One rule for us, another for them
Hauliers heavily fined for letting some migrants in, while HMG watches over the destruction of our borders
As we all know, the British government is incredibly hot on stopping illegal immigration.
What other explanation could there be for them levelling tens of thousands of pounds worth of fines on a haulage company in one of whose lorries some migrants were found?
Fair enough. They shouldn’t have been in the lorry, but you can’t expect lorry drivers to do Border Force’s job nor to act as security guards. It’s not the lorry drivers who are incentivising illegal immigration to the UK – that’s the government’s fault.
It’s not the lorry drivers who are allow a free flow of illegal immigrants across the Channel at levels that would impress even the invading Mongolian hordes of the 13th century.
There’s no deterrent and any pretence that the government wants to implement one is just that – a pretence. Rwanda can’t and won’t happen, not unless there’s some kind of massive revolution in British politics.
Of course, it’s easier to whack a fine on a small company. It’s a nice little earner for the government too, no doubt. But, ultimately, it’s a diversion: the government can look like it’s doing something to tackle what is by now the greatest concern of the British electorate while, in fact, just doing its bit to destroy a small firm and continue the relentless demoralisation of the law-abiding.
On the one hand they encourage migrants to come to Calais, knowing that eventually they’ll find a path to the UK where they will be looked after and never be told to leave. On the other, they throw the book at the over-taxed and over-regulated citizens caught in the crossfire. It’s opportunistic cowardice – and nothing less.
Here’s a thought experiment: since 2018 almost 120,000 people have arrived by dinghy. If that’s a £11,000 fine per person – like the haulage company got – then that’s a total fine of over £1.3billion.
And who’s going to pay that? The staff of the Border Force? The Home Secretary? The Prime Minister probably has pockets deep enough to pay it, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Not even the non-doms can chip-in anymore as we’re getting rid of them too.
More fundamentally, the government doesn’t want to stop the flow of migration anyway: just look at the how the Conservative’s pledge of migration in the ‘tens of thousands’ is turning out.
Extra people means a bigger economy. Not in per capita terms, and, yes, it means downward pressure on people’s wages. Politicians like to talk about ‘growing the size of the pie’ when they try to make economics relatable to us nincompoops without PPE degrees. Yet instead of making the pie even more delicious and made with ever higher quality ingredients – think a golden Swiss pie or glitzy Singaporean one for that matter – they dilute its cream and sugar with water and grit. It’s more a Somalian mud cake by that point.
Never mind. For each person brought in the economy notionally grows one zillionth of a percent. As such the only answer is to make the UK’s population the same size as China and India combined: we’d live in some kind of fourth-world hellscape but just imagine how enriched we’d be. Naturally Britain would, at that point, cease to exist in any meaningful way other than a geographic designation.
No doubt that’s their plan all along.
And to imagine – all under a notionally ‘conservative’ government!
Oh dear…
Lastly, compare the treatment of the haulage firm to actual criminals in our midst who get away with their crimes Scott-free. The woman who spray-painted and slashed away at Balfour’s portrait – a case of criminal damage if ever there was one – remains at liberty. She is free to go on boasting of her deeds on various media platforms.
In that way she is like the dummies who tore down and hurled Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour, or the Just Stop Oil lot let off by a jury despite the indisputable evidence against them.
It’s a two-tiered justice system, with people held at different standards depending on in whose name they commit their crimes. Just like how in the 1920s and 1930s German authorities turned a blind eye to the violent excesses of the Brownshirts.
Today, we all know who is able to get away with murder on the streets.
Such facts are simply another manifestation of the misgovernance of our country and its gradual – but inarguably relentless – decline.
You make valid points. Imagine fining the RNLI every time they bring an "undocumented migrant" into the country
An excellent article.
I remember more than two decades ago driving to the Channel tunnel on the French side, accosted by migrants. Ahead and behind were trucks - openly attacked. The dumb law - then EU28 - put the onus on truck drivers, not the crims breaking and entering.
Another aspect. Check out tent.org. Active since 2017, this is an enabling agent for migrant jobs. Fair enough one might say, but that includes illegal as well as legal immigration. Just like UNRWA, tent.org is yet another NGO paid for by many countries including the UK with tax cash. In other words, immigration - illegal or otherwise - is paid for......by us. Every single government involved knows this, yet do not tell their citizens.