Re: Ceuta is what happens when you’re not serio us abo ut migration

On 8/1/2026 1:54 PM, Tara wrote:
> 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
> 
> : (
 >
Where's Noah?

The crisis is reverberating far beyond Spain because it challenges one 
of the European Union’s central promises: that member states can 
maintain open internal borders while jointly protecting the bloc’s 
external frontier.