'I warned them!' Farage says migrant crisis will 'destroy EU politically and socially'

Nigel Farage has predicted the migrant crisis will "destroy" the European Union.

The GB News presenter highlighted how thousands of migrants have arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in recent days.

Mr Farage said when he was an MEP in 2015 he warned Brussels that a common asylum policy would be a "disaster", adding that he still stands by "every single word of that".

The former UKIP leader said that unless the bloc sends migrants back then "millions more will come".

Speaking on his GB News show, he said: "Well it's not as if I didn't warn them. I told them that the implementation of an EU common asylum policy, which basically said anyone that crossed the Mediterranean and set foot on EU soil could stay, I warned them it would be a disaster."

Mr Farage played a clip from one of his speeches in the European Parliament in which he insisted the EU "simply can't accept countless millions".

The Brexiteer went on: "Well, I stand by every single word of that. And yet the millions started to come in 2015 and 2016, and whilst it's gone a little bit quieter across the Mediterranean, this year the numbers that have come into Italy are double what they were last year.

"Look at what happened to Lampedusa over the weekend. Over 10,000 young men arrived across the Mediterranean in small boats, 200 small boats.

"This wasn't organised by some random trafficker, this was almost a military-scale operation, this was an invasion. Almost double the population of the island arrived over the course of the weekend.

"And some of those who thought maybe they wouldn't be accepted began to get pretty aggressive. Now this has led to the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who was elected on a platform of stop the boats, she's been in Lampedusa with the unelected President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

"And Meloni is saying please help, we want the European Union to share these people around and we want a European navy to try and stop the boats.

"As for the EU itself, the very people I was criticising in that speech in 2015, all she can say is she wants to establish safe and legal routes for people to come into the European Union, none of which is going to stop the boats."

Mr Farage said you can see "very similar patterns" in the UK, with Rishi Sunak pledging to stop small boats crossing the English Channel.

He said: "Unless the EU or Italy itself send people straight back to Libya and Tunisia, many, many millions more will come. And I'm going to speculate this will destroy the EU, destroy it politically, and I think in time, destroy it socially too."