In Expecting more hours of waiting and traffic jams on the approaches to the ferry port in Dover, British politicians are arguing over whether the departure from the European Union can be considered the cause of the delays. For the Easter weekend, the port administration in Dover activated additional helpers and asked the French border police, who already carry out their checks when leaving Dover, to send more control officers. At the beginning of the Easter holidays a week ago, there were waiting times of well over 10 hours in Dover; Bus passengers in particular had to endure long delays because passport controls took a long time.
The port authority has tried to reach the organizers of the bus trips via the three ferry companies that operate on the route between Calais, Dunkirk and Dover in order to spread the bus crossings booked for Good Friday over three days and in this way to equalize waiting times. All those responsible agreed that “a terrible situation arose for many trips last weekend, especially for the elderly and school children”. Everything will be done to improve the situation this Easter weekend. Even on Good Friday, in the early hours of the morning, all lanes in front of passport control were filled with vehicles waiting for passport control.
While the port administration in Dover blamed the longer control procedures after Great Britain’s exit from the EU as the main reason for the clearance backlog, Interior Minister Suella Braverman denied after last weekend that the traffic jam in Dover was a consequence of Brexit. She said of course nobody likes to sleep in a queue on the bus but the delays in Dover were the result of many causes. One of them she called “bad weather”.
Call for looser controls
Meteorological causes were used in government statements a few weeks ago to justify the sudden shortage of tomatoes in British supermarkets. At the time, it was said that the cold snaps in Morocco and the rise in gas prices had led to a shortage of tomatoes, and that the exit from the EU had nothing to do with it.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also said before the start of the Easter weekend that the traffic jam in Dover was a result of “various factors”. He indirectly admitted that leaving the EU was also one of those factors. There are “new procedures” for border clearance. The French border guards now recorded every passport when leaving the United Kingdom and stamped it if necessary – just as the British border police also do when entering Great Britain in Calais.
While the Interior Minister had also argued that the changed controls after leaving the EU had been in use “for many years” and that traffic via the ferry port was generally running without any problems, the port administration insisted that the new passport Regulations in the first year in which travel has returned to pre-coronavirus levels are the main cause of the delays.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, also refused to look for other scapegoats. Frost tweeted: “If we want to control entry into the UK – which we are doing now, as one of the key elements in the Brexit vote – then conversely we have to expect the EU to block entry into the UK States of the European Union controlled. We can’t have it the way we want in every case, and we should be honest about it.”
However, Frost also advocated relaxing the rigid control provisions that now exist. If relations with the EU have now improved, as was widely said after the conclusion of the new customs and trade framework with Northern Ireland, then “we should test that by trying to get better data sharing and reduced passport checks from UK and EU citizens to both.” to agree on directions.”