Anger at Le Pen Transit Camp Threat

France's far-right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen said yesterday the country was being submerged by immigrants and that illegal aliens should be locked up in "fairly comfortable transit camps" and then expelled.

Mr Le Pen also told Tony Blair, who had described his policies as "repellent", to keep his nose out of France's affairs, and promised to charter a special train to pack illegal immigrants off to Britain if he was elected president on May 5. He added that he was "no more of a racist than Tony Blair".

After managing to moderate his tone for the presidential campaign so far, the National Front leader seems to have rediscovered the taste for the kind of offensive remarks that landed him in legal trouble in the 80s and 90s, when he was fined for describing the Nazi gas chambers as "a detail of history".

Mr Le Pen said yesterday he was worried that France was being "progressively submerged by immense masses from the third world", saying that France's 9% unemployment rate showed the country could not afford further immigration.

"We do not have enough work even for our own citizens," he said. "The French constitution never said foreigners should have the same rights as the French. Foreigners who don't do well can leave."

The socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, defeated by Mr Le Pen in Sunday's first round, broke his silence to follow other leftwing leaders in calling on the people of France to reject the extreme right in the next round of voting. He did not explicitly call on supporters to vote for his conservative rival President Jacques Chirac, but said: "With no illusions about the choice our compatriots face on May 5, I ask them to express their rejection of the extreme right ... through their vote."

Mr Le Pen, who faces Mr Chirac in a May 5 presidential run-off, said he saw nothing wrong with transit camps. "It's where we would put the illegal immigrants who try to cross the borders before sending them back to where they came from," he said.

France's former Socialist education minister, Claude Allègre, described the remarks as "a horror ... not even Nazi, but pre-Nazi". For the French, the words "transit camp" evoke the notorious holding centre at Drancy outside Paris, the last stop before Auschwitz for most of the 76,000 Jews deported from France during the second world war.

Ahead of a weekend of mass anti-Le Pen protests likely to bring over a million people on to the streets of towns and cities throughout France, Mr Le Pen said Mr Blair did not want illegal immigrants to enter Britain any more than the NF leader wanted them to enter France.

"I am no more of a racist than Tony Blair, who doesn't want immigrants showing up at Sangatte," he said, referring to the Red Cross camp on the northern French coast from where asylum seekers try to enter Britain illegally through the Channel tunnel.