed the people smugglers, not just the kingpins, but the people themselves who are being smuggled across or paying to come across from the Middle east to Britain. Take me on that journey.

[Mitchell Durden]

So there's a man called Abu Hussein Al Araki. Al Iraqi is the Arabic for the Iraqi. Abu Hussein is a very generic name. It's essentially like saying John Smith, the Englishman. This is a person that doesn't exist. This person has concocted a huge international smuggling organization stretching from Iraq all the way to Britain itself. And with actually actions that influence inside Britain, I would say he has a network spanning multiple people of different nationalities. It's not just Iraqis. I've seen Albanians, Syrians involved. They are trying to market themselves as the biggest and the best. We predict that this gang in particular is responsible for at least one fifth of the small boat crossings affecting Calais and the uk.

[Winston Marshall]

So that would that make it the biggest gang?

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, that's what we always estimate. It's hard to really get a clear number on these. The BBC is one on the big Kurdish gang. They've got quite a contention of being a really large gang as well. But this one potentially could be the largest by the number of people they export. Not necessarily the members, just quickly on numbers.

[Winston Marshall]

Under Starmer's reign, it was 70 to 80,000, I believe, channel crossing migrants. And I've understood there's 200,000 channel crossing illegal migrants. Over what time do you have a sense of that? Is it sort of.

[Mitchell Durden]

I would sort of put this when this really started as 2018, but it really kicks off sort of 2020, 2021, the COVID periods when we really saw a massive increase in, in these small boats coming over and traditionally the lorries that they used to come in, that's somewhat been phased out. It has definitely morphed and transitioned into the small boats.

[Winston Marshall]

Oh, was the lorry thing before 2018? That was a big thing. Do we have a sense of numbers of the lorry crossings?

[Mitchell Durden]

It's really hard to determine because A lot of them back then didn't necessarily claim asylum, they came in the country and they just worked. Yes, yes. So we're facing a much different problem now because we have a legal aspect to it. We never had asylum hotels or people being put up and getting mobile phones and stuff. That never existed. Traditionally, people came and they vanished into the sort of black market economy. They might work in nail bars or Turkish barbers, things like that. We've seen a complete transition to a new form of sort of economic model where migrants don't even have to work. They get pays in these hotels and asylum. They get Aspen cards that they're allowed to spend and purchase toiletries, food, unlimited foods at these hotels. I mean, I bit unrelated, but I covers an American asylum seeker that came from Las Vegas, got on a flight to Gatwick Airport, claimed asylum on entry. He was given a UK phone along with his American phone. He was given free accommodation, multiple hotels, he was put around the place, he was given free clothes, he was given money, he was given benefits. If you think about that, for all these people from African and Asian and poorer countries, they're obviously going to take that advantage now.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. And they're not actually detained for processing, they're allowed to roam. They have. They're just given somewhere, whether it's a barracks or a hotel, they're actually allowed out. Yes, it's actually. We're zooming out now a lot and we'll zoom back in, but this is an important part because there's illegal crossings and illegal entrance boats or lorries, and there's also legal entrance, illegal staying. Right. Yes. And it seems that the bulk is that if there is at least a mid. I mean, Pew Research in 2017, I think, said there was 1.2 million illegal immigrants in Britain. It might be a million, but I think it might have been 1.2. So I assume there's a lot more now. Yes. And most of them are coming in legally and having, presumably, and I'm presuming, so you can correct me if I'm wrong here, their passports stamped in legally and they're just overstaying their visa.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, particularly one of them is Pakistan. In particular. They really come on student visas, they come here, then they overstay, I think, of the student visas from Pakistanis, they are the ones who claim asylum in the country, not the ones who disappear. 70% of them get rejected their asylum claims, yet of that 70%, only 4% of those are deported back to Pakistan. So there's really a deportation issue here as well. People that should be deported are not being deported.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, 4% is the figure I've heard as well for just general deportations across the board. And it's not more than that. So back to the people, smugglers themselves. I want to understand this journey. You got the Iraqi and let's say that he's responsible for 1/5 of the channel boat crossings. How are people who want to get to Britain finding him? How are the his clients, so to speak, finding him so they can get across?

[Mitchell Durden]

So social media plays an enormous part in this, particularly TikTok. His videos are distributed with sort of Arabic captions about smuggling to Britain. So they're not really particularly seen in this country because it's aimed at an Arabic audience. But he has people who distribute his videos back in Iraq, etc. There's people who will share his videos on Facebook, things like that. We didn't mention this, but I know he has a 14 year old who manages some of his social media in Iraq. He will post things to Facebook, share it around, get people to share it. They will also.

[Winston Marshall]

As in it's a family business.

[Mitchell Durden]

No, no, no. A random person making money. It's not related to him whatsoever.

[Winston Marshall]

You just know that this kid is a kid working for him. Presumably there's a lot of people working for him.

[Mitchell Durden]

Absolutely.

[Winston Marshall]

That must be a big operation.

[Mitchell Durden]

And part of it is their testimonies as well. So migrants who come here, they film themselves in these hotels, et cetera, saying, you know, look at all this stuff we've got that is sent back to Abu. He then distributes that to his people who share that in Iraq, who look and see, oh, look, there's a free hotel here. If we just pay Abu Hussein Al Iraqi, we can get there and we can have a much better life. We don't even need to work.

[Winston Marshall]

So people in the Arab world, seeing as it's Arab language, are seeing this and then how would they. Is there a link, sort of link in description? If you want to get across to, you know, it's not just him, also

[Mitchell Durden]

his followers, the people who work for him, they have networks on WhatsApp and Telegram. They'll get in touch with you, they give their phone numbers out, contact us, we'll give you more information. It really depends on the country you are coming from. You could already be in Italy from another smuggler who's got you across from Libya and you want to come to the uk, he can help you with that. You could be in Iraq, you want to get to the uk but you can't get through to Turkey, he can sort people out who can get you visas to get into Turkey fraudulently, then start the channel crossing through Greece, through the Balkans, up to France and to the uk.

[Winston Marshall]

Would they be legitimate Turkish visas?

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, they could be legitimately issues, but on false information. So fake bank statements, fake references, fake addresses. There was a man named Al Hashimi, a part of this organization. He offers that he could share with people a bank account that shows $50,000 in it, which helps to get Schengen visas. Because the amount is so high, typically people don't have $50,000 in their bank account, but for Turkey the threshold is much lower, it can be done much cheaper. And there's a man named Dr. Watan, he is a real specialist in this. He is known throughout the smuggling community, not just by this gang but by other gangs, Kurdish gangs, Iranian gangs, et cetera. The reason they all use him is because he's so successful at getting Turkish visas. So he probably has some sort of contacts in Turkey who distributes these, which is really quite unusual because these gangs are rivals with each other, they don't work with each other. But that man in particular, he's sort of a bedrock of all of them combined so that he can get their clients into Turkey, then on to Greece, etc. Etc.

[Winston Marshall]

And the key thing being that this is one of the easiest entry routes because you can island hop in Greece. Is that. Is that why there's other entry routes? Right.

[Mitchell Durden]

There is. There's the Lyons border as well. That's a lot more dangerous. It includes going through fences and stuff. That one really cuts down in the winter because Bulgaria have like thermal cameras which detects people in the forests and stuff. So really that's why you get such a big drop off in the winters as well as the boat conditions. People sort of stop getting into Europe around that time.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. So on the money thing, if you are someone who wants to be smuggled in not just to Europe but all the way across to Britain, how do they pay? Is it an advance? Do they have to pay everything in advance and do they pay a certain amount in advance or are they committed to sort of working for it? How are they paying and how is that money transferred? Is it cash? Is it crypto? What's going on there in the exchange?

