Former defence secretary Liam Fox said he was “s ad and disappointed to see our Prime Minister stoop to this level of scaremongering” and fellow MP Sarah Wollaston said he was “taking voters for fools”.
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He added: “As the argument slips away from the Remain campaign they are forced to rely on desperate scaremongering”.
The warning about migrants arriving in Kent – a picturesque area known as the “Garden of England” for its fruit and hop growing – was described as a political move by Cameron ahead of the referendum.
UKIP migration spokesman Steven Woolfe said: “The baseless statements from David Cameron and the Remain camp that France will scrap its bilateral Calais border control agreement with the United Kingdom, leaving our country vulnerable to illegal immigration and Calais-like “Jungle” camps on the south coast, are based on fear, negativity and a falsehood”.
A French interior ministry source however pointed told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and said he had “no plans” to change the agreement in the event of a Brexit.
Could the kind of squalid migrant camps we see on the outskirts of Calais become a familiar sight in southern England? “If those controls didn’t continue then there are thousands of people there who are there specifically because they want to come to the United Kingdom who would then come to the United Kingdom”.
Current agreements between Paris and London, which were signed in 2003, allow the British authorities to do inspection procedures at the border in the French Ports instead of the British ones.
As well as meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, leaders of the two other biggest states in the EU, Tusk will visit Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, who chairs the Visegrad Group of East European states that also includes Poland and Hungary.
And with the extra border checks and United Kingdom investment in security ever goes, the fear in France is that even more migrants would head to Calais if they thought it would be easier to get to Britain.
If they don’t want to claim asylum in France and insist on trying to make a life in the United Kingdom, their only option is to try to cross the Channel illegally, then make a claim.
Defending the claim, the Number 10 spokesman told reporters at a regular Westminster briefing: “This is about raising a genuine concern”.
But Sir Peter warned there is “a lot of humanitarian pressure” on the French because of the camp, situated just outside Calais, and backed Mr Cameron by saying a rethink of the agreement would be “very likely”.
“This is a perfectly feasible scenario that could happen”.
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Thatcher, as leader of the opposition, supported membership of the EU’s forerunner in a 1975 referendum but after winning power in 1979 she threatened to halt payments to the European Union unless Britain got a refund, known as the rebate. He is planting the idea in people’s minds in the hope that they may consider the option of staying in rather than getting out.
