The apocalyptic images of 70,000 illegal immigrants storming into Ceuta, one of Spain’s two territories in North Africa – accompanied, predictably, by criminality including sexual assaults – suggest, depressingly, that Europe hasn’t learnt much about the need for strong borders. Can it really be that all the woe that followed Angela Merkel’s 2015 invitation to the Third World to relocate to Europe – which led to 1.3 million doing so – didn’t teach a few lessons?

The key factor behind the chaos has been Madrid’s creation of big extra pull factors for illegals. Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government recently offered them legal status – it estimated 500,000 would apply; 1.2 million did. Additionally, Spanish judges have ruled that illegal immigrants arriving by sea can’t be deported immediately and must first be allowed to claim asylum. On top of all that are Ceuta’s weak defences, allowing huge numbers to arrive by sea unimpeded.

Even though travel from Spain’s African territories to mainland Spain requires identity checks, many of the illegals would have calculated that the Sánchez government is a soft touch and would let them in. Indeed, while Madrid has claimed the arrivals have overwhelmingly been returned to Morocco, several thousand haven’t. At least several dozens have made it to what the illegals see as Europe’s gold-paved streets.

Still, Spain’s handling of the Ceuta crisis is a lot less ‘refugees welcome’ than was the norm in Europe a decade ago. The fact most of the illegals were rapidly expelled is more Viktor Orbán than Angela Merkel.  Sánchez seems not to have ignored entirely the fact that Spain has elections next year and the polls show the anti-immigration right in front.

Much of the rest of Europe has also learnt at least some lessons from the Merkel open borders insanity. The popular backlash against that has meant most EU countries have governments run or dominated by the anti-immigration right (in Denmark’s case, Social Democrats). Most importantly for the people smugglers, conservative-run Italy and Greece, the key gateways to Europe other than Spain, have greatly reduced the arrival of illegals. The political shift is highlighted by the fact that 22 of Spain’s 26 EU partners sharply criticised Madrid for causing the chaos. Giorgia Meloni’s Italy went further and has suspended Spain from its Schengen passport-free entry arrangements.

By contrast France and Germany haven’t (yet) joined Europe’s sharp rightward drift.  Both oscillate between rhetorically supporting multicultural pieties and fitfully accommodating anti-immigration popular opinion.  Macron’s immigration policy is a French farce of aggressively policing borders to keep out illegals, helping those who’ve made it move on to Britain and pocketing the £1.4 billion London is paying France to ‘stop the boats’. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz meanwhile tries to prove he believes in strong borders with occasional half-hearted gestures like sending a plane-load of Afghans home. Mostly his strategy is to fantasise about banning the country’s most popular party, the strongly anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.

The drama in Spain has obscured for the moment the fact that Europe’s most hopeless case of open borders chaos is Britain. If Ceuta were under British rule, the invaders would have been put up in hotels, issued with mobile phones and given three halal meals a day. Nearly 210,000 illegal immigrants have landed on the Kent coast since 2018 – three times the recent influx into Ceuta – usually brought in on British vessels. All but four per cent have stayed, making Spain’s Ceuta deportation effort look impressively tough by contrast.

About 80,000 of the UK arrivals have been on Labour’s watch. Keir Starmer said he’d ‘smash the gangs’, but anyone who expected he’d emulate Tony Abbott’s disruption of the people smuggling gangs in Indonesia – as detailed in Paul Kelly’s Twilight of Exceptionalism – was disappointed. Journalists have no difficulty finding the gangs openly doing business on French beaches, but Britain’s James Bonds don’t seem able to. About 100,000 arrivals, overwhelmingly undocumented young males, are accommodated in hotels, ‘houses of multiple occupancy’ and former military barracks, where they’re free to come and go. In several parts of the country they outnumber the local community.

For Andy Burnham, the issue is clearly a tiresome distraction from his main focus, TikTok videos on issues such as his favourite pub snacks. Like the rest of Labour, he probably likes mass Third World immigration and isn’t really interested in stopping the boats. Andrew Neather, an advisor to Tony Blair, has said Labour opened the gates to Third World immigration with the secret motivation of engineering a ‘truly’ multicultural society, which would weaken the right. There’s no reason to think that’s changed.  Labour’s only consistent policy on border security is to accuse critics of its immigration record of racism.

Britain has probably gone further than anywhere else in the West in allowing the capture of its institutions by an ideology of obsessive support for high immigration and promotion of the rights of all races except the natives (and Jews). In that context, it’s hardly surprising Cambridge University has made a fool of itself by appointing as a professor – and proclaiming as a genius – serial fraudster and fantasist Jason Arday because he ticked the racial diversity box. Cambridge will long be mocked for Arday’s boss’s gushing, televised welcome – ‘We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world.’ And also for the revelation that one of the clowns who selected him glories in the title of the university’s Lego Professor of Play.  Yet this saga says sinister things about modern Britain: the police agreeing to Arday’s request to call off a Times journalist asking questions about 180 apparent cases of plagiarism in his PhD thesis; and students who complained that Arday was a lazy supervisor being accused of racism and being given low marks.

There’s a good chance Spain could eventually join Europe’s rightward shift, ending its current role as the continent’s main entry point for illegals. But politics being unpredictable, the people smugglers might have renewed luck elsewhere on Europe’s external borders.  Only one thing’s certain: as long as Labour remains in power in Britain, it won’t stop a steady stream of chancers continuing to break into the country, making it poorer, less cohesive and more dangerous.