Re: Ceuta is what happens when you’re not serious abo ut migration (was: Ceuta is what happens when you???re not serious abo ut migration)

On Aug 1, 2026 at 1:17:00 PM EDT, "Julian" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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

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