[Mitchell Durden]

So I would say it's really individualistic. Depends what country you're currently in, where your position is, the price you're going to pay. If you're in Egypt, for example, there was a contact there in an office you can Go and pay cash. Your route is secured. There's a office in Paris as well. There's sort of dosses about all around the place. I haven't really seen crypto used that much, to be honest. It's more cash. But there's ways that you can decrease the price of your smuggling to Britain. So, for example, you could swallow loads of drugs and then when you get into Britain, obviously you distribute them back out of your body. And the people who are actually coming into Britain, they're not X rays. That's why it's a drug route as well. X raying is how you detect drugs in people's bodies. So that can cut down your price a bit. You could film social media videos for Abu, saying, look, I'm on the boat, he got me here. That could decrease the amount of money you pay. So really there's a bit of a negotiation involved. The price changes per person. It's typically about €1,200, the part where it goes from France itself to England. But depending on which country you're coming from, the price could be totally different.

[Winston Marshall]

The Winston Marshall show will be doing its first ever live taping and I want to see you there on September 11th at the Emanuel Centre in London. We are coming and boy, do we have a show for you. Journalist and author Majid Nawaz will be sitting down with the historian Raymond Ibrahim to debate the question, is Islam compatible with the West? Perhaps one of the most important and difficult questions of our times. It is without question, a clash of the titans. The Winston Marshall show live in London, September 11 at the Emmanuel Center. The link for the tickets is in the description. For more information, go to winstonmarshall.co.uk UK Otherwise, I'll see you on September 11th. How much drugs or what's the value of the drugs that any individual could bring across, do you think, across the channel?

[Mitchell Durden]

It's really hard to determine without having that core evidence. I mean, these are all sort of being distributed from migrant hotels and as you see, there's usually Circo cards, things like that. People don't know the full extent.

[Winston Marshall]

Do we know what type of drugs?

[Mitchell Durden]

So it's a mixed bag. It could be bits of cannabis, it could be meth and things like that in packages. It's a mixed bag. It depends on what they have at the time.

[Winston Marshall]

Cannabis seems like it would be. Do you think cannabis is being smuggled in? Isn't it pretty easily accessible already?

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, the thing is, it depends as well.

[Winston Marshall]

It's grown here, isn't it?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, and that is a good point. Sometimes it depends on what gang you're using. So people don't know this, but there's actually a shadow fleet of boats coming across the Channel. Everyone knows about the rubber dinghies and

[Winston Marshall]

stuff, but the mega dinghies, yeah.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes. But people don't particularly know about the small yachts and the sailing boats. These are particularly run by Albanian gangs who are much influenced by the drug trade in North London. While all the attention is on the east side of our country, Dover, Ramsgate, et cetera, a lot of these sailing boats are bringing small quantities of people on the west side of the country. Exeter, Plymouth, Cornwall, Devon.

[Winston Marshall]

You're kidding.

[Mitchell Durden]

No. And it's not really reported much, but the National Crime Agency has put alerts out. If you see suspicious boats coming inland at like, you know, 12 o' clock at night, can you report it? This is linked to Albanian gangs and what they have is they actually have taxi drivers that go to the west country and they then bring the people all the way back to London, where they work in places like Edmonton in North London. They work in the weeds houses and they cultivate cannabis, which is then sold back on the streets. Obviously affects our knife crime and things of that nature. Granted, it's a small number of people, you might have five people on the boat. That might be every week or so. Not compared to the rubber dinghies, where you could fit a hundred people. But it is a problem as well.

[Winston Marshall]

And where they're coming from. So Brittany or northern France?

[Mitchell Durden]

Northern France, mostly, yes. Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Wow.

[Mitchell Durden]

The location changes, obviously.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, that's astonishing. When they get into Europe, how are they getting from, let's say a Greek island to northern France?

[Mitchell Durden]

Depends on your money. So one option is you could purchase a lookalike passport. You have someone else's passport, a European Union one, Of course. You fly from Rhodes, Cos Samos, et cetera, to France, then you go straight across.

[Winston Marshall]

You fly across, yes.

[Mitchell Durden]

That is one option. That is the most expensive option, getting a fake passport. The cheapest option is the Balkan route. You either go from trucks, vans, etc. You go through Greece, through the swamps, through the mountains, through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Germany, etc. And you do the lands route.

[Winston Marshall]

And you would still need some sort of fake.

[Mitchell Durden]

No, because you smuggle between the countries. You pick, the smugglers already have predetermined weak points in countries, borders that they know and they've sourced and you go there without documenting.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay. And why do you think they, once they're in the Schengen Zone, Once they're in the eu, they want to go to Britain because, you know, France, I always say when I'm asked about this, they're not fleeing war torn parts of the world, they're fleeing France. And there's lots of reason to flee France, but if you're an even an economic migrant, you'd be like, actually, France is. I'll take it. Is there a reason why they would do that extra journey across the Channel?

[Mitchell Durden]

I would say two reasons in particular. The first is obviously the benefits we give them compared to France. If you claim. Just picking France as an example, if you claim asylum in France, you're not given a hotel, you're left to sleep in the streets in a tent. Whereas in Britain you're given that hotel, you're given that luxury. You're given a lot more than our counterpart in France. Now, historically, Germany was the biggest one for smuggling. That has changed in recent years to Britain, partly because Germany's changed their own rules on who they grant asylum to, how long the process takes. They've got a little bit more tougher on it. Whereas we've gone the opposite direction with our pendulum. We've made it easier in some cases. We've given them things that other countries won't give them. So that is the first reason. The second reason is this scheme they've concocted, which nearly guarantees 100% success in actually getting a fully a valid asylum claim in the United Kingdom. Because you could go to these other countries and still foul asylum, right? So when they come to the UK and this is what Abu Hussain puts out, he tells people to claim they're a bidoon. A Bedoon is the Arabic words for stateless. They're claiming that they're a stateless tribe from Kuwait in particular. Particular. Now, this tribe, there's about 100,000 of them in Kuwait. It's known in Kuwait. This issue dates back to the 1960s. Kuwait doesn't consider these people to be a part of their peoples. They say these are illegal immigrants from Iraq, Syria, etcetera, who've come to our country. They don't give them full citizenship. So there's two different categories of Bedoons and this is important. The first is documented. These are people who somewhat have a connection to the lands going back maybe a thousand years or so. Tribes, people, people who can't read or write, genuinely stateless people. The other category is non documented Bedoons. These are generally people who are illegal immigrants who've said, yeah, I'm a Bedoon in Kuwait.

[Winston Marshall]

So just there's the two categories are you're a Bidoon, we are not a Bedoon. Yes, right.

[Mitchell Durden]

But essentially they have different legal principles. So a documented Bedoon is still a second class citizen in Kuwait. There's human rights abuses and stuff. Two sides to the story. There are recognized as being mistreated, an undocumented Bidoon. In our Home office policy, a small number of these people are recognized to be genuine Bidoons. The reason for this is in 1965, Kuwait is a census. It tried to detect every single person with connections to Kuwait. A small number of people, maybe a thousand or so in the Kuwaiti desert who don't have access to information, can't read or write. They were missed off that list. So this is how the loophole works. You have to state you're an undocumented Bidoon. You have to state your parents, grandparents, etc. We're living in the desert, so they weren't registered on the list. And then you have to answer questions set out by the Home office to prove you're a Bidoon. Now there's a 25 page Arabic document on this which lists every single Home office question on Bedouins and the answers you should give to every single question. Some of them are very basic, like what's the flag of Kuwait, what's the capital, what countries do iborda, what's the international dialing code? And if someone doesn't know those questions, that would be highly suspicious. How do you not know the basic facts about Kuwait? But on the flip side, if you have all the answers, this is really easy revision. This is something you could learn in a day or two. This is easier than a GCSE exam. So you recite these back to the home office. The second part of this is you need to have some element of threat against you from Kuwait. So there's a scripted story. You say, I was protesting for my rights in Kuwait as a Bedoon. The government arrested me, they tortured me in prison. I signed a document which I can't read and write, so I don't know what I signed. It said I was a spy and I had to report on my family. I had to flee the country because I was scared. If I don't do xyz, people could be hurt. So that level of threat that ticks boxes every sort of category from the home office. If we deport this person who knows everything about the Bedoon community, there is genuine threat to their life back in Kuwait that we would be responsible for if anything happens. So the home office is extremely lenient on who they issue Bidoon status to.

[Winston Marshall]

How many quote unquote Bidoons have they given status to?

