A friend of mine was getting married last weekend in England, so I had to pay it a visit. I am amazed at how illegal it ended up being.
The opportunity arose to go there on a small sail boat crossing the English channel, so I of course opted for that as my way of entry. That caused a pretty major problem in its own right, but more about that later. First I had to get the fucking £20 ETA – Electronic Travel Authorisation.
To get the ETA you need to fill in this pretty basic but overall dumb online form. It went pretty smoothly until the end, where I'm confronted the dumbest most open ended question imaginable: "Do you have extremist opinions". Yes/no. No definitions, no nothing.
Of course I'll say no. By my own standards I do not hold extreme opinions - I consider my opinions to be perfectly sane. You'd honestly be somewhat extreme to disagree with me. I do however also know that if I told an English policeman that I support Palestine Action they would throw me in jail. So I guess I am forced to start off the entire trip by, in the eyes of the government, lying about not being an extremist in order to enter. So far so good.
Then comes the actual sail across the channel. Smooth sailing, except for the near misses with French fishing boats fishing more or less legally with or without radios on in the middle of the night. Arriving in England we seek to announce our arrival, only to learn that they have created some fucking beta website in which you need to announce your journey ahead of time. It is not advertised anywhere, and it is impossible to announce one's arrival into the UK retroactively or in any other way than through this form in advance.
Basically the only way to legally register our arrival at this point was to sail back to France, fill in the form, and then come sailing back to England again with our newly filled forms. We of course sailed with a yellow flag and all that jazz, but none of that seems to matter without having filled in this new and completely unknown web form. So I of course said fuck it and skipped border controls.
There is a customs house in the port where we arrived, but after many years of irrelevance it has been turned into a (rather nice) pub.
For good measure I spent most of the days leading up to the wedding illegally wild camping.
I'm not sure I'll be coming back soon.
When you read guidelines about sailing to the UK anywhere this website is never linked, at least not in any source I could find, as it is too new and nobody seems aware of it yet. The harbour in which we arrived were also not aware of it before making several phone calls. And to find it again I had to try several different search terms while adding "site:gov.uk" into the search engine. All the search results are just about illegal immigration. I'm not sure exactly how they expect people to gain awareness of it.
If you press the big green button saying "start now" you'll come to the website of the form, which states clearly on top: "Beta This is a new service – your feedback will help us to improve it", which is why I describe it as a beta website. Because it literally is.
If you proceed to try to fill in the forms they ask weird questions like if you'll be paying VAT on your boat, why exactly you won't be paying VAT on your boat (giving a range of options, none of which made any sense coming in on a tiny boat with a crew of five), and if you have a tax free store on board. The whole site is absurd to the point where even if I found it before leaving, I would have thought it was made for someone completely different than random tiny boats crossing the channel.
Sorry but I don’t believe you.
A quick web search for relevant keywords (‘uk legally registering entry immigration border small boat’) immediately brings up not only the supposedly impossible to find link, but also a guide from the Royal Yachting Association that tells you that you need to register in advance and links directly to the form.
It's easier to find the website retroactively when you already have it and you know which vocabulary it uses. Use the wrong word and you only get a million articles about illegal immigration.
Furthermore, we had no way of knowing a website like this now existed, as in the past you would sail in (with yellow flag + courtesy, obviously) and then register. We had no reason to believe anything had changed on that front and therefore no reason to conduct a whole lot of research into it. Had we known there was a website we would of course have managed to find it.
If I wanted to enter illegally I would obviously have saved my £20 and not gotten an ETA, as I ended up not needing it anyway.
On behalf of the saner members of the UK, sorry about Murray. Sadly, we're overrun with pedants of this nature which is largely why we've become such a backward set of mouth breathers since 2016-ish.
All good - the UK is a fascinating mix between the best and the worst. I guess that's almost part of the charm at this point.
Sorry but I don’t believe you. I just searched your exact terms on my search engine of preference and I still haven’t found said beta website.
Furthermore, and most importantly, if you know exactly what to look for, eventually you will. In the same vein, if I had typed the URL to said website on my browser’s address bar, guess what… I would have found it without even have to search for it! 🤯 Even easier, by your logic.
Yeah, in order to find the site again for the purpose of this post I had to switch search engines as well.
Also doesn't make it easier that a minority of the crew spoke good English. Most are only comfortable in French. I imagine most Brits would struggle if they had to dig up obscure government websites in French that they had no idea even existed.
If one has travelled outside of ones country, surely there is no doubt that one can nod agreeingly to the BS of navigating the legal system of another language, culture, where you don't follow the news-stream
Of course, I wouldn't expect the UK government to produce information in French. However there is a traditional way of doing things: You fly a yellow flag, and you report to a port of entry upon arrival.
If this is changed without being very publisized, it is really stupid not to at least have a transition period where people can still register their entry into the country after their arrival, until the new rules are well established and the website that is supposed to be serving them is out of beta testing.
If you want to sail from the UK to France, you just raise the appropriate flags, and then you announce your arrival when you get there. Ask in the harbour and they'll let you know where to go. So you wouldn't have to navigate their legal system, you just need to know how to use flags.
That said, I had no problem being in the UK illegally, so no real complaints from my part. It just seems like an attempt at tightening control of the borders that ended up having the exact opposite effect.
While I loved your story and agree with all your points, I should note there's a big difference between having an immigration website in English and having one in pretty much any other language.
Yeah, but it needs to be announced somehow. We all filled in ETAs, because this is something people have heard about. It would make sense to inform of something like this at the end of the ETA registration. Instead, the fact that I had a travel authorization lead me to believe that I was, in fact, authorized to travel to the UK.
Oh yes, like I said I agree entirely with your post