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.
I'm guessing that - from my experience of the CasualUK community when I used to be on Reddit - they have similar rules of ABSOLUTELY no politics. Even something that might lead to politics.
It's to keep the place extremely light hearted and not turn into a depressing news/politics community.
So immigration/border policy and Palestine Action would both be out.
Even jokes about small boats would likely be too close.
It is a fun story, glad you shared it. And good on the mods recommending an alternative community