One of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls. So I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while no-one was looking this summer.
Even though I also back a policy of open borders, I never once imagined that the Coalition would implement the idea quite so literally.
Much media coverage in recent days has focused on Theresa May’s hush-hush policy initiative of relaxing passport checks on arrivals from the EU, and whether or not UKBA boss Brodie Clark was over-zealous in their implementation.
Sadly, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper have sought to extract political capital from all this by playing to the xenophobic gallery. The subtext of some of their remarks are not exactly pretty. Is the 100% increase in firearms seizures over the period really entirely down to bloody foreigners, Ed?
I suspect those ghastly continentals are laughing their clogs off on this one. Have none of the politicians involved ever heard of the Schengen Area? Maybe they should google it up.
Almost every country in Europe outside of the Balkans now forms part of what is a vast single state for travel purposes, with 400m people needing no documentation whatsoever to move between them.
So it was that on one holiday a few years back, I drove over a bridge. One side was Portugal, the other Spain. Nobody stopped me half way across.
Frankly, Britain could quite easily have scrapped the majority of passport checks about three decades ago. Permanently. It really is high time that the UK signed up to Schengen.
Meanwhile, the madness of the EU bailout of the bond holders and speculators marches on at the expense of the ordinary people of Europe.