Two British men were arrested by French police in Calais on Sunday night. In a statement the Pas-de-Calais prefecture said the pair were detained ‘during an identity check while they were posting a video on social media’.
Prosecutor Cecile Gressier said the men, aged 50 and 35, were in custody on suspicion of ‘participation in a group with the intent to prepare acts of violence’.
There is something sinister about far-right activists travelling to France to take matters into their own hands
Apparently the pair had tried to rally a large crowd of Britons to Calais but few responded to their call to arms. In one video posted before their arrest, a man declares: ‘I’ll guard the beaches tonight, if no one else wants to.’
The activists had dubbed their mission, Operation Overlord, the codename for the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. The men who came ashore that day were liberators; the men who came to Calais last weekend were laughable. A reporter from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo did respond to the anti-migrant Overlord appeal, out of curiosity as opposed to conviction. The police were braced for a large-scale demonstration but the magazine encountered ‘13 masked men puffing out their chests on a beach and waving Union Jack flags’.
The two who were arrested – the first anti-immigration activists detained by French police – will most likely be deported. Until then they will be held in an administrative detention centre ‘with other migrants ordered to leave France’.
One is tempted to chuckle at the irony of the pair’s fate, but the antics of this small band of activists make them the useful idiots of the left.
There is already a campaign to smear anyone who expresses opposition to mass uncontrolled immigration as a Nazi. Last September the Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy accused Nigel Farage of ‘flirting with the Hitler Youth’ during his adolescence. A few months earlier the Attorney General, Richard Hermer, referenced Nazi Germany when speaking of the wish of the Tories and Reform to leave the ECHR. Reform’s newest recruit, Suella Braverman, received similar treatment from Gary Lineker in 2023 when, as the Conservative home secretary, she unveiled plans to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda.
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Decent people, the silent majority, can see the absurdity of such remarks. There is nothing ‘Nazi’ about wanting to control one’s borders, particularly when some of those entering Britain illegally come from cultures where anti-Semitism is ingrained.
But there is something sinister about far-right activists travelling to France to take matters into their own hands. It emboldens the left and feeds into their narrative that anyone opposed to mass immigration is a far-right thug.
The anti-immigration movement, Raise the Colours, issued a statement on Saturday to clarify that they had no links to the activists in Calais. In the past they have promised that their actions will ‘remain peaceful and within the law’.
Raise the Colours activists were present on Sunday when thousands of people marched through the Sussex town of Crowborough in protest at government plans to house asylum seekers on a former military base. There were no arrests. The nearest the crowd came to anger was when they took up a chant of ‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker’; words that might resonate with some Labour supporters, though for a different reason.
Illegal immigration is the West’s most divisive issue of the age. It is a battle to control borders but it is also a fight for the moral high ground. The left have become so intoxicated by their virtuousness that they are oblivious to the wickedness of some of those who have entered their country illegally. To defeat them will require reason, integrity, determination and above all discipline.
This is something that appears to have dawned on Donald Trump in the days since ICE officials shot dead Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The president has sacked Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief, and sent his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota to take control of the febrile situation. Homan is a veteran of ICE and headed its deportation wing during the Obama administration. Trump described Homan as ‘tough but fair’.
That should be the mission statement of every government wanting to control its borders.
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