I’m not sure if the immigrant riots in Calais have made the news down south, but if you are planning to travel to western France at the moment – don’t!
Calais is synonymous with cheap shopping for the Brits. You hop on a ferry at Dover, cross the sliver of sea that shaves England off from France by a mere 35 kays physically but a thousand kays mentally, and come back loaded with bargain wines and a gazillion cigarettes.
However, what Calais is now even better known for is its teeming refugee camp housing thousands of illegal immigrants who are desperate to flock to Britain. And it’s getting nasty.
Most are not real refugees; they’re just trying to get out of the hellholes of their own countries, such as Libya and Somalia. Who can blame them? But at the risk of generalising, some are also criminals and others jihadis wanted by their own governments for terror acts.
So sadly this is not a cut and dry situation of noble people wanting a decent shot at life. In fact, when you look at their current behaviour, many seem to have little interest in gaining sympathy for their plight.
They are smashing into security zones, threatening lorry drivers and mugging the locals. How’s that for scripting your own PR?
In fact French dock workers, sick to death of having their lives endangered, have gone on strike. The motorway at Dover is now crammed with lorries unable to go forwards or backwards in what the Brits in typical understatement call Operation Stack.
This is a massive dilemma facing Europe and it’s going to get worse. The main problem is the authorities are paralysed by political correctness. For example, Britain’s David Cameron said the illegals were ‘swarming’ in and got hammered by the luvvies for ‘provocative’ language.
But what do you call thousands of people bursting into security zones, breaking into trucks, thumping the drivers and flaunting every law possible? If you can’t call something for what it is, how will you ever solve it?
I heard one driver who had been holed up in his lorry for five days describe on radio how he could not leave his vehicle as it would be stripped bare. He said some of the drivers who had left to get food and water had been attacked by illegals.
Others finding illegals clinging to the chassis of their trucks are too intimidated to report them, as they could just get a knife in the ribs for their troubles. There is also the massive toll on businesses as supermarkets cannot rely on road transport as perishables go rotten while medicines needed in the poorer parts of Europe such as the Balkans are simply not getting there.
In short, Europe is being held to ransom by ‘swarms’ of increasingly aggressive people hammering against the borders believing they have a right to enter.
Many do enter, which creates other issues. For example, a significant number of North Africans who either sneak in or get refugee status never integrate.
Not just in Britain, when France played Algeria in a football match some years ago, immigrants booed the French anthem. Ironically, playing for France was one the most iconic players of all time, Zinedine Zidane, a Frenchman of Algerian descent.
Indeed, it is well-documented that some parts of ‘banlieues’, the immigrant suburbs surrounding Paris, are no-go areas for native French – to do so is tantamount to white South Africans venturing into the burning townships during the most bitter apartheid years.
In Britain, many immigrants now demand that their own customs and traditions be enforced by law – ironically in some cases the very customs that many fled from in the first place.
The question is this: if people break laws getting into your country, are they suddenly going to b e model citizens once they are in?
This is not going to end well. I am not talking about blood on the streets or anything like that, but what is happening in Calais today is the Europe of the future unless the ruling class grows a spine.
