Ceuta is what happens when you’re not serious abo ut migration

Ursula von der Leyen doesn’t seem to care about the tide of people 
rushing the Spanish border. Voters in Britain will


If any of us were in doubt about the scale of the problem facing our 
borders, that ended in half an hour on Thursday. Thousands of topless 
Moroccan men were filmed scrambling over rocks, pushing over walls and 
setting things on fire as they rushed into Ceuta, the Spanish exclave in 
north Africa.

To watch the footage was, simply, to be boggled. How many people were in 
that frame? Why were they doing this? Who even were they?

And what about the people of Ceuta, a city with a population smaller 
than Eastbourne on the coast near Tangier, long governed by Spain? What 
would we do if Eastbourne was overrun by 60,000 foreign berserkers?

Some would argue it already has been.

I’ve written a lot about Nigel Farage, the movement of people and the 
threat of small boats. And, to be honest, I’ve always been a bit 
embarrassed doing it. You don’t have to have watched The Odyssey to know 
that human decency says you must at least try to welcome refugees and 
migrants, especially if you’re one of the richest countries in the world 
and they’re victims of wars you’ve started or meddled in — which is, of 
course, in the end, most of the wars. This has always been Europe’s 
position.

Yet, looking at the surging crowds, I thought: hasn’t it gone a bit far 
now? Europe wants us to do what?

They want us to just deal with thousands more illegals, on top of the 
thousands who have already come here on boats this year — 752 on 
Wednesday alone — because they simply can’t be bothered to stop them or, 
worse, expect us to actually welcome them in, as they do? To give them 
free houses, taxis, mobile phones, allow scores of dependants to also 
come across — because: human rights — when there are barely enough 
houses for the people who are already here, when taxes are this high, 
when the NHS is messy, dysfunctional and killing people?

Are we just expected to take it?

For Ursula von der Leyen, the useless, robo-haired functionary at the 
top of the European Commission, the answer is yes. She couldn’t have 
cared less about the Ceuta stampede. At most, for her, thousands of 
gleeful men romping up metal railings, raiding shops and then sleeping, 
half-naked, out in the open, were a mere HR/health and safety issue.

“Dangerous crossings” must not happen, she tweeted on Friday. “I tasked 
two commissioners to support to control the situation.”

I looked up the commissioners. One was a wet-looking Austrian ninth-tier 
politician, a holder of the Grand Cross of Liechtenstein. The other was 
a former mayor of Dubrovnik and recipient of the 2006 World Mayor Award. 
Are they real people? It’s like sending Gareth and Dawn from The Office.

Europe has never been serious about stopping migration. Philosophically, 
it’s not their thing. Effective returns of people who flood into Greece, 
Spain, Italy, France and so on bump along at only 28 per cent. Spain’s 
prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, whose recent policies made the rush on 
Ceuta possible, could not, when he addressed the press on Friday, even 
bring himself to use the word “border”. The police would put a “physical 
containment barrier” in the sea, he said, to stop migrants swimming the 
three miles from Morocco to Spain.

How about telling them they simply won’t be welcome? How about not 
promising an amnesty, as he did this year, prompting the surge? How 
about seeing a huge body of random people just over the border and not 
automatically thinking, what can I do to make it even easier for these 
people to enter my territory? What can I give them? Shall I pass them a 
lifejacket, a cup of tea, a credit card, an SUV and a four-bedroom house 
in Kilburn?

These people aren’t refugees, by the way, or asylum seekers. They’re 
economic migrants, chancing it. As one of them put it, when the border’s 
down they’ll try anything, because: “Salaries are very low in Morocco. 
It’s dead, Morocco is dead.”

For them, Ceuta’s a jaunty day trip.

Any serious attempt to deal with the many millions who flood in is 
resisted with psychotic anger in the European parliament. Its recent 
plan to create “return hubs” was met with scorn. One commissioner, two 
weeks ago, said  that  “extraterritorial centres” had bad human rights 
records. Australia’s plans led to “years of arbitrary detention in 
inhuman conditions”. Similar plans by Israel (it’s always Israel) left 
asylum seekers in “legal limbo”.

Fear of legal limbo — is that a reason to desecrate an entire continent? 
These politicians are consumed by madness and guilt. They are 
embarrassed by Europe’s wealth, its global standing and its relative 
ease of life. They feel it is their mission to tear this down by waving 
in thousands of people who shouldn’t be here. And those people know 
this, which is why thousands still tip up in Italy each month, to 
Giorgia Meloni’s horror. Sánchez himself has said that Spain will 
welcome 500,000  migrants. This will tear Europe apart.

Some of these arrivals will head out of Spain and go north, attracted by 
our better healthcare, education system and free houses.

We pay the French £662 million to stop them coming here from Calais, 
but, as Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, found out on Tuesday, 
like every EU official with a lifejacket they don’t do the job.

Philp was mocked for running up and down the French coast, asking the 
gendarmerie why they were doing “absolutely nothing” to stop 
people-smugglers loading up hundreds on boats in front of them. “Our 
order is to let them go like that,” shrugged one. “We just have to say 
to them, don’t do that, it’s dangerous.”

As I said: mere health and safety.

The strange thing about migration is that it should be the easiest thing 
in the world to manage. There is nothing more simple than securing the 
borders of one’s country. Yet many politicians seem unable to speak on 
this matter. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary — all 
tongue-tied.

On other subjects, the prime minister won’t shut up: poetry, tea, pubs, 
education, bus fares, electricity, who he’s going tax, why he felt 
Cambridge let him down. On Europe, he couldn’t be clearer: he wants an 
“even closer” relationship. On immigration, though, nothing.

At some point, perhaps when he sees his TikToks falling off a cliff as 
eyeballs race to the astonishing pictures of Moroccans marching in 
relentless columns across Spanish soil, he may realise that however much 
the EU tries to obfuscate the reality of what is happening, however much 
they try to tidy it away (“50,000 have gone back now”),  however much 
they pretend that what happened on Thursday wasn’t their Tiananmen 
Square — an event we can never unsee — there are only two subjects that 
will interest people at the next election. Money, and this.

The longer Burnham prevaricates and utters soundbites, the longer Labour 
tries to pretend the matter is in hand when it isn’t, the more people 
will come across, the more our seaside towns will be destroyed, the more 
stories will leak out about migrants bringing over 18 members of their 
families and/or raping people. Is he ready for it?


Camilla Long