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

On 8/2/2026 9:48 AM, Wilson wrote:
> 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!
> 
Do you think this Nick guy reads a newspaper?