This podcast is sponsored by Canacord Genuity Wealth Management, award-winning wealth managers who go above and beyond to support and guide you.

Visit can-dowealth.com to start building your wealth with confidence.

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Max

Geoffrey and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. British troops have been sent

Poland to help stem the flow of migrants coming from Belarus. James, what's going on here?

So essentially what we've seen is Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator in Belarus,

is attempting to weaponise the migrant crisis. They are essentially granting tourist

visas to Belarus to people from Syria and Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries,

bringing them to Belarus and then essentially pushing them towards the Polish border.

And they are essentially attempting to weaponise the migration crisis to their benefit.

And I think what you ask, and this has then led to Poland, moving troops near the border.

Belarus has responded by that.

We're saying, well, if you're going to do that, we need to have joint patrols with the Russians. And you've got a situation where Poland, a NATO and an EU member,

is deeply concerned about the situation. There are reports, and this is obviously hard to verify,

given the restrictions on reporters getting close to the border. But there are reports that the Belarusians are essentially kind of arming these migrants with kind of, you know, clubs and other kind of basic weaponry

and kind of encouraging them to try and cross the border.

And so I think you have got a situation where the polls are getting very worried.

How do they deal with this?

I think the deployment of these, the

relatively small deployment of British troops is meant to send a message basically saying,

hang on a second, if Belarus and Russia have the idea of trying to engineer some conflict here,

engineer some firefight or something, then you aren't just going to end up in a scrap with

...