I went out with RNLI – it’s a disgrace volunteers are being abused for rescuing migrants

The icy wind blasted at my face, making my eyes water, as I looked out across a lively, choppy Bristol Channel on a freezing cold winter’s evening. I, an intrepid young reporter, was accompanied by a teacher and a local pub landlord as we gingerly trekked across the wonky planks of the pier in Weston-super-Mare.

This wasn’t part of a local protest, of course. This was the night I met the crew of the local Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) who spent many of their evenings saving lives at sea.

It wasn’t migrants they were fishing out of Weston’s tidal range – incidentally, the second-largest tidal range in the world – but usually a mix of hapless tourists who got cut-off by the rapidly incoming tide, stranded fishing boats or occasionally, an individual with mental health concerns spotted entering the waters.

As part of my chat with them, which was more than a decade ago, I found out something astonishing about these people. The RNLI, to my surprise as a wide-eyed 21-year-old journalist, was not an official registered emergency service, nor does it receive any direct funding from the state.

No, the lifeboat crews who wade into sub-zero waters from a rickety pier, even on Christmas Day, are unpaid volunteers, all of whom are holding down regular jobs at the same time. Indeed, living on the seafront in Weston for three years, I regularly saw the lifeboat crews being called into the water at all times of day and night and regularly reported on rescues of groups of children, of families and of unfortunate souls who had been spotted in trouble at sea.

The crews explained to me at the time that they all carry pagers, 24/7, and that if this bleeps – usually because of a 999 call that’s been referred by HM Coastguard – they all leap out of bed, rush down to the lifeboat station, change into wet suits and lifejackets in a tiny space and then throw themselves onto an orange boat and get in the sea. They aren’t paid for this, they get nothing from it, they just do it because they want to help. They disrupt their work schedules, sleep schedules and social lives to fish people out of the channel.

Until that moment, I’d just assumed it was an emergency service the same as the Coastguard, but that visit opened my eyes. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would risk their life – and so constantly inconvenience it – every night for total strangers bobbing about in the sea, for nothing other than the satisfaction of it.

Which is why I think the government so badly let down the RNLI this week.

An RNLI boat carrying about 140 migrants was turned away by the Port of Southampton and the Port of Portsmouth on Sunday.

According to reports, the Associated British Ports at Southampton and the King’s Harbour Master both declined a request by the Coastguard, saying there was not a ‘safety of life at sea’ issue.

When the RNLI boat eventually docked at Eastney the asylum seekers became blockaded by anti-migrant protesters in a stand-off that lasted hours.

RNLI volunteers have since been subjected to threats by protesters accusing the charity of becoming a taxi service for illegal migrants.

The good people manning (and womanning) the RNLI crews should never have been put in this position. It is not a political organisation, and it’s unfair that it has been caught in the middle of the most contentious issue in the UK today.

The RNLI was set up to rescue exactly those aforementioned – unaware tourists, children lost at sea, tragic locals. It is not there to be a volunteer Border Force, and its job is not to scoop up hundreds of migrants who came from a safe country and taxi them to their asylum claims in the UK, or sail them back to France, unpaid, in their spare time either. Nor is it fair to leave the RNLI’s volunteers to judge who should be saved and who should be left to drown (nobody).

Its volunteers are being left in an impossible position – they can’t refuse to rescue someone in case they might be a migrant. They can’t be expected to ferry hundreds of asylum seekers from port to port and carry the can for what happens to them either. This is the job of the Home Office, of Border Force and, at a stretch, the government’s Coastguard.

The RNLI can’t decide who to rescue, and doesn’t decide where to drop them off after. It’s the government’s job to organise this, and the government’s job to police its borders. It should not be kicking the can to the RNLI and inviting a kicking for its teachers, landlords and other volunteer heroes for doing what the government told them to