British holidaymakers heading to France have been warned of delays from Nov 1, when border checks will be reintroduced to combat illegal migration and terrorism.
France has joined six other countries in reintroducing Schengen Area border checks, which will be carried out on travellers entering by road or train from neighbouring countries.
They are being introduced for an initial six-month period on its borders with Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy.
They will be spot checks rather than being carried out on every person, but travel experts said they would add to delays at the border.
It’s not going to make any difference in entering from Britain of course. We never were in Schegne, passports always were checked. But that plan of borderless trvel is having its problems all the same, eh?
I was always getting pulled by the rozzers on the German Austrian border. Couple of times by both lots on the same trip.
Mind you they were convinced that I was smuggling cigarettes, so innocent and carefree were the days back then….
Instead you were smuggling cars, one at a time? 🙂
Franco British controls have been governed under the Le Touquet agreement for twenty years and nothing is changing. If travelling on from France then, yes, there will be controls because the ridiculous Schenghen agreement is giving way to practical reality.
Next stop, the € !
The death of Schengen is huge, this is the EU starting to curl up around the edges.
It’ll die hard, but like all other attempts to politically unify the European continent, it will die.
Otto – I always get stopped and searched for drugs.
Jokes on them tho, I have a prescription for that wacky tobaccy.
Well, because the EU seems determined to sink its one genuinely useful achievement in the name of swamping the continent with millions of unemployable and unintegratable muslim men. The part of the Schengen deal that has been actively abrogated, but is essential to the functioning of the rest of it, was to keep the external border as tight as achievable. You’d think that with that external border currently being invaded being the Mediterranean sea, it wouldn’t be too difficult. About as difficult as stopping rubber dinghies crossing the English channel. But no, our taxes are spent on actively funding criminal people smuggling gangs with boats.
All controls are in any case more announcement than action. Some bottlenecks like the train between Denmark and Sweden are checked routinely, for most of the continent you can forget the notion of any country actually “sealing” its borders. I know buildings in (Swiss) Basel where people go out the back of the building to have a smoke in France.
BiG – it was only a couple of years ago that Algerians and Chechens were fighting in the streets of Former France, toting AK-47s in broad daylight.
So, Europe can look forward to either some kind of fascism and the horribly painful and violent expulsion of foreigners, or the horribly violent and painful ascendancy of political Islam. Either way, lots of people will die.
Whistling past that graveyard like Gracie Fields
Steve, I basically agree with you.
While government is always infested with power-hungry lunatics desperate to impose their views on the cowed populace, what European governments (including the UK) are doing is now openly trolling the indigenous/established population. They know we will do nothing. We will not rise up and rebel. That’s where your and my views diverge. I know it won’t happen, and so do they. That’s why they keep doing it.
BiG – I’m not expecting some kind of man the barricades Le Mis event, but I think Net Zero and Infinity Immigration and Magic Money Tree and the competency crisis will collapse existing systems in the West, much like the Soviet Union ran out of money and steam and people realised in 1989-91 that it wasn’t a system worth defending, that the slogans they’d been trained to repeat were hollow lies.
We know the status quo is completely unsustainable, so the future is still up for grabs.
On a more optimistic note, at least we’re out of the bloody EU. If Reform can make some progress we might even see a peaceful, democratic transition to something sane and reasonable that works.
The worst case scenario would be endemic sectarian and racial violence along NornIron/Middle East lines, with every ethnic group competing against all the others for resources and control. That’s something we should hope to avoid if humanly possible.
“I know it won’t happen, and so do they. That’s why they keep doing it.”
That’s how every conflict starts. We can invade Poland, Britain and France will do nothing. Every conflict and most revolutions start with the hubris that the other side will do nothing. Delusion.
However, we shouldm’t go straight to piano wire and torchlight. We can and should start civil disobedience and peaceful protest.
Rhoda – That’s how every conflict starts. We can invade Poland, Britain and France will do nothing.
The current British identified government is doing this to Russia. It’s received wisdom in UK establishment circles that Ivan won’t do anything if we help Ukraine launch massive airstrikes deep into Russian territory. There’s a whole ecosystem of chinless OBEs, CBE’s and CMG’s constantly writing puff pieces for war with the world’s biggest nuclear power.
Thankfully, the American government is slightly less insane. Imagine if Vladimir Putin was as reckless and feckless as the British government is, we’d be crawling out through the fallout already.