[Mitchell Durden]

So there's about 20,000 in the country. It used to be in the top 10 of the people coming into the country there was more Bidoons than Ukrainians. And when you compare that, there's about 33 million Ukrainians in existence. The Bedouin community, there's only 100,000 of them and about 30,000 are documented. So you cross them off. There's about only 70,000 people we can choose from, yet they're over 136 times overrepresented than Ukrainians in our refugee and asylum statuses.

[Winston Marshall]

Oh, proportional to how many of them there are not. No, in total. No, because we've got a lot more Ukrainians than 20,000. Yes, but. So we have 20,000 quote, unquote badoons.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, we'd nearly have the whole population if this continues going as the way it's gone.

[Winston Marshall]

Wow. And presumably this is just one of the. Of many, many different.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes. So for example, Ethiopians pretend to be Eritreans. The reason for that is in Eritrea they have false conscription. They claim it's against their human rights. Another one, this predates the Iran war, but a known Kurdish one is they'll make an asylum application here, perhaps say they're gay or something like that, which is frowned upon in Iran. Then what they'll do is while they're in the country, obviously you can edit and change your asylum application while you're here. They'll go out to anti Iranian protests. They'll take photos of themselves, post this on Facebook. And because of the law in Iran, those people could be severely reprimanded if they return to Iran. So they then put that in their applications to strengthen and enhance their claim to the uk.

[Winston Marshall]

And so this is all part of the package that the likes of Abdul the Iraqi. Was it Abdul?

[Mitchell Durden]

Abu Hussein.

[Winston Marshall]

Abu Hussein, forgive me, Abu Hussein the Iraqi, he. He's. His operation includes all of this.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, he includes the Bidoons in particular. He doesn't really specialize in Ethiopians and Etreans.

[Winston Marshall]

But what I mean is he'll have as well as travel and yes, you have the legal. He then also has the like preparation for what you do when you get into Britain.

[Mitchell Durden]

He's even distributed, and you can see this in the Telegraph, audio recordings of people pretending to be bedoons in Home Office interviews. They secretly record them on their iPhones or whatever it may be. They then send that back to Abu Hussain, whose people check. Are there any New Home Office questions. Is there anything we need to be aware of? And then this is distributed to migrants to show. Look, we just faked an Iraqi trying to be a badoon. Here. Here's the whole thing. This is what you do. Look how easy it is.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. And for those who don't have the cash to get all the way across, is it true that they become indentured servants and are sort of stuck to the food app operations? That they come in and they'll be given a fake profile on Deliveroo which someone else has used in their face, and then they have to sort of pay off their debt? Is that.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, yeah, Uber Eats and Delivery, that's a big one. There's people who source that not particularly related to Abu Hussein. These are people whose contact is in Britain, whose contact details can be passed on. So they're not particularly human smugglers, they're just experts in frauds per se, who give their details out and help these migrants in exchange for money themselves.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay. I had heard that there were other smugglers who. It's part of the operation. Every gang is like, don't worry, you don't have to pay it in advance when you get there. You'll work for us and pay it off.

[Mitchell Durden]

Exactly. I mean, we saw this with the hotel in Canary Wharf. They moved all the migrants in and then the next day, loads of them have Uber Eats bags and bicycles and stuff, and they were all back out working. It is known around the country that this happens. Of course.

[Winston Marshall]

So who's steering the boats across the Channel?

[Mitchell Durden]

It's a hard one to say because there's so many different groups, so many factions, so many nationalities. We've mentioned Iraq here in particular. Afghanistan is a big one. The Kurds are a big one. I would say. There's multiple groups. It is like a capitalist business. There are rival gangs with each other. They arm themselves in Calais with firearms because they're rivals with each other. They threaten each other. There is no one single overlords. There's not a monopoly, but there's various types of different smugglers, like we mentioned, obviously the shadow fleets with Albanians, that is a different kind of smuggling. There's still the people who attempt to get in lorries. They're not as successful. But the thing about lorries are if you fail, you just do it again. Because France don't send you back, they just let you out the lorry.

[Winston Marshall]

Yes. We'll definitely have to come back to the French. There was a guy who was reported by the Home Office themselves. I Think last week of Sudanese nationality who got sentenced to 16 months in Britain for people smuggling. Now that's remarkable. Just if you remember, Lucy Connolly got 31 months for a swiftly deleted tweet. He's actually smuggling people across the Channel. He's actually putting people's lives in real danger and he's only getting 16 months. What's your sense of how our response as a nation, or I should say our response, our government's response in dealing with what's going across the Channel.

[Mitchell Durden]

Inadequate? Completely. I mean, Abu Hussein Al Araki, we alerted them. I alerted them multiple times in advance before that story about this individual.

[Winston Marshall]

The police. Who did you leak?

[Mitchell Durden]

The Home. Home Office.

[Winston Marshall]

Home Office.

[Mitchell Durden]

Home Office. They done nothing. I appreciate there's a French element to it. We can't just storm into France, boots on the grounds, but.

[Winston Marshall]

Well, maybe we could. That's. That's. I'm not against that.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, that'd be a good idea, but they just seem totally incapable of doing anything. I mean, for example, that Bedoon one, when we done that, the Home Office response to that was instead of addressing and fixing the issue, they decided to re categorize all the Kuwait asylum claims from Bedum's, take them out, reclassify them as either stateless or refugee. So when you look at the Kuwait asylum statistics, it looks like after our article, it shot straight down. But really what happens is they've just redistributed the numbers to other categories. They're more interested in hiding it in some aspects than actually dealing with it.

[Winston Marshall]

One of the. We went to the Hungarian border with Serbia. Okay. And they have. Even though Hungary is within the eu, they have very good relations with the Serbs. And anyone who comes across the border, the Serbs agree to take straight back. Sure. A problem we've got with the French, even though we're paying them half a billion every three years to stop the boats. And as far as I could say, there's a. I'm not really sure there's much of a decrease, maybe mild decrease, but it's pretty much the same thing.

[Mitchell Durden]

It fluctuates as well.

[Winston Marshall]

The problem we have though, the difference with the Hungarian border and why they on a practical level have been much better at dealing with it, as far as I can see, is that it's a land border, not a sea border. And as soon as these people are in British waters, it's our responsibility. And we can't. In the same way the Americans can put a big beautiful wall up and actually stop things, we can't actually easily do that. I mean, we could put a floating wall up, which I actually think is.

[Mitchell Durden]

I somehow disagree. I would look at the Belgian model for this right now. About a month or two months ago, there was a big increase in boats coming from Belgium, but that has decreased again. The reason why is they don't just get people on the land and sort of shoo them off, they actually intercept the boats on the water, which the French don't do, and turn them back. So if Belgium can do it, why can't France do it?

[Winston Marshall]

The Belgians are intercepting boats coming from the Belgian coast and stopping them coming over to Britain.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, yes.

[Winston Marshall]

And why are they doing that? Are we paying the Belgians?

[Mitchell Durden]

I don't believe so.

[Winston Marshall]

I mean, I don't remember that. I think I would know if we were. So they're doing it because just.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, it's illegal human smuggling. I mean, it is a choice. You can do these things if you want to do these things.

[Winston Marshall]

And what does that say about the French? The Belgians, who are not being paid by us, are stopping it, and the French, who are being paid astronomical amounts, are just letting it continue. Just the people smuggling itself.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes. And if astonishing. If you look at the actual article we're talking about, the one I've done about Abu Hussein Al Iraqi, there's a video in there, he's filmed. He's sitting on the beach with about six French police officers around him. He's filming the boat going out and saying, I've just sent another boat out. France to Britain. We go every single day. This was about eight days after we signed an agreement with France to give them £662 million to stop this. And they're all standing there watching him let the boats go out.

