AN IMMIGRATION INCONVENIENCE

A look at the way Governments inconvenience their citizens in order to show that they care.

A thoroughly unpleasant and unBritish thought crossed my mind this morning and it made me shiver.

It concerned questions that might be asked of important people like members of Parliament or (their equivalent in other parts of the world if you live in those other parts of the world). Members of Parliament are our elected representatives and as such the theory goes that they represent us should representation be needed.

The unBritish thought had to do with a subtle, barely detectable, change in the powers of Authority, one that may not even exist but has been imagined by my tiny brain as I’ve contemplated this or that event in my life.

This time it’s movement. My movement as I sally forth on my holidays with my partly disabled wife, travelling with the ease of the deities we’re possibly nothing like through countries that form the bulk of Europe.

You notice the words “partly disabled” in the last paragraph? What my wonderful good lady has got is a badly damaged back. She has treatment for it, infusions and so on, and needs support because standing for her is a painful problem. Walking without an aid isn’t an option. But her brain’s as bright and shiny and seemingly new as it ever was, so she’s not disabled in that department. Not remotely.

So when we sally forth on our holidays we go by bus … or coach because a coach is that bit more comfortable and luxurious than a bus and has a bog aboard. That’s how one driver described it to us: a coach, he said, is a bus with a bog.

We like to travel to various European destinations. Italy and Austria are among our favourites, and isn’t Switzerland a delight? You’ll notice here, then, that it isn’t just European Union countries we like because Switzerland isn't one of those. On our way out of our own country we start at Dover where there’s often a passport check by French authorities. This involves a couple of inspectors making their way through the coach with hand-help scanning devices, and it’s all over and done with in a matter of minutes.

And that’s the last time our movements will be checked until we get home, though it’s normal for Italian hotels to make copies of non-Italian passports. They do that overnight, so it doesn’t actually affect us at all. And anyway, not everywhere’s called Italy.

There’s an agreement called the Schengen agreement because it was signed in a place called Schengen in Luxembourg, signed by most European countries, that allows relaxed border controls, but our own glorious country didn’t sign it. We distrusted foreigners, apparently. So we don’t have relaxed border controls, as shall be seen later on.

Holidays in Europe, be they in EU countries or Switzerland, are splendid affairs. People are invariably pleasant, friendly and obliging and there’s always something that compares more than favourably with home. Cuckoo clocks, for instance. And, time-pieces aside, they let us pass amongst them with no hassle on account of Schengen, no suggestion of bother and with the kind of friendliness we used to experience back home, and, let’s be honest, still do most of the time. Home isn’t a bad place. British people are fundamentally as decent as people anywhere because we’re all human, aren’t we? But Europeans are a delight to mingle with, too.

But at home a ripple of something less than harmonious has crept in. Have you read the Daily Mail? Yes? Well, stop it! And the Express? The Sun? Behave yourselves! Because what I’m implying has actually lessened our land stems from the xenophobic ranting of those three newspapers with, and here my heart begins to break as I suggest it, a tiny bit of help from the BBC.

But what’s all this got to do with the unBritish thought I’m supposed to be writing about?

It’s all to do with the return home after a delightful few days amongst mountains or wine tasting or enjoying the serenity of foreign lakes. It’s to do with, in fact, Calais.

Why, I hear you remonstrate, Calais is in France. It always has been!

Yes, but it’s also where the British Immigration people sit at their desks, and, to repeat, we’re not Schengen. It’s their job to ensure that the world behaves itself and only those who set out a week ago are returning. They don’t want to let anyone else into the country without permission, and that’s understandable. With a human population as big as it is, there’s got to be order somewhere, or chaos might ensue.

When we left our shores and entered France the French, as I’ve described, checked us (in Dover). Politely, without intruding on our lives, they zipped our passports through a little handheld reading device, and we were swiftly on our way to the ferry and adventures in far off lands.

The British authorities could do this, but they’re more stolid and anyway they want our experience to demonstrate just how much our Government cares about our safety. They need to make that experience border on the unpleasant, so there’s a room with rows of tapes making a zigzag path to desks behind which polite and gentle folks sit and, with a simple zipping movement scan our passports. It’s quick and easy just like with the hand-held devices, but needs our presence, loping along, one at a time, but the queue isn’t.

Back to the light of my life. My partly disabled wife. She find is excruciating, queueing in a slow-moving ribbon of people and last time she had her walker with her (which inconvenienced the driver slightly because it was in the coach’s hold) and, sitting on it, scooted along the interminable queue slowly towards the desk. I said last time because the time before she didn’t and could see what torment could lie ahead.

They used to do something about that if there was mobility involved. A member of the Immigration personnel team would have a hand-scanner and deal with the handicapped on the coach. (Question: why can’t they do that for everyone, like the French do?)

Apparently, while we are queuing up they check the coach to make sure there aren’t any aliens hiding where they shouldn’t be hiding. There never is, of course, there’s not really anywhere they could be hiding. And then, after a total of maybe half an hour or maybe longer we rejoin our wonderful ship of the road and carry on to the ferry, hoping that the delay hasn’t caused us to miss it.

I don’t mind a little inconvenience if it’s necessary, but it seems to me that there are two motives behind Government systems of checking the return of UK citizens. One is to make sure that only the right people with the correct documentation do actually enter the country, and that’s probably quite important in a world of so many displaced people, and secondly so that we have it forcibly demonstrated to us and are sufficiently inconvenienced so that we can’t avoid noticing how fondly our law-makers are caring for our safety. Governments have always done it: make sure we see that we can’t manage without them and their caring ways.

It’s no coincidence that a rise in xenophobia via the foul offices of the Daily Mail (remember, that was the newspaper whose headlines praised Hitler in the thirties, and said he was right, and it hasn’t changed much since then) has coincided with increased vigilance at places like Calais and a more vociferous presence of the thug element with their brains wrapped in a flag they barely understand and the insistence that foreigners are all somehow inferior. I mean, inferior to them! Who are they kidding? Only themselves.

All this has gone to diminish us Brits in the world. And the kerfuffle at Calais and no doubt at airports the nation over is feeding it. Inexorably we are being shown how we are being saved from … nobody’s sure quite what, but it’s probably aliens with evil intent and an eye on our health service. Or our jobs. Or our wives and daughters. Or our plot of England…

And my unBritish fear? Well, bit by bit freedoms are being eroded, the right to free speech is being questioned and some things are beyond the right of normal folks to understand. That if I ask too many questions of my elected Member of Parliament something odd might happen, and I might simply disappear one dark night, never to be seen again…

Sometimes questions that ought be asked might be dangerous things. But I asked anyway. How many aliens, I asked, have been apprehended? Have there been enough to justify the pain my wife suffers at Calais? The reply was “ask them yourself”, and I will.

© Peter Rogerson 30.06.18