The real message from Ceuta: we need to build Fortress Britain before it's too late.

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Abu Adem Muhammed/Anadolu/Getty Images

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If you want to know where Britain’s migration crisis might be heading then stop looking at Dover and the Channel and start looking at Ceuta.

Over the past few days, this small Spanish city on the North African coast has become the latest symbol of Europe’s ongoing migration crisis.

In truly harrowing scenes, 60,000 illegal migrants overwhelmed authorities, engaged in violence, and exposed just how quickly national borders can unravel.

Predictably, much of Europe’s political and media establishment then spent the following days not addressing the issue but trying to gaslight its own people.

“Ceuta isn’t really Spain,” they say, because it happens to be located away from the mainland.

But as commentator Konstantin Kisin rightly points out, this is a ridiculous argument. Pearl Harbor sits in the Pacific Ocean, but nobody argues it is not American territory. If Spain cannot control its sovereign territory, then Spain has simply lost control of its borders.

Others tell us not to worry because many of those who entered Spain have now been sent back to Morocco. Nothing to see here.

But again, they miss the point entirely. That some migrants have returned home does not change the fact that a Western state completely and publicly lost control of its own territory in only a few hours.

Then comes the final excuse: this was neighbouring Morocco’s fault.

There’s no doubt that Morocco fuelled the crisis. As Spanish author and security expert Rafael Bardaji points out in an insightful essay in The Spectator, Morocco has long used migration to coerce and try and influence Spain, turning the taps off and on depending on what it wants from its neighbour.

This is why, as Bardaji notes, we should no longer immigration as just a humanitarian or economic challenge. Because today it has morphed into an instrument of geopolitical competition — used by the likes of Morocco, Turkey, Libya, Belarus, and other hostile states to try and bully the West.

This is right. But it still doesn’t paint the full picture. Because ask yourself: what does it really prove? That European nations have now become so weak, their borders so soft, their leaders so distracted, that they can be so easily manipulated in this way by hostile states and organised criminals? I don’t find that very comforting. Do you?

The real lesson from Ceuta, I think, lies elsewhere. What I see unfolding in recent days is not just about Spain. It’s about Europe. Because for more than a decade, Europe’s politicians have been failing to resolve an ongoing and intensifying migration crisis at the border that is not only undermining the sovereignty of European Union member states but will increasingly impact Britain, too.

Politicians will tell you they’ve “regained control” since the initial peak of the crisis, in 2015. But the numbers say otherwise.

In the decade since, according to official data from Eurostat, the European Union received nearly 9 million first-time asylum applications — with most asylum-seekers now coming from Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey.

While the numbers have fallen a little since the peak, step back and look at the bigger picture, as shown below, and the long-term trend becomes clear. Europe is not resolving this crisis; far from it. The numbers are steadily rising over time.

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Meanwhile, illegal migration continues at speed. Increasingly organised criminal people-smuggling gangs have flourished, and Europe’s borders are being exploited.

Since 2015 alone, the EU border agency Frontex says it has detected more than 3 million illegal — sorry, “irregular” — border crossings at the EU’s external borders. But the real number, as we know, will be much, much higher.

At the same time, EU member states have become openly divided on the issue, failing to find a consensus between socially liberal leaders who now view mass immigration as an unalloyed good, and conservative leaders who can now see what’s coming unless they take urgent, radical action.

Many of the latter, rightly, point to what lurks on the horizon. Such as the fact, shared earlier this year by the respected Gallup agency, that some 33 per cent of all adults in sub-Saharan Africa and 25 per cent in the Middle East, would like to move to another country if given the opportunity.

That’s equivalent to more than 300 million people who say, if they had the chance to move, like the chance that emerged in Ceuta in recent days, they would grab it with both hands.

Of course, most never will and we should be careful about confusing desire with intent. But what these findings point towards is the sheer scale of the potential migration pressures that are building up around Europe — and by extension Britain.

The established political class will scoff at this. But then had you suggested twenty or thirty years ago that Britain’s political class and entire armed forces would soon find themselves powerless to stop an invasion of more than 200,000 illegal migrants on rubber dinghies then I have no doubt they would have scoffed at that, too.

While hostile states are already exploiting these weaknesses — including Iran sending operatives into Britain on the small boats — so too are the criminal gangs.

Already, according to The Daily Telegraph, people-smuggling gangs are slashing the price of small boat crossings to Britain in an effort to exploit the crisis in Ceuta.

