Port of Dover Critical Incident

[AndreaC74]

Why are we blaming the french? they didn't vote for Brexit and aren't responsible for increasing/paying for extra capacity at the French border posts on UK soil.

Stamping passports is what happens to 3rd country nationals & that adds time, a lot of it, when dealing with 100s of '000s of passengers, plus having recently been to France, i ve seen UK people arguing with French officials because they don't want their passports stamped!

The UK seems incapable of organising anything at the moment, the numbers travelling across the channel is entirely predictable and delays we are now seeing were talked about pre 2016, i remember seeing the graphs on how long the queues would be for just a few seconds of delay for each passenger.... all Project Fear.

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER

France is notorious for causing - or contributing to - delays or chaos during holiday periods. Air traffic controllers, railways, it’s the usual sort of thing we’ve heard about - or experienced personally - for years

Does that have any relevance to what is going on today at Dover?

(Funny really, the reality is there have been very few major strikes here recently)

@Fladdermus on the way back via Calais you go through the French exit checks (another stamp) and the UK checks which are precisely the same as the outbound UK check.

It has every relevance @notimagain because people are blaming it on Brexit
Their behaviour is not a recent thing

the fact that people that have chosen to live outside of the uk didn't get a vote does not invalidate the result. Thank goodness they didn't. They have no skin in the game

are you fucking joking? they had the most of anyone to lose. And FWIW I personally know a whole bunch of British people living abroad for less than 15 years who should have been eligible to vote but whose voting material arrived too late for them to exercise their democratic right.

@fladdermus the UK check involves the same passport checks. Because there is no separation of nationalities at Calais you don't have British only lanes.

I don't understand why 52% of the population don't just stay in the UK to boost their own economy instead of whinging about delays in the EU they didn't want to be a part of anyway.

No one cares about brexit - it’s been and gone!

Really? We care here. DD (19) has the offer of her dream job starting in October ... only problem, it's in Belgium. So now she has to jump through all manner of bureaucratic hoops and pay out hundreds of pounds in various admin fees, with no guarantee that she'll get that coveted Schengen visa at the end of it all. All stuff that would have been completely unnecessary just a few years ago. So Brexit isn't something that has simply "been and gone" - it's repercussions are already being cruelly felt by the generation that was too young to have a say when the vote "came and went" in 2016!

'France is notorious for causing - or contributing to - delays or chaos during holiday periods. Air traffic controllers, railways, it’s the usual sort of thing we’ve heard about - or experienced personally - for years.'

Exactly. French traffic controllers always causing mayhem. But that'll be the flag waving, sun reading, gammony brexiteers fault too!

We should take bets on this weekends calamity..can't be the weather that's back to normal after a 2 day heatwave, can't be covid surely. I'm thinking there'll be chaos in airports caused by holiday companies overbooking obviously, but somehow it'll be Boris Johnsons fault for Getting Brexit Done.

I thought everyone was too poor to go abroad on holiday? Feel sorry for the locals though just trying to go about their day to day business- what a shit show.

Ah OK, I think I now see the way some people are thinking….

Having been stuck in slow Border queues into France from UK many a time I can certainly testify that getting through French Border was sometimes a slow job even well before Brexit…the extra checks due UK being a third nation won’t help.

Then again going through the Border process entering many countries can be slow and tedious unless there is some favored status/reduced paperwork or visa requirement for some passport holders.

Another case of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Precisely the same? So a UK border official will ask a British citizen their reason for travelling and want to see their visa if they say 'got to get back for work' and refuse them entry when they see there is no visa? They'll be asked to provide extra documentation if their purpose for travelling to the UK is anything other than a holiday? Righty oh!

I'd say there's a fair overlap of people who can afford to go abroad with those who voted to stay in the EU purely because it benefits their and their families lifestyles and ends. For example jemima wants to have free movement to work in europe.

Don't be so ridiculously fatuous. Johnson and his ilk are busy trying to tear up the agreement on which it was based. Truss is set to carry on with that, if she is PM. It hasn't gone at all.
And a very great many people do care.

So it was the French? With understaffed booths?

The UK was just starting the 'booster' stage of the pandemic and travel wasn't straightforward or easy for many due to the changing (and expensive) testing requirements at the time, so travel numbers were still well down.

Summer holidays this year, post all the jabs, looks very different number-wise, with waaaay less staff to deal with it plus the Brexit issues.

The French are supposed to staff the border on their side. They haven't. Hence the delays. Local roads are completely and totally gridlocked and residents of Dover and the surrounding towns can't get to work etc. It's been compounded by a serious accident on the m20.

But queues at dover are nothing new. It happens every year. Every single year for 20+ years. Before brexit. Ever heard of operation stack?

'I'd say' is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting here. You mean this is the scenario in which you believe because it suits you to believe that freedom of movement is for the middle-class. Is that why you chose the name Jemima?
I guess you never saw Auf Wiedersehen Pet or recognised where it came from . . .

*I travelled through Dover port at October half term last year (so post-Brexit and with lots of covid paperwork) and it was absolutely fine.

So I don't understand why it's such an utter shambles now. Have there been any significant changes to the rules since then?*

No. It happens every summer. It's the start of the holidays and everyone is trying to get across the channel and this time French didn't staff the booths. This is not new, or particularly unusual.

"No one cares about brexit - it’s been and gone!"

We should care. It's cost 50 billion Euros.

"NEW

UK’s post Brexit EU “divorce bill” reaches €50 billion, confirms Treasury... up from €40-45bn..."

twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1550156669769900033?s=21&t=pczQBPlbdYkBi2wbwzybqw

A good day to bury bad news.

I don't think it's down to Brexit really. I travelled on the Eurostar recently and the queues were no different to pre Brexit. Checking passports takes a while as it has done ever since the twin towers, but stamping them only adds about 10 seconds to the process . It sounds like it's just the sheer number of people and not enough staff, as is the case with almost everything post Covid!

Surely this must also be one of @jgw1's parodies

You mean why not pay for grossly overpriced, underwhelming accommodation near overpriced take away and restaurant options in grossly overcrowded tourist areas while slogging through roads unfit for purpose using overpriced fuel to get there?

Throw in unpredictable rubbish weather for late July and August, and hey, I don't know, it's shocking that more people don't enjoy that. 🙄

20years? But but I don't understand are you saying this is normal and not 'Brexit's Fault'? The poor op must feel very embarrassed.

Oh course it's brexit. As many people have pointed out, french staffing levels have been like this before, causing delays. Which was annoying. However, the reason those same staffing levels now cause a critical incident, is emphatically, due to brexit. That's the difference. Because border controls take longer when you vote to have border controls, which is what some people in this country did (not even the majority of citizens, just a slim majority of the people who voted, many of whom have since been brave enough to admit they would make a different decision now)

There is clearly a brexit element and I do think the French are likely being a bit unhelpful. When we travelled via Eurostar it was French border control that was causing major
problems and to be honest felt quite unsafe. I’ve travelled frequently but it took a noticeably long time to process our passports on exiting the county. It felt like they were being deliberately as slow as possible to just increase the general shitness of the situation.