[Winston Marshall]

We're getting mugged.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

I actually don't understand also why the deal wouldn't be, we'll pay you if you end it. So it's not in advance. It's like based on results.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

And they actually had an incentive. I cannot get my head around this deal. It's a deal that can only have been done by. And I'm talking about the British on this side. People who have no sense of reality and no sense of human nature.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, the smugglers themselves in their telegrams. This isn't the first time we've done a deal with France. Give them money. What they've described as usually happening is there'd be some sort of media event with all the journalists there. Maybe the French police will stab a knife in a bow or they'll pepper spray some migrants, they'll put on a big show of force. Right after some sort of announcement of money. Two, three weeks later, it all goes back to the same. And that comes from the migrant smugglers themselves.

[Winston Marshall]

Is there anything that you think the media misses about the story of what's going. I mean, without revealing what you're getting up to, is there anything that's going on that we need to wake up to?

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, just the potential of terrorists coming over. That's the most basic, simple point of government. Defend your people. Again, the Bedouin loophole. There was a man one month ago from Germany, a convicted Islamic State terrorist. He's come pretending to be from Kuwait. Obviously, our Bedoon loophole. His name is Mohammed Yassin. You can look him up. Why are we allowing this to happen? I mentioned this in November, yet they're still using this loophole in July, nearly August.

[Winston Marshall]

Do you have a sense of how many. What's the proportion of men and women and children?

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, I have seen a small number of women and children, but I would say it's 99. Men versus women and children.

[Winston Marshall]

99%. Yeah, 99.

[Mitchell Durden]

That's what I was. I'm just going from what I've seen, but I have seen women and children, I have seen them stuffed onto these boats in dangerous conditions where there's high waves, etc. So many people packed together. Some of these deaths we've had in the Channel, not all of them are from drowning. Some of them are actually from being crushed on these boats. So overcrowding is on the boat itself? Yes, yes, yes, that is a real issue.

[Winston Marshall]

And the women and children, are they going a part of the same people smuggling operations?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. So they're doing the same as everyone else. And of the me. Well, of the men, do you think that any proportion of them are legitimate asylum seekers?

[Mitchell Durden]

Not particularly. I can't say I've documented one, to be honest. I mean, there may be a needle in a haystack one. But why wouldn't you claim asylum in France?

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, if you're safe in France. Exactly, yeah. Wow. You've reported on them coming across from Ireland?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Is that a whole other story?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yeah, well, that's more sort of focused on Albanian trafficking again, but that is particularly with fake EU passports. So what they do is they go from Italy, France, wherever, somewhere within the European Union where it's almost like a domestic flight, what you take. So you just get on a flight with your passport, you land in islands. There's no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Islands you freely walk over, this can be exploited by illegal immigrants, maybe wanting to get here under Texas, which is why the Albanians have such a big proportion of a stake in this, again with the drug trade. But then this can also be used for asylum seekers. So not long ago, we saw a man from Sudan, he attacked someone in the streets of Belfast, tried to behead them. He is an asylum seeker who came from the Republic of Ireland, crossed with one of these passports into Northern Ireland. So it is a real issue. A lot of the focus is on small boats, but this is also an issue that we have to face.

[Winston Marshall]

And those coming into Northern Ireland, is there anything really stopping them getting across to the mainland from Northern Ireland? So, no, because it's a problem for Northern Ireland. But once they're in, they're just.

[Mitchell Durden]

At that point you're in the country, it's no different from going Scotland to England. They just take ferries across. Maybe on some cases, if you want to get a flight from Belfast, do you not need.

[Winston Marshall]

I have. I mean, I've done that journey a lot of times. I just can't remember if it's been a while and I can't remember if you need ID to get across it.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, the thing is, they have these fake IDs, which is how they get into islands to begin with. So you just use that again and

[Winston Marshall]

those fake IDs will be real, but not for that person.

[Mitchell Durden]

Look alike, essentially.

[Winston Marshall]

Look alike, yes. Right, I see. And it is the case that there are now coming, some percentage are coming over from Belgium. So despite the efforts of the Belgians, there are some coming, which is a much longer route, Right?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

So that's a presumably a lot more dangerous route. Do you know anything about that? What's going on there?

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, again, that one's a little bit on the decrease. They did pump that one up not long after this 662 million deal, I was afraid. French. Yeah. So I suppose, you know, they know for a week or so there might be a heavy French presence. We'll just move to Belgium that week and do our smuggling from there.

[Winston Marshall]

Oh, I meant the. Yeah. And I mean, if I was Belgian, I'd be like, well, why when we can get so much cash out of the British? Look what they're giving to the French.

[Mitchell Durden]

Let's.

[Winston Marshall]

Let's just maybe try and get a deal here. I mean.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, I wouldn't give them that idea personally, but.

[Winston Marshall]

Well,

[Mitchell Durden]

it is something that's possible, but I think the Belgians take this more seriously. There Was a report by one of the Belgian police in one of these towns saying a lot of the people he encountered doing these run ins were ex soldiers from Afghanistan and they were highly dangerous people. So they do take it somewhat more seriously for France. They want to punish us for Brexit. I get. It's in their interest. They don't want people in France, just let them go. That's.

[Winston Marshall]

I think that's the main thing. They don't want these camps. Do we have a sense of how many people are in the camps at the moment?

[Mitchell Durden]

The camps sort of move around historically. If we go back to 2015, there was the Calais Jungle. Everyone knows about that one mega camp where they all conjugate. Now it's. They're sort of dispersed, they're in forests, they're walking down the sides of the street, they're all over the show. I mean, another method, if you don't have a mobile phone or access to social media, you hang around a park in Calais or Dunkirk, someone taps you on the shoulder, you make contacts, you cross the Channel.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay. And we were promised that, certainly by Keir Starmer and I imagine other consecutive prime ministers, that they would smash their gangs. Smash the gangs is now a cliche, actually, in British politics. Has anyone come close to smashing any of the gangs?

[Mitchell Durden]

Not particularly. If you take someone out, someone replaces them quick enough anyway.

[Winston Marshall]

Has anyone been taken out?

[Mitchell Durden]

There was a Kurzish gang and there's a few minor people here and there who may have some roles in operating the boats and they've been caught, but no real major smugglers per se.

[Winston Marshall]

So there's the Border Security Command is what it's called.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Do they have any, any sort of scalps that they can like. I mean, you just mentioned that, but is there anything substantial that they can say that? Let me ask a different way. Is there even in the evidence that it's being taken seriously as an operation and they're actually working on it? Like if you were to steel man the position of the government and their efforts to smash the gangs, they might not be yielding results, but are they actually doing anything that we can say are fair enough? They are actually trying. It's just an impossible problem.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's tricky sometimes. Yes. There are documented cases where we have prosecuted people. Sometimes that's come from the media. So, for example, a different gang, they were paying, sorry, migrants were going to vape shops around the country as payment, which goes back to the human smugglers.

[Winston Marshall]

What do you mean migrants are going to vape shops?

[Mitchell Durden]

So people who can't pay. Say we were talking about Ubereats etc, those contacts, some of them were in vape shots. This was a different gang, not Abu Hussein Aliraqi, but they were making their payments. Their debts they owed to vape shops which were then being distributed back to France to the human smugglers.

[Priceline Advertiser]

Bonjour, compadre.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's the Priceline negotiator.

[Priceline Advertiser]

How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood vibe, star level and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me up.

[Mitchell Durden]

The colonels cooked up a new ten

[Priceline Advertiser]

dollar bucket of the day just for you.

[Mitchell Durden]

Monday, 24 nuggets for $10. Tuesday, eight piece fried chicken for $10. Wednesday, ten wings for $10. Thursday, eight tenders for $10. Friday, 24 nuggets for. Oh, you guessed it, didn't you?

[Winston Marshall]

Ten dollars.

[Mitchell Durden]

The ten dollars bucket of the day deal every weekday only at KFC. It's finger licking.

[Priceline Advertiser]

Good prices and participation. Variable supplies last not available on third party ordering platforms. Tax extra. Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's a club. Of course, Jason.

[Winston Marshall]

It's in the name.

[Priceline Advertiser]

Sam's Club.

[Mitchell Durden]

Oh yeah. Come join. Join us.

[Priceline Advertiser]

Sam's Club.

[Winston Marshall]

Wow. Gosh, the tentacles are far.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's absolutely everywhere.

