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.

Aside, the UK has had the highest % of flights cancelled of any other country in Europe, doubtless due to the having the highest number of Covid cases & a Govt of utter incompetents :)

Not to mention staff shortages exacerbated by... what was it again? Ah yes, Brexit.

@Rosehugger

Not helped by France now being the ONLY country now checking Covid passes- for people vaccinated seven months ago. Muppets. They fucked over my holiday last year by pissing about with the Covid rules last minute, and by the time the holiday came round they changed them again, and we could have actually gone - but sadly the airline and accommodation had already cancelled due to the earlier rule change.

Their Border, their rules....(something about control)...

TBH I do wish some Brits would stop thinking this is/was all about them and that they were somehow being singled out.. there was plenty of being "fucked over" going on world wide during the epidemic.

A lot of people this side of the channel got their travel arrangements stuffed last Summer/Autumn by the UK when they were seemingly forever pissing around with their ever changing Covid rules and for a time not accepting EU issued vaccination certificates, whereas if I recall it correctly the French were accepting NHS certificates.

And yet France has a higher GDP per hour worked than the UK🤷‍♀️ (source House of Commons Research briefing published 2/7/22)

Not helped by France now being the ONLY country now checking Covid passes- for people vaccinated seven months ago. Muppets

When i crossed the channel 2 weeks ago, this was done by the ferry company employees whilst they checked tickets, it added nothing to any delay, French Border force didn't want to see them.

But at the end of the day, this once again proves that countries in the EU are free to do as they wish.

The Port of Dover CEO blaming the French saying "We have been planning this for months." I wonder if their plans involved speaking to the French authorities at all or just saying "Well, we're fine on our side."

I don't feel singled out by the way, I'm just fed up of the way things are going at the moment and lashing out. Whatever we do personally, there's always someone else fucking things up beyond our control.

Hilarious to see people who were irresponsible enough to book a holiday abroad during a pandemic blaming France for trying to protect its citizens

And that went so well as they ended up with higher rates than the UK in the autumn. I don't mind rules if they make sense, but it was all so random and arbitrary.

Because before Brexit people had a cursory passport check, which took seconds. Now they have a full check and a stamp for each passport. Minutes.

Multiple minutes by thousands of passengers and you get a Brexit caused queue.

This was predicted years ago and why people like me voted against. F

@JaniieJones I had the misfortune to need extensive car repairs in France, the garage dropped what they were doing, cracked on with the job and had it all done inside a day and a half, including getting the part, this despite a 2 hour lunch break...

Despite having the chance to rip me off price wise, they didn't...it was actually cheaper than what my regular UK garage would have charged, i wonder how the average british garage would treat a french couple in a similar position?

..and no, it wasn't a french car lol.

@countrygirl99

And yet France has a higher GDP per hour worked than the UK🤷‍♀️ (source House of Commons Research briefing published 2/7/22)

General impression we've got over the years is breaks/lunchtime are sacrosanct but when they are on the clock they do put in a decent effort..

Also in a lot of jobs there seems to be more use of mechanical assistance/automation where appropriate than you perhaps see in the UK ...people are expensive to employ here so anything to improve an individual's productivity, but it comes a price in the form of the labour market.

I live in the immediate area, it’s horrendous.

“Well I voted for Christmas because I like tinsel and thought I’d get lots of presents” said a turkey. “I never voted to be slaughtered and served up with cranberry sauce,” he added, just before he was taken off to be slaughtered and served up with cranberry sauce.
🙄

@CraggyIslandTouristBoard 😂😂😂😂

'When i crossed the channel 2 weeks ago, this was done by the ferry company employees whilst they checked tickets, it added nothing to any delay, French Border force didn't want to see them.'

Were you queuing 12 hours? You must've been as the delays were absolutely not due to staffing issues today nor the start of school holidays. It must be like it everyday if it's Brexit's Fault, and yet today is the first day its been reported!

Not helped by France now being the ONLY country now checking Covid passes- for people vaccinated seven months ago. Muppets.

@Rosehugger

To be considered fully vaccinated in France you must have had a booster within 270 days of your second vaccine. If not, you need a test.

Newsflash - France has different rules from the UK.