In Clown World, we are the ones on the wrong side of the Rainbow Curtain, chained to a self-harming ideology that mocks human nature. I want to break free.
Steve, what has Brexit actually changed? I’m back and forth half a dozen times a year, at least since covibollocks finished, and I don’t see anything different about everyday life. You only need state Pravda to know that the Junta (which is going to be in power for at least another 9.5 years) is up to the same stuff as the Europeans, which is worse than it would have been were the UK still in, so arguably things are worse not better, but for the absence of a label.
BiG – what has Brexit actually changed?
Bugger all, due to the determined rearguard action of our Judas goats, but as long as we’re out the potential for democratic sovereignty remains. Obvs, a large part of the status quo is about demoralising people into thinking they are powerless. But that’s not true.
“the American government is slightly less insane”
One recent report suggested that the US government is just as insane but that the Pentagon threatened not to obey orders. True? No idea!
“Imagine if Vladimir Putin was as reckless and feckless as the British government is, we’d be crawling out through the fallout already.”
I think he was pretty reckless invading, and no doubt it was he who decided the other side, NATO, would do nothing in what he considers his backyard. That was suppoed to be a two-week war, or SMO, but his own hublis of believing his army wasn’t crap got his country into a heap of trouble. He fits my theory better than the UK getting all sabre-rattly.*
*I recently read the British Army Review issue discussing the future shape of the army. Some pearls of wisdom but mostly a crock of shit. The Generals still fantasise about sweeping amroured thrusts against a peer enemy on some German plain. Manouvre warfare is the formula for success, nothing can be learned from the UKraine war, it’s a special case. And drones are just the modern equivalent of a BE2C in WW1. How this will work if the enemy lays five million mines I don’t know. Nor how to occupy a country against partisan opposition with drones provided by a sympathetic third country. IOW all the wars since 1945 save first Iraq, which was not peer, just thought they were.
BiG,
I know buildings in (Swiss) Basel where people go out the back of the building to have a smoke in France.
That reminds me, I meant to ask you this some time ago….. are you based near Bad Säckingen? The reason I as is we met a lovely British woman (from Iceland IIRC) by the Sushi stand in one of the supermarkets there when we were passing through. She started talking to us when she heard we were Brits and it turned out she was just as cynical, if not more so, about Germans than you.
It was only after we left that I thought about you and always wondered if it was you’re wife or someone you knew because from what you’ve said I assumed your in that region.
PiP – One recent report suggested that the US government is just as insane but that the Pentagon threatened not to obey orders. True? No idea!
Dunno either, but Biden and Harris both turned down Pres. Zelensky’s “victory plan”.
Rhoda – I think he was pretty reckless invading, and no doubt it was he who decided the other side, NATO, would do nothing in what he considers his backyard. That was suppoed to be a two-week war, or SMO,
Invading Ukraine was a huge gamble, but the only people talking about timescales are NATO. It was the Pentagon that said Kiev could last maybe 3 days.
Tbf, I think everyone thought Russia would fully mobilise, rather than do what they have done.
The Generals still fantasise about sweeping amroured thrusts against a peer enemy on some German plain.
Ironically, that’s what the Germans hoped for in both wars, defeat their enemies relatively quickly in maneuver warfare. Made sense for Germany, since they have no strategic depth. But it obviously didn’t work for them.
What we’re seeing in Ukraine is that modern warfare is more bloody and expensive and attritive than anybody imagined in their worst nightmare.
The most unfair peace would be preferable to more of this. Boggles my mind that we’re the baddies encouraging more war.
@rhoda
And drones are just the modern equivalent of a BE2C in WW1.
Only in the sense that they fly (though they don’t all fly – we’ve already seen sea drones in operation, with the fucking Houthis at the controls FFS, and the capability exists for ground mobile drones, too.
BE2s needed two crew, for a start. Crew need training, and it’s a problem when they die. Plus the whole fleet never amounted to many more than 3,000 – I’m sure there are factories which can turn out 3,000 drones in a day.
Drones have only really been around in the current format for a couple of years – they are changing the face of warfare in front of our eyes, and it’s only just begun.
The sight of Yahya Sinwar feebly lobbing a stick at a drone which had flown into his house and was looking at him was both amusing but also concerning.
On the one hand, future Osama bin Ladens are not going to be chilling out safely in the caves of Tora Bora while the SAS or US SF slog up hill for days trying to find them.