[Winston Marshall]

It's massive. Give me a sense the money. So you've already said how much individuals might be paying one or two grand to get across the channel? I've actually heard more in other cases.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

And several thousand to get across the continent if you're including crossing the Turkish border, getting even into Turkey. I imagine these people the likes of. Sorry, is it. It's not Abdul the Iraqi, it's Abu Hussein the Iraqi. We're talking, we're talking about hundreds of millions here.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, right, yes, yes, absolutely. I mean they. Offers from Egypt, someone to come for $10,000. What sort of deprived person fleeing war has $10,000 in cash? So most definitely there is.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. They can't charge that if there isn't people with 10 grand to actually pay that.

[Mitchell Durden]

Exactly.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. Because otherwise. Yeah, right. So, so what is the money situation then? How much, how much are these people? Smugglers walking Home with and several thousand

[Mitchell Durden]

euros every single day. And if you think there's about 120 people on a boat, do the maths. Obviously they have employees, sometimes they have costs. The boats themselves, they're not stored in France. Most of them are stored in warehouses in Germany, which obviously complicates the issue because you can't go to the French police and say, can you destroy the boats? When all the boats are stores in Germany. But a lot of money is outsourced. Some parts, like engine parts, for example, they have to buy from China without.

[Winston Marshall]

For the dinghies.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, because they're operated with engines. They're not rowboats. They're. And they're very large as well. Some of them have 3, 4, 5, 6 engines in some cases and they need that power to get across. The fuel as well is another one. Sometimes they steal fuel from petrol stations, sometimes that's smuggled in. Morocco is a big smuggling point in regards to fuel comes across the Strait of Gibraltar as well as cocaine. There is a lot going on here with the fire.

[Winston Marshall]

What do you mean? They're smuggling fuel across through Gibraltar into the continent to get up to.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes. And this is sort of things that you see with Russian sanctioned oil that we can't buy, which is obviously much cheaper in countries like India, et cetera, exported outwards to countries like Morocco. Or maybe it's Libyan oil. Countries with sanctions, they can get that cheaper from countries we don't agree with that is smuggled here, given to them in some cases.

[Winston Marshall]

So back to the money thing. If this money is a huge amount of money, it's. He's got to be doing something with this cash. I mean, it's not literally cash, It's. It's money in some house. Somebody's laundering it somehow.

[Mitchell Durden]

Bank account.

[Winston Marshall]

It must be track. It must be traceable. If there was a proper sort of.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Investigation. You know, if we actually had our intelligence properly investigating it, I would hope that we can. Could find it. Or is it just. Is it too. Is this a very clever bloke who.

[Mitchell Durden]

We're not going to be able. Some of it's in Iraqi banks, some of it's offshore banks. They're really shady about the finance. For me personally, that'd be very tricky to uncover where each and every financial detail goes. But it does go offshore. Some of it is spent in France. They might buy nice clothes or have a nice car, et cetera. It's really distributed all over the show. There's not one money source, not one pot of gold. It is Sent in different places. If someone gets taken down, well, they've still got five, six other pots of gold elsewhere.

[Winston Marshall]

And you'll remember, of course, that Keir Starmer said that one way he was going to deal with this was with digital id.

[Mitchell Durden]

Right? Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Can you still make the case why digital ID would.

[Mitchell Durden]

Somehow I just can't see what digital ID would do. Would that stop a boat crossing? Would that stop someone from northern islands coming? I mean, think of something. We have control over student visas. They could suspend Pakistan for abusing them, but they don't. So what is a digital ID going to do? People don't get deported when they overstay. So I just don't understand it. What will we achieve by that? Especially if people throw their passports and pretend to be other nationalities. They do what's called nationality shopping, which we explained earlier. Ethiopians pretended to be Eritreans, Iraqis, Kuwaitis. What was a digital ID do in that case?

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, quite. And what are your solutions to this problem, then? What's. What's the sort of the Mitchell answer? If you were in charge, if you're the Home Secretary, what would you do?

[Mitchell Durden]

The tentacles are absolutely everywhere. You need a multi layered level of defense. The first part of that always comes from intelligence and information. You need to inform the people out there, we will not be accepting the boats, we will not be accepting asylum claims, we will not be accepting any of this. I think what you should do is you should, should be paying these influencers who get paid to promote these routes. You should do the opposite. You should pay them more to not promote these routes. Say if you go to Britain, they'll turn you back, you'll waste your money.

[Winston Marshall]

You think the British should pay?

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

I mean, if you think about Abu Hussein, the Iraqi.

[Mitchell Durden]

No, no, no, not them. He has people in Iraq who aren't human smugglers, who post things on TikTok, Facebook, etc. Who get paid to promote this as influencers, if that makes sense. So we should employ our own influencers to do the opposite and counteract that. But obviously that comes to stage two. You actually need to turn back the boats. You actually need to stop this, because words on paper don't mean nothing. People will still launch those boats out. So the second part, I would say is.

[Winston Marshall]

The second part's more important. The first part is, as long as the incentive remains, clearly it's worth it for someone to spend ten grand, or at least they believe it's worth it. We've got to make it clear. Firstly, we've got to make it that it's not worth it, they're not getting anywhere near our country. And then second, we've got to then use your TikTok army to make it clear that don't even bother going to the uk.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, that's just a small part of it. Information is needed. The second part is doing the job. You need a Royal Navy and I know we have problems with the Royal Navy. We couldn't get a ship out for Cyprus when Iran was attacked back in, we had a nuclear submarine, the trident, one that float for 400 days. I know there's problems with it, but whatever power of it remains must be used to restore our borders and defend our country.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, so I'll pick up on that because, I mean, we need, of course, to improve our navy fleet and our sub fleet, just to protect ourselves. And not just the United Kingdom and the British Isles, but Falkland Islands that flared up in the World Cup, Chagos. That's a serious thing.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

But if, let's say for the sake of argument, we had a fully functioning fleet.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

What exactly do you imagine they would do in the Channel? Because if you have an answer. Go on.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, what you do is you have a sort of a system of escalation and de. Escalation. So you would intercept the boats first of all, when you do that, you need to give out warnings, let off sirens and stuff, turn back, turn back. They refuse to turn back. You then escalate it again. You fire flares up in the sky overhead, a clear visual warning. If they can't understand English or whatever language you're speaking on megaphones, that is a warning to turn back. They refuse that again. You escalate it more. You fire warning shots into the air, into the sea. They turn back. Sorry, they keep going. You have to escalate it more. You take evasive maneuvers to nudge the ships back to France, Belgium, wherever it may be. If they keep going, essentially, are they endangering our personnel? You have to take decisive action. If that includes shooting the boats, no one wants to see that. But if that includes it, then that's what needs to be done. Only at that point, when you have a serious balls of policy like Russia or China or the United States, you can then stop this problem. I think after that, you then need to go for the people smugglers themselves. You need to put out probably international warrants for arrests, put them on hit lists, we will arrest you, sanction their bank accounts, freeze their assets. I said this on GB News. I think we should use our cyber warfare Capabilities. We have a whole section of the British army trains in cyber warfare. They're sitting there doing nothing. Why don't we hack their phones, find where these transactions are going, find where the payments are. As you were asking earlier, where is that money going? We can track this on their phones. We could listen to their conversations. Why are we not doing that? I don't know. We need UAVs and drones in the sky to detect these boats with thermal cameras. We need a whole range of measures. So there's not one measure in particular that solves the issue. You really need an integrated system between the Royal Navy, between the army, between the intelligence community and even between our Special Forces. We could conduct raids in some of these rogue countries where people are giving these dodgy visas or helping terrorists and people like that who are coming all the way here. We could go out there, we could arrest them. Think Trump, he arrested the leader of Venezuela for narco terrorism. Well, do we not have border terrorism? We have people from the Islamic State, we have Iran coming out saying that we've smuggled agents into your country. Surely that is a threat to us. When they're firing missiles at RAF bases and the Chagos Islands, we should use. In my opinion, maybe others won't share this. Terrorist powers, declare them as terrorist cells. Because I have seen myself actually an ideological sort of. In some cases it may be Islamist, in some cases it's pro Iranian. The Ayatollah, they have a great affinity with. In some cases they're very anti Israel, anti the United States. Those are anti Western. Yes, yes.

