- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
- Location
- IOM
The Schengen area is where the countries that are part of it abolished their internal border controls and allows free movement whilst you are within the Schengen zone.
Considering that the UK was never in the Schengen zone, the border between the UK and France was always an external border just as it is now since Brexit.
The French had a similar duty to protect that same border then as they have now. Yet prior to Brexit they were slap dash with it, now they're not.
Tells you exactly what the French are playing at.
When we travelled/travel many a times between Stansted and Eindhoven, our passports were thoroughly checked, before and after Brexit. No difference in time spent at the Dutch border control.
I honestly don't see the point of you fixating on this interlog, it's like you've decided that the answer has to be 'It's nothing to do with Brexit' and are reverse-engineering to a question that will deliver that answer.
I mean, I actually agree with you on most of this:
1) The French should have been implementing Schengen border checks at Dover before Brexit, but when it got very busy they didn't, in order to keep things flowing.
2) The new border checks haven't made much difference at airports, we're talking maybe 10 extra seconds to get a passport stamped.
But you can't take those two facts and then assert that the situation we saw at Dover over the weekend is 'nothing to do with Brexit', at this point it's completely irrelevant what the French were doing two years ago or five years ago or ten years ago, or whether the moon is made out of cheese or not. They didn't do the Schengen border checks at all times, everyone seemed to know about it, and no one seemed to care. (Witness Kay Burley telling James Cleverly 'Oh come on you know they just used to wave us through when it was busy' or Rachel Johnson on LBC refer to it as 'The Schengen Wave', i.e. it was so common she even had a name for it.)
Also it's not true to say that the Schengen border is the same as an EU frontier border, for starters it didn't require passports to be stamped, and also they didn't need to check that you were going over the 90 days in any 180 days, they literally just had to verify it was a valid passport, whereas now there's an extra check AND they need to stamp it - and when you've got cars full of people going through Dover, that's a slower process. (Quite different to an airport queue when everyone's on foot.)
When you say things like 'Tells you exactly what the French are playing at' you're just playing the victim card, the French don't care, they don't give a shit, Brexit has happened, the UK left the EU, it's all done, we're just another third country now, they don't care enough to try and 'punish' us - (plus the prevailing opinion in the EU is that we've done a very good job of punishing ourselves) - it's just a load of border control staff doing their shifts on the job. (And if they are able to 'punish' us, then taking back control didn't work very well, did it?) As the French MP guy said over the weekend, 'This is just a consequence of Brexit, we didn't ask the UK to leave the EU'.
Seriously interlog, how can you expect to leave the EU, the Single Market and the Customs Union, and actually have Priti Evil Patel PUBLICLY BOAST about ending freedom of movement, and then expect there to be absolutely no change at the UK's borders? Whose freedom of movement did you think was being ended, everyone except the British?
You're arguing about something that is, at this point, an utter and complete irrelevance, the French are implementing the rules as they exist now, the rules are different to those that existed before Brexit, we chose Brexit and we chose the type of Brexit we wanted, we chose the rules that would apply to us, cause and effect.
Here's Rachel Johnson talking about 'The Airy Schengen Wave' - you're acting like it's some sort of terrible outrage that has only just come to light, when as far as I can tell it was very well known it was something that happened on a regular basis at Dover, and no one gave a shit.