One the other hand…
The best case scenario is that drone swarms which can overwhelm any defences are developed which thus render the idea of war itself as a bit silly.
The worst case scenario is terrorist drones – not to mention police drones. What would Starmer give to be able to put loiter drones above every town and village in the UK (for our own safety, of course)?
All controls are in any case more announcement than action. Some bottlenecks like the train between Denmark and Sweden are checked routinely, for most of the continent you can forget the notion of any country actually “sealing” its borders. I know buildings in (Swiss) Basel where people go out the back of the building to have a smoke in France.
Schengen was simply a recognition of reality – the only way to effectively control a land border is to build a big fuck-off wall (as per DDR or Israel), and nobody’s proposing that. Land borders are inherently permeable: for every major obvious crossing, there are a hundred dirt tracks and a thousand fields – with half the British Army stationed in Northern Ireland, we couldn’t effectively control a few hundred miles of border with Eire – and even a river doesn’t present much of an obstacle.
Britain, OTOH, has a natural and defensible sea border, if we choose to defend it – currently we (or, at least, our politicians) don’t.
Interested – the combination of cheap drones and cheap (smartphone grade) AI chips is not an encouraging one.
If you were a bad guy, you could train a small swarm to automatically target, well, pretty much anything or anyone you want.
Postmen, for example.
Steve – yes. AI allowing for swarms remote drones unreliant on GPS or remote command is an order of magnitude shitter.
You don’t want to be in a vehicle on a battlefield if someone is controlling a drone on to you. You don’t want to be exiting a vehicle, nor in a building, nor a trench.
But if there are 50 of them, all communicating with each other and programmed to take out anything without an IFF transponder you’d better have said your prayers.
I think from memory you were in the Mob? I don’t know if you ever did any FIBUA training but whatever you did you might as well forget all of it.
I know people who’ve been quite high up on the fighting side of things in UKSF and I know they’re very concerned.
An SAS trooper vs a flip flop AKer is very little contest. But the playing field is suddenly looking much more level. Imagine being in FOB Inkerman (or the streets of Sangin itself) in 2025… bad enough twenty years ago, untenable now.
The only way to fight is very shortly going to be on your enemy’s territory, in his bases – or his cities.
Football stadiums. Nightclubs. Schools transport systems.
MAD makes it unprofitable (for nation states, anyway).
Conspiratorially speaking, I wonder if that’s why so many countries are operating in unison on other stuff?
Maybe they know the game is just about up and that they’re going to have to find their marginal gains elsewhere – ie from their own populations.
Interested – browser ate my longer answer (lucky you).
I reckon companies selling anti-drone tech will make a fortune. It’s not an unbeatable weapon, but right now it can still wreak havoc, even deep behind enemy lines. I would assume the natural counter to most of the smaller drones equipped with computer vision is the radar or optical controlled laser dazzler.
I first flew a small drone (about) ten years ago: the owner, a younger family member, gave me his iPhone and said “Control it with this”. I was wonderful fun at the level of “Let’s see what’s in everyone’s garden.”
We immediately fell to talking about how boys would love one modified to let them bombard people with, as might be, stink bombs. He later bought a bigger one and used it on Safari to locate animals they wanted to see and photograph (and to avoid).
No doubt the military developed lots of expensive ones but it seems they have been taken by surprise by people using fleets of cheap ones. Still, my father used to say that one thing he learned in The War was that professional officers were duds compared to officers from the Reserves or from “civvy street”. Well, government employees, aren’t they?
No doubt there will be a drone vs countermeasures race just like the gun/arnour race in tanks. There has never been an all-powerful war-ending weapon yet. As dearieme says it is the proliferation of drones down to the lowest level which is the innovation in recent times. We’ve had drones in the British army since, I believe the 50s. They (and the data they gather) have always been reserved for high levels of command, and tended by high priests of tech jealous of their turf. The new review plans to put them at section level, which is good. And to integrate the data via network, which is better. It is also the irreducible minimum to be a competitive army. My qualms with the review are all about using this new stuff to plan the war we never had, whereas all the wars and conflicts we have had did not require sweeping armoured thrusts etc. Half our tank casualties in 1945 were from mines. We didn’t learn a damn thing from that so when we went to Afghanistan we didn’t have the right kit. Same in my conflict in NI. A load of blokes I knew were blown up by emplaced explosives. A sweeping armoured thrust up the Falls Road would not have been appropriate, apparently.
Maybe we should have asked the Israelis for help