[Winston Marshall]

So I think you're onto something with the Special Forces here. And we sort of forgotten. Even though we still put James Bond movies out every few years, we've forgotten who we were. And this is an act of war. It's certainly an act of invasion, as the way you describe it. I would say that is actually the problem with the word invasion is that it implies that it's against our will. But if you looked at the behavior of the government, it's not totally clear to me that it is against our will and certainly not the will of the British elite to allow everyone in. And. But that perhaps brings in the question of legal migration as well. But absolutely going to find out these cells, despite how degraded our military is, we still have unbelievable special forces and sending them out. I have no problem eliminating Abu Hussein, the Iraqi. Find him, kill him. That should be absolutely the case. But on your point about the Channel, and this is where we get. Get things get problematic, I think, is that if you had a situation where the Navy were to sink one of these boats with however many people there's on them now, 50, the mega dinghies, I think it might be 80 or 100 or, you know, a lot more. And then you have a front page and, you know, 150 killed in channel, then it would set back everything that's going on politically and it would be. It would cause. It would cause a political upset.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, absolutely.

[Winston Marshall]

Make things much harder.

[Mitchell Durden]

You don't want to kill people. Just to be clear. I don't want to see people die. You need to treat people with dignity and respect. The boats are a threat. When you shoot the boats, you do pick them up, take them back, deport them, whatever you need to do. Yeah. Which is really circumstantial. It depends on the context of what's going on at sea. Right. This could be. Be at the shore. This could be between our boulder and the French boulder. This could happen anywhere.

[Winston Marshall]

Well, so another way of dealing with it is that those people should never set foot on British soil. So either they're picked up, you say nudging. I don't see why we can't, with great British, you know, ingenuity, come up with some sort of contraption that can pick up the boat and either take it back to France, like as big ice cream scoop, take it back. I mean, that might sound ridiculous now, but there's more preposterous ideas that have that have come up, or we. They're brought on to another boat and they're just.

[Mitchell Durden]

They're.

[Winston Marshall]

They're taken off immediately to the sentient islands or something like that, somewhere where they're processed nowhere near our country, just so that. It's just the message is out that they're not getting anywhere near us. And I think that this is another comparison with the Hungarian model. If you have a border, they. If it's like a trapped border and they're killed crossing it, it's their fault for trying to cross it. The problem you get, as soon as you have the navy actually shooting people, then it looks like the things are.

[Mitchell Durden]

I appreciate that, but on the flip side, you talked about Hungary. If you talk about Poland and the Belarus border. There was a Polish border guard who was killed by a migrant when he was defending Poland. So if we're nudging these boats, what happens if one of them smuggles a firearm on the boat and shot at a navy personnel? You need to be there ready to defend the country no matter what. This is a threat. There are known terrorists Coming. There are drug dealers coming. You cannot rule out the use of force. It is like the nuclear deterrent. We don't want to use it, but it's there. Should it be used? I don't want to see people shot. I don't want to see people killed. I always hope flares, things like that. Nudging the boat would be enough to send them back. But it's our country first.

[Winston Marshall]

It's very important. This is a very important point. People are being killed in the process of coming across, in the smuggling. And the people who are coming across, some of them are killers and they are killing British citizens.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

So we have a moral duty, our government has a moral duty to protect British lives and that means to stop this. And it is an invasion and it needs to be stopped, as far as I can say. So to use force is completely legitimate, but being tactical about how it's used is the real question.

[Mitchell Durden]

It needs to be in a controls and measures way, not in aggression, not in an outburst. Our arms forces are trained professionally in discipline. They know the procedures better than me. They know how to deal with this, just as they would deal with perhaps Somalian pirate boat trying to board a cargo ship. Sometimes force is used, sometimes force isn't used. It will be up to them to determine when it's used, when it's not, what the level of threshold is and how to go about that. So I would trust that to our armed forces. But the option needs to be there and you need to take away the lawfare if you want to do this properly. You need to take away people who could prosecute our navy, you need to leave the echr, things like that, which was limit us in being able to stop this issue.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, we've mentioned the French, we have mentioned in passing the Chinese because they're parts used on the dinghies. And we've also mentioned that an Iranian Islamist recently came over. Are there any other foreign nations that are complicit in what's going on across the border? Apart from those three, it's hard to

[Mitchell Durden]

say complicit because sometimes they could be partially complicit. So. So for example, the Taliban issues fake death threats to people that they could buy from Afghanistan to enhance their asylum claim in the United Kingdom, but that doesn't mean the Taliban got them the fake visas or got them through Greece, etc, Etc. There are certain elements that can be enhanced by other countries, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are culpable for everything. So it's really a mixed bag. Iran's one to look at. Iraq potentially is one to look at. It's 50, 50 on that. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

[Winston Marshall]

And sort of a whole other angle about this, but it's a lot more in the numbers. Is the legal entrance illegal staying? As we discussed earlier, there's a lot of people that are coming in that way. Have you, have you done any investigation into, into that aspect of our. About border woes?

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, yes, absolutely. I mean, if you talk about visas, here is a good anecdote for an example of where the Home Office has done good. So before I was really writing with the Telegraph last year, I reported to the Home Office about the country of Nararu. Nararu is a very. Yes, Nararu is a very tight. You wouldn't. Well, it's quite close to the Marshall Islands.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay.

[Mitchell Durden]

But. But very tiny country, 12,000 people. No one's ever heard of it. No one knows where it is. It's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They introduced a scheme called a Golden Passport for Climate Change. So essentially what that is, who did Naruru? Their government.

[Winston Marshall]

Their government.

[Mitchell Durden]

So what you can do is for $25,000 you can buy Naruru citizenship. That process is done offshore from Nauraru in a company based in New Zealand. Now I lays out to the Home Office if people could purchase passports from a country and they don't even know who they're giving passports to, what's to stop, say, people on sanctions lists or foreign mercenaries, international drug dealers, etc. Etc. Using this to get into our country because they have visa free access. The Narurians, Yes, Visa free access to the United Kingdom. Because you never hear of them. They're not in any crime stats. Hardly any of them ever come here. But there is good precedence for this because they had this scheme 20 years ago, but they had it controlled by the government. And what Happens was in 2002 in Malaysia, an Al Qaeda cell was raided and they found that all the members of Al Qaeda had Nuraru passports using this same scheme, more or less. Now it's off ship to New Zealand. That was the same 20 years ago. So there is precedence to that. I didn't get a response. I was a bit aggrieved. But two months later I saw a notice on the government website. We are imposing visa restrictions on Nirru. They more or less quoted my words for words answer. Because of the security situation, we don't know who they're giving passports to, et cetera, et cetera. So that is the Home Office being proactive. No one is going to kick up a fuss about visa restrictions from nrauru. But you put it to the other side. Shabina Mahmoud's the Home Secretary, Pakistani heritage. Why is there no visa restrictions on Pakistanis who are abusing student visas? The biggest of that kind. Why has that not been addressed?

[Winston Marshall]

The biggest abuse of student visas is coming from Pakistanis.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, yes. Out of any nationality in this country. So if you could do it for Narara, why can't you do it for Pakistan? Is it potentially because a loss of their base votes for labor and it's a political issue more than a borders issue for them? Because they announced ones on Congo restrictions for visas, places like that, Afghanistan, Burma, etc. But why not Pakistan? So I think it's circumstantial. In some cases, yes, the Home Office can be helpful. In some cases the government ties their hands behind their back.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay. And you did a story about reverse smuggling.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, yes.

[Winston Marshall]

This sounds very bizarre.