When we wanted to visit the UK we had to comply with their rules (and we did).

What makes you so special that you you should be exempt from the requirements?

"We're British, innit!"

And most of those who did vote to leave the EU didn't really understand what they were doing, to be quite frank. They were sold a load of utter tripe by a self-serving Govt. with no moral compass and they were ill-educated to boot

How do you know why most people who voted for brexit did so? I’m sick of this arrogant, patronising assumption that everyone who voted for it is a simpleton who hangs on every word uttered by the government and has been misled.

Having the funds and the privilege to travel abroad is something that the middle classes will retain.
The need to work abroad because of poor conditions in one's home country is something experienced by the working class much more, and this has now been taken away from working class Brits. Same with Erasmus - the middle class students can afford the visas needed for a year abroad - it's the working class students who are losing those opportunities.
What I kept hearing around the time of the referendum was that Brexit would hit the working classes worse and first - there was a lot of truth in that.

@Parpophone You don't need a booster but if you've had two jabs only the last one has to have been within nine months of travel. DH and I have had three (so timing is irrelevant, teenage DDs have had two). Their second jabs were at the same time as our third, in December/January. I bought antigen tests just in case though when I wasn't sure what the rules were going to be.

www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/france/entry-requirements

No, Plymouth Roscoff doesn't 10s of '000s of passengers everyday.

However, i ve used this route numerous times and tbh, it was probably quicker than normal because those bastard frenchies put in extra booths in the port of Roscoff.. utter w@nkers AND it was market day in Roscoff, they had no excuse not to make us all wait.

Delays in Plymouth on our return were worse, multiple lanes into 2, back into 4 booths.. no room for more, its just how it is, nothing anyone can do about it.

To be fair staffy there were a lot of interviews with Brexit voters at the time which demonstrated this - I remember in particular one with a guy outside a leisure centre in I think Ebbw Vale, he was standing next to a sign saying it had been built with EU funding. He said he was voting leave because of all the immigrants. Interviewer asked if there were many immigrants in Ebbw Vale, he said no. Interviewer asked if the EU had benefited the community in any way, he said no.

Plus we absolutely were sold a load of tripe about Turkey joining with lies about the veto, everything being easier and cheaper, who cares about experts, concerns about N Ireland dismissed as project fear, let's give £350M per week to the NHS etc etc.

Poor people in britain: "we want out of the EU, its serving the rich for the benefit of Europe's richest countries. We would rather have a tough few years extricating ourselves from the EU than have all power held remotely by an unelected politician for a mega-country that cares little about our interests"

Mumsnetters: "but...my holidays! You are so selfish and thick!"

Ah, stack, the good old days. Lorries queuing literally everywhere, every main road through town, every verge and layby, every single road blocked for miles around by lorry drivers thinking they could beat the queue and getting stuck and blocking local people from getting anywhere.

Local people were calling for a solution to stack for literally years before brexit. Brock is what they came up with. It's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than stack. If they try and jump the queue they get sent to the back. They're not allowed to drive down certain roads. Not allowed in the right hand lane on the dual carriageway into the port. Basically - order has been restored.

Other than filling Kent with lorry parks, which wasnt popular, there's not a lot else they can do.

If brock was done because of brexit well then that's one positive to come out of brexit!

Just as a matter of interest, what control has Brexit taken back, to date? It seems we still have no control over immigration, no control over inflation, far less say in how other countries behave towards us, we have made exporting and importing into the UK more unreliable, expensive, time consuming and burdensome, we have alienated our closest allies and emboldened our enemies, we have caused no end of predictable problems for Northern Ireland, we have further damaged our internal relationship with Scotland, we have lowered everyone’s quality of life in the UK to a greater extent than covid alone would have done, we now owe the EU a colossal sum of money in the “divorce settlement,” and we have reduced our ability to move elsewhere in the world to improve our situation. I’m scratching my head and wondering what benefits we should ever expect to see from this?

My mother voted for it because there are too many black people in London. She's never even been to sodding London. But she happily threw her daughter and grandchildren living in the EU under the brexit bus because of it.

And the fact that Angela Merkel is one of those lizard people. I'm not kidding.

Yep, still waiting for the sunny Brexit uplands. And where is that NHS money?