Over the weekend, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf travelled to Ceuta. In the spirit of ‘every crisis is an opportunity’, he wasted no time posting a video sprinkled with claims I can’t verify.
“We saw some of them maraud through town overnight,” he said, speaking of the roughly 60,000 mostly men who swam five kilometres around the Moroccan coast to reach the city on Thursday. “We saw them loot shops, we saw them terrorise locals,” he continued.
There have been no credible reports of looting or marauding. Vehicles were torched, but in Findeq, a border town in Morocco. Some Ceuta locals may have been understandably terrified when the city’s population suddenly increased by 75%, but, again, there’s no evidence anyone was terrorised. There were, however, fatalities. At least 72 Moroccans have been reported killed in their attempt to cross the border, crushed or drowned in the rush.
No one appears to have crossed the roughly 20km of sea from Ceuta to Spain. Ceuta is not part of the EU’s Schengen agreement, meaning there is no control-free crossing between it and Spain. Yet Italy has imposed border controls anyway. With new checks on airport and port arrivals of third country nationals from Spain, it’s a PR move: if someone got to Spain illegally, why not just take a bus through France?
Fine. Italy is governed by the rightwing Giorgia Meloni. But centrist governments are seizing the moment too. The leaders of 22 of the EU’s 27 countries have called for urgent talks over the Ceuta border breach (they’ll happen tomorrow). And in a letter to the bloc’s leaders, they highlighted a Spanish domestic policy as a “pull factor”, demanding it be eliminated.
That’s no doubt an irritation to centrist governments who’ve jigged along to the right’s fear-mongering tunes, now caught in a doomloop of economic stagnation and public fever dreams around migration. And there’s more egg-on-the-face likely to come, as evidence mounts that Spain might not have been subject to an organic run on the border, but rather an act of political warfare on an EU member.
Who needs enemies when you’ve got allies, eh?