[Mitchell Durden]

Brand new and this is completely related to what we're just talking about. So mainly Hindi speaking people, this is India and Pakistan who are coming here primarily on student visas. Again, there are smugglers putting out advertisements out there. If you've overstayed your student visa, contact us and we'll take you to France or Spain. Now I couldn't understand if you're in the uk, why do you want to be smuggled from the UK to France or Spain when you're overstaying your student visa? I couldn't get my head around that. So I posed as a migrant to these people and I sort of asked the benefits, what can I get? I've overstayed my visa. What happens? They informs me a lot of people now are going to Spain. The reason they're going to Spain, the socialist government there announced an amnesty for over a million migrants. And it appears now this is going to be when it comes out, the very first documented route of the United Kingdom being used as a country, as a stepping stone to another country. Spain, we're an island country. No one's ever used us to get forward as a sort of designated route in previous years. It might be an individual wants to evade the law and smuggles himself over.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. So they're easily getting student visas for Britain.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

So they can come here. Yes. And then once from here, from there,

[Mitchell Durden]

here they'll go in a lorry at Dover, they'll be smuggled to France, they'll be picked up by taxis, minibuses, whatever it may be driven from France to Spain. Then there's different cells In Spain. Who. From this new Spanish law, they say you have to be there before December 2025 to claim this. There's cells there that will sort of forge documents or references. You've been here as an undocumented migrant since whatever date. And then you can get a European Union citizenship via Spain. And of course, when you got that, Spain's not the richest country, but you can go to Germany, you can go to Sweden and you can go to France. You can claim their benefits legally as a European Union citizen. That's the new route.

[Winston Marshall]

Do you have a sense of the numbers?

[Mitchell Durden]

It's very small at the moment. This is brand new. We're talking.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay. So this actually in some way answers why they're coming to Britain in the first place.

[Mitchell Durden]

I mean, who would guess? You put massive pull factors and they come.

[Winston Marshall]

But it's also the case that they're coming to Britain because. Just ignoring the people who go onto Spain. Yes, the ones who are coming to Britain, it's because they. It's not easy for them to get that European documentation legally, and they're not getting the welcome that they're getting here. And that's evidence, because if they go, they actually want to get the European passport from Spain. It's not because Britain, they actually sort of love British culture and they're real Anglophiles and, you know, love our history and our art and our music. It's nothing to do with that. It's because it's the most, I guess, attractive in a material sense.

[Mitchell Durden]

Well, it's a new smuggling route. There's always these new routes that pop up here, there and everywhere. I mean, an old historic one was a Vietnamese route to the UK using university placements in Malta, which is quite interesting. You would go there from Vietnam to Malta because it was quite easy to get a student visa to Malta as a Vietnamese person. They would sort of have a transfer exchange scheme with universities in the uk. So you go from Malta to the UK as a Vietnamese person and either claim asylum here or disappear into the shadow economy.

[Winston Marshall]

Huh. You also had a story about EU settlement.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, yes. So this is the country of East Timor in particular we're talking about. Or Timor Leste is more known as. Now, this is a country. No, no, no, it's the other side of the Wales. It's close to Australia. It borders Indonesia quite close to Papua New Guinea.

[Winston Marshall]

Not far from Narura.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yeah, exactly.

[Winston Marshall]

I can't pronounce it.

[Mitchell Durden]

Sorry. Nururu. Nguru, I believe. Yes, yes. But a European Union scheme is being abused there now, to understand the context of this, this has gone on over many years. That country, East Timor, was historically part of the Portuguese Empire. It was a Portuguese colony for hundreds of years. Portugal had turmoil in 1975. They had nearly a bit of a civil war. The government was overthrown. All of their colonies declared independence, Angada, Mozambique, etc. But East Timor was in a different situation. They were invaded and occupied by Indonesia for many years. They gained their independence in 2002 from Indonesia. And because of the law in Portugal, all of those people before it was occupied by Indonesia were Portuguese citizens. So the law in Portugal makes it as a Timorese person, you can obtain a Portuguese EU passport if you were born before 1975, or if you have parents, grandparents who were in the country at that time, which obviously a lot of people will have, because it is a poor country, people don't really move out of it. So they were all obtaining Portuguese passports. Flick to the 1990s. Britain's in the European Union, Portugal's in the European Union. A Northern Ireland's meat processing plant was really struggling for a shortage of workers. So what they'd done is they had job advertisements in Portugal, come work in our meat processing plants. The people of Timor, the East Timorese on Portuguese passports saw this and the Portuguese economy is not as good as ours. They went, yeah, we'll go in Northern Irelands, we'll set up shop there. They lived with us. They couldn't believe all of the sort of social benefits they're entitled to in Britain. So if you look at the IOM report from the United nations from 2019 on East Timor or Timor, Lesd, it details this migration route. It found that a lot of people from Timor, instead of taking up these meat processing plants, et cetera, et cetera, they were claiming social benefits like for children or out of work unemployment that they weren't necessarily getting in Portugal, that they didn't know about. This was echoes back to East Timor. And what they found is actually a lot of Timorese people were taking children that were not biologically their own children to northern islands to claim child benefits. While we will end the European Union, we vote to leave the European Union, this route closes because Portuguese, sorry, EU citizens can no longer freely work and travel to the United Kingdom as we can't to Portugal, through free movement of people. But because it's so incentivized, the United Kingdom. Back in East Timor, what started happening recently, and this hasn't been documented yet, people from East Timor have started to sell themselves as spouses, parents, Et cetera, back to people in East Timor so that they could fulfill European Union family settled claimants, or it's a way of getting in as a family member into Northern Ireland, despite the fact they're Portuguese passport holders, but not necessarily Portuguese people themselves. This sort of Brexit legacy has opened our borders to a country on the other side of the world.

[Winston Marshall]

And people are using legacy. Why?

[Mitchell Durden]

Because the European, or the eu, sss, EU Family Settlement Scheme, or whatever it may be called, that is a negotiation from our government to the European Union. This is something we've come up with. So the point of it is, if you're a European Union member and you've been living here and working here before Brexit, you can bring your wife, your kids from France, Germany, wherever, any European Union country. But critically, you can bring them if they're not European Union citizens. So if your wife was Nigerian, American, Australian, you could bring them over as well, because you're European. So that roots per se has been advertised back in East Timor. People are fraudulently getting marriage certificates in East Timor that don't exist. Things like saying, that's my child and they'll have photos together and stage it and the interest.

[Winston Marshall]

A whole other level of evil. It's a whole child smuggling.

[Mitchell Durden]

Exactly. There's historic precedents with this. This isn't just our country. There's child exploitation that's known in that country. But just focusing on Britain for the meantime, since I'm not a specialist in the child exploitation in their country, this isn't a necessary thing. This is something that's negotiated on the table. This is sort of a legal means of smuggling. This isn't a illegal get on a boat. This is a sort of way of frauding or forging.

[Winston Marshall]

This is another one of the legal ways in.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, sorry, what I was going to mention, just came to me is looking at the Home Office statistics for this. How many people are doing this from East Timor? So if you look at every single visa that's been put in From East Timor, 83% of them for people coming from East Timor to the United Kingdom. So it's work, holiday, travel, etc. 83% are European Union family settlement schemes. No other country in the world has a relationship with us where a vast majority of their people are family reunifiers. I mean, we don't have that with Australia, we don't have that with Canada, with Ireland. Countries that we have a shared sort of ancestral legacy or shared culture or

[Winston Marshall]

shared history, but we do have it with the dependable scheme. Right. So when, when someone comes in, we just had this with a Gazan, I believe it was, who came, I think, on a student visa, and if it wasn't a student visa, it was some sort of resettlement thing, and insisted that 18 of her family, because they were close family, needed to come with her, which of course. And they were. It was allowed. And that of course means that each of those 18, it would be legitimate them to each have their own 18. And so you just kind of spirals out of control. And that's basically what's happened is whether it's exactly work visas or student visas, the dependables is when everyone comes in and the actual is something like 17% of people coming into Britain on these visas are actually working. The rest is students and dependables. And that's the legal stuff, of course, not including the illegal stuff. So the idea that we need them for the NHS or for infrastructure, well, firstly we need more houses, we need more water, we need more energy just to deal with them, we need to build the infrastructure. We're not doing that at the appropriate rate that we wanted to do that even if we wanted them in our country. And we don't or I don't. And. The idea that they're going to themselves work in the NHS and we need them for the NHS and we need them in all these specific jobs. It's like, well, each of them brings in enough people that they're not even accounting for what they would be able to contribute. Take them in their hole as a group coming in. I'm not sure that they're a net contributor really in any way. I'm talking more about the legal side and sometimes the mess that we're in,

[Mitchell Durden]

sometimes with these student visas, et cetera, when they come from these universities in India or Nigeria. And if you talk about social healthcare workers, sometimes the training they receive in these countries isn't the same level as, say, the nhs, or sometimes it's completely fraudulent. You can purchase certificates saying, I attended X university in X country and I'm qualified in nursing or whatever else it may be. And obviously the effects of that for young people in particular, people maybe my age, who want to go to university, do a nursing degree or et cetera. They're being pushed out by people who sort of jump the queue, which the government are bringing in, but they're not trained at the adequate level that the NHS or whatever organization it may be is promoting.