While EU politicians convene pointless video summits or, in the case of Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, go on holiday during a major migration crisis, criminals are responding in real time. This week, in the shadow of Ceuta, Channel crossings to Britain were being offered for as little as £513.

What I’m suggesting is that instead of dismissing Ceuta as some kind of crisis in the distance, Britain should instead see it for what it is: a major warning of what’s to come. Because the small boats crossing the Channel are just the start.

If we really want to avoid scenes like those in Ceuta, and the failures that are visibly humiliating EU member states like Spain, then we urgently need to start constructing something new: Fortress Britain.

I’m not talking about a country that is completely closed off from the world. I’m not talking about one that does not accept a small number of legitimate refugees every now and then, such as those who we helped from Ukraine or Hong Kong.

I’m talking a country that is genuinely sovereign, where parliament and the British people — not foreign courts, international conventions, activist lawyers, and NGOs — determine who enters the country, who stays, and who leaves.

Fortress Britain means getting ahead of what is about to hit Europe in the coming years and decades. It means getting the appropriate legal architecture in place.

It means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights — the ECHR — so that we can genuinely control our own borders, our own laws, and our own country.

It means repealing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which enshrines the ECHR into domestic UK law and prevents us from detaining and deporting those who do arrive illegally, and the more than 12,000 foreign national criminals in our prisons.

And it means reconsidering our obligations under things like the Refugee Convention which were built in a completely different era and are no longer fit for purpose.

Fortress Britain, in a nutshell, means removing any and every legal framework that prevents democratically elected governments and, in turn, the British people from securing their own borders.

I say this because we are no longer just engaged in a rational debate about immigration policy, nor only facing threats from beyond our borders. What makes all this especially pressing is a final factor that lies within Western nations.

Across Europe, we have entered a much deeper debate about whether we actually want to remain self-governing nations, whether we want to defend Western civilisation, and whether we want to preserve this place we recognise and call home.

This debate is not simply being stoked by ‘far right culture warriors’. It has been forced on us by a radicalised political establishment within our own nations which, on both the centre-left and centre-right, has come to view the display of empathy to people from outside our nations as the supreme virtue in politics — no matter the consequences.

From Spain’s socialist government granting an amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, to Andy Burnham’s Labour Party refusing to stop the boats while opening even more ‘safe and legal routes’, from one-nation liberals on the centre-right who sold out their nations to serve the interests of big business, to European Union globalist bureaucrats who have become dangerously disconnected from national citizens, for too long Europe has been in the hands of a political class that has come to view mass immigration as an objective in its own right.

To return to Rafael Bardaji, who aptly summarises this political shift:

“Across much of the political spectrum — and particularly on the contemporary Left — immigration is no longer treated merely as a phenomenon to be managed. It has become a political virtue in itself. Openness is assumed to be morally superior to restraint. Borders are often regarded less as expressions of democratic sovereignty than as obstacles to universal rights. The distinction between legal and illegal migration is progressively blurred beneath a broader language of inclusion”.

Increasingly, leaders are abandoning the responsibility they have to their own people in the name of showing empathy to others.

They have forgotten that the first duty of the state is not to signal virtue to the rest of the world but prioritise its own citizens, without whom the state will collapse.

What we are left with — what Ceuta and its aftermath reveal — is a glaring contradiction that now sits at the very heart of Britain and Europe.

A political class that claims to be working to defend our borders but whose members often no longer believe in borders at all.

A political class that assures us our concerns about borders are legitimate but which is now filled with activists who view neither borders nor nations as legitimate.

A political class that says welcoming illegal or “irregular” migration is in the interests of the wider national community while ignoring the fact that for many people in politics this is about creating new voters on only one side of the political divide.

And a political class that now defines itself foremost by how much empathy it shows to outsiders, even if this means showing little or no empathy to its own people.

The choice before us, then, is clear. We can either continue down this path of suicidal empathy — led by a political class that has become so obsessed with showing empathy to the rest of the world that it would allow the collapse of our borders along the way.

Or, instead, we can choose to save our nations by openly rejecting this extreme ideology and replacing the members of this political class before they replace us.

This means electing politicians and parties that reject suicidal empathy and will do whatever is necessary to restore full control of our borders, our laws, and nations so we can prioritise the safety, security, and survival of our own people.

But let me reiterate: you cannot have both these things. You can either have more suicidal empathy, more loss of control, and more scenes like those in Ceuta. Or you can replace the political class and save your country. The choice is yours.

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