A father-of-four dubbed ‘the Farminator’ for rounding up 50 migrants hiding in his fields every week has hit out at Keir Starmer, claiming the PM ‘treats them like royalty’.
Chris Gadsden, 70, hit the headlines ten years ago as he collared hundreds of suspected stowaways sneaking into his fields in Bedfordshire.
The groups of men had crossed into his farm after being dropped off at the nearby M1 services, following a 125-mile journey from the Dover ferry hidden inside lorries.
Chris, who has run the farm for 38 years alongside his wife Lianne, 67, has even found an encampment in the woods close to his home – complete with water bottles and food wrappers showing people had been living there.
He says as many as 10 still trespass across his farm every week – equivalent to 5,000 over the past decade. He believes the number is now decreasing because they have found an ‘easier’ route to get to the UK.
Chris told MailOnline: ‘They’ve found another way in where they seem to be more welcomed. They’re taking the easy route, coming over on the boats.
‘Coming in on boats they are given high vis, taken off to where they need to go, treated like royalty above our own people.
‘The country needs someone that actually does something to deter them from coming over, because at the minute it’s a free-for-all.
‘I’d like to go down to the Houses of Parliament and say my piece there. I would sit there and I’d tell them: ‘Face up to reality.’
Chris’ farm has been a migrant hotbed for more than three decades. He was first alerted to it by police knocking on his door wanting to conduct a survey.
On Monday this week, 228 people in four boats successfully made the perilous crossing across the world’s busiest shipping lane. The day after a further 489 people in eight boats arrived – pushing the yearly total over 17,000.
Photos of migrants on his farm show them trekking through his crops and sheltering from the sun under a bush, while groups of men laugh as they are confronted.
In others, a police dog jumps up as cops collar a suspect, while a migrant grins at the camera and offers a cheeky thumbs up from the back of a lorry.
Chris now says he is scared for his safety as he nears old age – and the migrants keep on coming.
He told MailOnline: ‘There are still immigrants coming off. Ten years ago I was younger – now, I don’t walk it as far so I don’t survey it as much. But they are still coming in.
‘It got worse and worse and worse to the extent where it was invading our privacy and our way of life.
‘But for me to go out there and look for them now is a bit of a task now. If I jumped on the quad and went around the fields and had a good look, I’d probably find clothes.
‘One of my sons, in the second wood around the back, when he walked around it, found an encampment inside. There were bottles of water and that sort of stuff there.
‘I feel more threatened now because my abilities are more limited. But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t run. That’s a sure fact.’
Chris, despite living 125 miles from Dover, has even been forced to brandish a shotgun and shoot into the air after he was confronted with a group of migrants outside his door.
Toddington Services is often one of the first stops for lorry drivers coming from the Port of Dover.
When he escorted immigrants back to his house, Chris said he would give them food and water as they waited for the authorities.
Chris continued: ‘I was tolerating them for years, until one day my missus took the dog for a walk down the lane. I was back working on the tractor when she rang me up and said: ‘You’d better get round here quick.’
‘I went round to the bottom gate and three blokes ran from where she was, and then I ran up the side of the field and stopped all the others.
‘That’s when it really kicked off. It felt that this was becoming a real threat. They jumped out of lorries and their first stop was the farm, hiding in the barns.
‘We did feel threatened at one time. One day I saw lights at our bottom gate. I put the cameras on and there was one minibus parked on the drive, two minibuses down here.
‘There were all these men blokes who couldn’t talk English and they started marching up towards the house – not being funny, I had to put one out. I shot back up into the house and got the shotgun out, came out and let one off in the air.
‘My wife was on the phone to the police – they didn’t like that I had let a shot off but that was a big threat.’
He continued: ‘We were breaking the chain from them coming in to where they were trying to go. There used to be a white transit van that would come over and pick them up.
‘They’d have a phone number written in on their hand and as soon as they got over here they just rang it.’
Chris says that all but one of the migrants he has seen are young men.
It comes after Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, sparked fury when he claimed ‘the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women’ – something Chris dismissed as ‘not true’.
He continued: ‘There was only one time that a woman was in the same vicinity, when Somalians came over. Other than that it’s all been men. Only men.
‘The politician – that’s not true. It’s always men.’