[Winston Marshall]

Is there anything I missed, you think, on this? We've covered a lot of ground We've covered a lot.

[Mitchell Durden]

I don't believe so, I don't believe so. But if you've got any questions about, say, the human impacts, I've got interesting stories. So, for example, I went to Wethersfields Asylum Camp. If you heard that it's the largest

[Winston Marshall]

in Essex, near Braintree.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, it is the largest camp housing asylum seekers in the uk. I went to one of the parish council meetings with Peter Harris, he's now the head of Reform UK for Essex County Council and the Merrill candidate. He asked me what's going on. So we went to one of these parish meetings to hear the impacts of the people who live there. What's going on? I have to say I was totally astounded, shocked at what I heard. When I was there. There was people saying about the migrants from the base coming in. There was one couple in their family, they had two men in their back garden who had anal sex with condoms and feces spread all over the floor. The reason being, of course, if you are gay on the camp, there's a large Islam, sort of Muslim presence that's frowned upon in their cultures. They reported it to the police, the police didn't show up. There's people banging on people's doors saying, take us to London, we want to go to London. And bear in mind a lot of these people are in their 60s, 70s, 80s. It's lot. A lot of like picturesque retirement villages. People there, they told us we used to live with our doors unlocked. We've never had anything like this. There'd be people walking in the dead of night down these country roads. If you've ever driven down them, they weave and turn. There's an accident waiting to happen at some point. People have said they don't respect boundaries, so migrants have crossed over farmers, fields, fences, things like that. Just sort of social unorder. And a lot of the stuff they were taking to Essex police, it was just being thrown out. The police were not helpful at all. One person, it was a man. He says his wife opened the door to someone. Migrant pushed the door open. This is all allegedly, of course, he came down, shouted at them to leave. The migrant left, they called the police. Police turned up. Is there any criminal damage to the door? No. Was anyone hurt or assaulted? No. Oh, well, there's nothing we can do. Just lock your doors and shut your curtains and basically get on with it.

[Priceline Advertiser]

Bonjour, compadre.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's the Priceline negotiator.

[Priceline Advertiser]

How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood vibe, star level and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me up.

[Winston Marshall]

So that's, that's the new England now.

[Mitchell Durden]

Exactly. And this is coming to all these bases. There's more opening up around the country. I think it's something you're going to hear a lot more of condensing all these people into one place where they just run riot.

[Winston Marshall]

So the, the base story is that they were being housed in hotels for a long time for the practical reason that the hotels actually had beds. And that, as everyone knows, became very politically unpopular because they were firstly, these hotels were in middle of towns and it was causing problems. But then we were like, we're paying them how much? So I've quite worked out what the Home Office were thinking when they thought, well, let's put them in barracks. Because I think part of it was the idea that they're a little bit out, further away from towns, except they're not. We had protests in, outside in Piddington, which is another one of these barracks, which is in Oxfordshire, the shire. And there's something like 1200 asylum seekers being put in this. All men, of course, in this tiny little town of population like 300 or something. So they're like vastly outnumbered in, in this place. And it's all men and they are free to roam as we discussed outside. But sorry, I digress a little bit. The idea to move them to the barracks was that it would somehow be cheaper and somehow be more practical. Except that the barracks don't, or the sites might be more accurate to call the military sites don't necessarily have bedding and housing and places touch keep them. So we've got to spend the money to build up these properties, these bases, these sites.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, a lot of them are aging.

[Winston Marshall]

So they're aging and so it's going to only going to cost more, potentially it costs a lot more in the end. So it seems like a total bait and switch of a problem.

[Mitchell Durden]

And the thing is, if we talk about Wethersfields in particular, okay, it's not in the town center, but there's a bus company, Foster Hartley. It takes the migrants to Colchester, Braintree and Chelmsford on buses every single day, multiple times a day. So despite them being housed away from everyone, they still freely get dropped off in town centres, which is an issue. Another issue is obviously doctor's appointments, GPs and that if they need specialist treatment, a lot of that is not on the base. The vans that you pay for, there was a whole van taking a single person to a hospital, for whatever reason that may be, that's taxpayer money. So I don't think it saves any money putting them in camps as opposed to hotels. But that's an issue for the government.

[Winston Marshall]

We'll see. And there's not many of these. Right. So there's. There's Piddington Weather, Wethers Fields.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

I think there's one down in Kent.

[Mitchell Durden]

Napier Barracks. Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Napier. Is that. Is that Crowbra?

[Mitchell Durden]

There's Kroger as well. Yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

Which is the Kent one.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

And then I think there's one in Scotland near Inverness.

[Mitchell Durden]

Yes, Inverness, yes.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. But. So there's only a handful, but presumably that's going to change and. Or who knows which way it'll. It'll swing, maybe it'll become politically unpopular and it'll swing backs. Right, so do you have a sense of the numbers at where the show. Because is that. What's the. Is that the first one?

[Mitchell Durden]

I believe it was. I think from memory the capacity is 1245, but it has a legal limit of 1800. They're building extra capacity so they can go to 1, 800.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. Astonishing. Well, Mitchell, it's been a great pleasure speaking with you.

[Mitchell Durden]

Pleasure.

[Winston Marshall]

I've covered a lot of ground and it's horrifying. It's absolutely horrifying and very serious. We're losing our country. These people are not being deported, the smugglers are not being punished. They should be eliminated and I mean, they should be killed. This has got to be stopped because people are dying along the way. And I still think that we need a floating wall through the Channel, a mind floating wall, because that way, if they decide to come across it, then it's them who are making that decision, not our navy shooting them down, but who knows what's around the corner. Thankfully, we have great investigative journalists like yourself actually doing the hard work and trying to suss out what's going on and illuminating the people of our country, this horror. So, Mitchell Durden, thank you so much.

[Mitchell Durden]

Thank you.

[Winston Marshall]

Before I invite you over to the substack to take some of our substackers. Brilliant questions. Where can people find you?

[Mitchell Durden]

I write in the Telegraph, sometimes I put bits on Twitter. It's just my name, Mitchell Durden. I'm a nobody. You probably can't find me. I don't have a big following.

[Winston Marshall]

A very good journalist and a very impressive one. Thank you so much.

[Mitchell Durden]

Thank you. It's a real pleasure.

[Winston Marshall]

Cheers. Cheers.

[Mitchell Durden]

It's very hard to integrate people when they've come illegally. They've broken sort of our basic British

[Winston Marshall]

values about honesty, decency, integrity and wardrofgraine also asks, are parts of the Home Office actively enabling illegal immigration?

[Mitchell Durden]

They just hit the figures. Rather than addressing the issue, Michael Hopper

[Winston Marshall]

asks, why doesn't Britain destroy the small boats used for Channel crossings instead of returning them to France? Thanks for watching the Winston Marshall show with Mitchell Durden. Head over to WinstonMarshall.co.uk, our substack or our YouTube members section if you want to watch the extended conversation between me and Mitchell where he takes some of our substackers. Brilliant questions and you'll also enjoy ad free viewing and listening. Otherwise, thanks again for watching and until next time, be well

[Priceline Advertiser]

Athletic Brewing Company crafts award winning non alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion. Summer's full of good times and Athletic fits right in. Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door or find them at a bar, restaurant or store near you near Beer Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all Times.