It would be interesting to know the substance of the presumed consultations by Dan O’Mahoney, the Home Office’s clandestine Channel threat commander, concerning his piratical proposal to lay the marine equivalent of snares and mantraps in the form of nets designed to foul outboard engines’ propellers (Home Office may use nets to stop migrant boats crossing Channel, 11 October).
Presumably he’s taken advice from the International Maritime Organization, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the International Federation of Shipmasters’ Associations, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, Nautilus International, the RNLI, the Royal Yachting Association and Trinity House, to mention just a few of the organisations familiar with the practices of safety of life at sea.
I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a consensus among them that any practice designed to impact on safe navigation would be a flagrant breach of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.
Tony Lane
Ex-director, Seafarers International Research Centre, Cardiff University
