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

On 8/1/2026 10:37 PM, dart200 wrote:
> On 8/1/26 10:17 AM, Julian 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
> 
> capitalists and crying about free association: name a more ironic duo
> 

Do the citizens of Ceuta get a say in who they associate with?

Apparently not.

It's just the invaders who get to decide. That's what makes it free!