PETER HITCHENS: Why those few desperate people in dinghies really are a danger to Britain...

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We aren’t grateful enough for the English Channel. Personally, I give thanks for it every day, but that is because I have been out in the world quite a lot and know just how dangerous our planet is. 

That short, rough stretch of sea is what has enabled us to create one of the greatest civilisations in human history.

It is continuity, stability, peace, mutual understanding and long-accumulated experience that make civilisations. Without them, the most vital ingredient of human society – trust – cannot develop or flourish.

Look at the rest of Europe, unprotected by deep water. Every century or so there’s an invasion, or a devastating war in which the enemy’s armies sweep through, burning, looting and worse.

That short, rough stretch of sea is what has enabled us to create one of the greatest civilisations in human history

A little further back, and you find vast movements of population, in which people who thought they were safe and settled were displaced or subjugated by stronger, crueller or simply more energetic and hungry peoples.

This process hasn’t stopped. China’s neighbours, and minority nations living under China’s rule, face a combination of ancient ruthlessness and modern secret police efficiency.  

The Turkic people of China’s far west, and the Tibetans too, are being rapidly turned into dispossessed, humiliated minorities in their own lands. 

People who moan constantly about the long-ago misdeeds of the British Empire are strangely silent about China’s steely modern colonialism.

And then there is the vast surge of humans brought about by those three Olympic-standard idiots George W. Bush, Anthony Blair and David Cameron. 

Their various thought-free, vain adventures and interventions, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, have set the whole world on the move towards Europe, from as far east as Kandahar and as far south as the Congo. 

Migrants after being intercepted by French authorities off the port of Calais on Christmas Day. A lot of people are currently mocking the idea that the migrants making their way across the Channel are an important issue

Nobody can blame the migrants for seeking better lives elsewhere, but if they all do so, they will destroy the very thing they are seeking.

There has been nothing like it in modern times. If we do not check it, it will transform Europe into somewhere else in two generations.

Britain is far better-placed than other countries, thanks to the sea which surrounds us. But salt water alone will not do the job. We have to patrol it and turn back the uninvited. If we do not, the sea becomes an open door, with every beach a port of entry. 

A lot of people are currently mocking the idea that the migrants making their way across the Channel are an important issue. They say the numbers are small. They were small, too, when they first began to arrive in Greece, in Spain, in Sicily and Malta.

 A migrant camp in Calais. Nobody can blame the migrants for seeking better lives elsewhere, but if they all do so, they will destroy the very thing they are seeking

Then word spread that those seas were open. And the numbers quickly stopped being small.

People-smugglers are not fools. They can quickly see and exploit any opportunity.

If I had anything to do with it, I would tow them all back to free, democratic France on sight and tell the French (correctly) it was for their benefit too. After all, if they knew they couldn’t get into Britain, most of them wouldn’t come to France in the first place.

And the fact they don’t want to stay in France proves they are not refugees, but migrants.

But if that doesn’t work, perhaps we could copy Australia, and pay (say) Greenland to take them in, unless they agreed to go home, with an absolute guarantee that nobody who arrived here illegally, or was caught trying to do so, would ever be allowed to stay here.

Or we can do nothing much, and say goodbye to Britain.

Everyone in the Army knows that service recruitment problems began when the job was outsourced to the unloved Capita. But the latest idea, actually begging snowflakes to join up, must be driven by desperation. 

Why try to hire people as soldiers who don’t like fighting? Next, look out for a campaign to recruit people with a fear of flying for the RAF, and people who hate getting wet for the Navy. Or we could just get rid of Capita, and go back to sending recruiting sergeants out into the pubs on a Saturday night. 

The ‘peaceful drug’ that’s causing carnage 

Will it ever sink in? The authorities are still trying their best to claim that the knife incident in Manchester was part of some sort of terrorist grand plan. All that spending on ‘security’ has to be justified somehow. But the suspect has, in fact, been detained under the Mental Health Act.

Anyone with his wits about him knows that there are far more crazy people about than there used to be, many of them with knives, and it isn’t much of a stretch to connect this with the fact that the police and the courts have given up enforcing laws against marijuana, which some idiots still say is a ‘peaceful drug’.

Well, not always, I think. There’s been an above-average rise in aggravated assaults and murders in the first four US states to legalise marijuana for recreational use. And Finland and Denmark have recorded significant rises in mental illness since 2000, also following an increase in marijuana use.

Cannabis laws, it turns out, don’t greatly increase the numbers of people taking the drug. But they do mean that those who do use it, use it more heavily.

Amazing that, as the evidence of its danger piles up, we should even be thinking of legalising it here, as the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby wants.

I suspect the Tory Party lost the next Election on New Year’s Day, when huge numbers of railway season-ticket holders in the South East were forced to pay more for less. 

Many will need to take out loans to find the money for a miserable, disorganised non-service that infuriates its users even more by perpetually offering insincere apologies for things it will do again the next day, and has no intention of putting right.

It is only in the South East that railways are so vital. But it is also in the South East that the Tories cannot afford to lose votes. By the way, don’t tell me that the railways were worse under BR. I remember BR very well, and it’s not true. If they’d been given the money squandered on the fly-by-night privateers, they’d have run a decent railway.

The chattering classes just love lapping up tripe

If I ran a university, I think I’d start a course on just how utterly wrong most films are about the past. You could do a whole term on how completely false the new film The Favourite – starring Olivia Colman – is. It is supposed to be about Queen Anne. Almost everything in it, from the alleged Royal lesbianism to the rabbits and the supposed abduction of the Duchess of Marlborough, is either baseless speculation or totally made up. Yet when I went to see it in a grand university town, the cinema was packed. Is it only same-sex love, the monarchy and the four-letter words that bring the pseudo-intellectual middle classes into the cinema these days?

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