Relaxing in a lorry, the Albanian stowaways ‘sneaking into Britain’

Brazen images of stowaways on Facebook sites such as ‘Albanians in London’

BRAZEN ‘ stowaway selfies’ posted on Facebook appear to graphically illustrate the extent of illegal Albanian migration into Britain.

Pictures of young people hidden in lorries are uploaded on pages including ‘Albanians in London’, alongside the caption: ‘On the way.’

Other images offering fake IDs and charges to book a place with a smuggler expose how gangs of people-traffickers seem to be cashing in on social media.

Yesterday even Albania’s government branded Britain a soft touch compared with other nations, and urged the UK to send migrants back home more quickly.

Meanwhile families there openly admitted sending their children to sneak into Britain to find a better life. Many end up in foster care or at the mercy of criminals, a Daily Mail investigation reveals.

Some are forced to work as drug mules for Albanian crime gangs – which police recently described as the ‘most ruthless the UK has ever seen’.

Images on three Facebook sites purportedly show young Albanians celebrating their illegal entry into Britain. Laughing, holding bottles of drink and posing with the Albanian flag, the teenagers’ ‘stowaway selfies’ are on pages which can reach 60,000 followers.

One image appears to show a man in a van, and is captioned ‘God willing, I will be in England by New Year’.

Another photo shows a row of grinning young men lying in the back of a lorry, which appears to have been rigged with breathing tubes to give them fresh air.

Captioned ‘The way to London’, the picture was posted on a Facebook page devoted to helping youngsters reach the UK from an area of Albania including a village named Krume – where almost every family is said to have at least one member already in Britain.

Other images suggest it costs £8,000 to ride in the back of a lorry or £3,000 to hide in the chassis. One picture shows wads of cash spread across tables, in an apparent boast of the success young Albanians enjoy once they reach the UK.

Many pictures are captioned: ‘Inside the lorry to UK.’ Youngsters strike a trademark pose of intertwining their hands to reflect the Albanian flag of a double-headed eagle.

One Facebook post offers cards for NVQ qualifications – without needing to complete the courses – ‘for all the Albanians living in England’.

It also offers bricklaying qualifications and provides a phone number, or urges people to get in contact via Facebook.

Albanians last year made up the second-highest number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Britain – with more applicants than from war-ravaged Syria. Many are encouraged to travel here by their parents, who take them part of the way before helping to pay traffickers to spirit them across the Channel, officials said.

Most of the unaccompanied minors are economic migrants, some of whom falsely claim to have been beaten by their parents or say they are victims of blood feuds to boost their asylum claims.

But when their claims are rejected, many vanish from state-funded foster care and are forced work for ‘slave gangs’ in car washes to pay off huge debts – up to £12,000 per trip – owed to people smugglers, Albanian officials warn.

Albania is not in the EU, but because it is applying to become a member, its citizens are free to travel through the ‘borderless’ Schengen area. They can reach

the Channel without showing a passport. Teenage Albanian boys are taken with their parents or other close relatives through the Schengen area and left at ports in France, Belgium or Holland.

From there they are fixed up with people smugglers who take them to the UK where they are provided social care – usually with a foster family – and schooling.

Yesterday, Albania’s deputy internal affairs minister Rovena Voda urged the UK to follow Germany and France in swiftly sending home under-18s who have asylum claims rejected.

Mrs Voda said: ‘The reason so many go to the UK rather than Germany or France or the Netherlands is that those countries do much more to deport them earlier. In Britain this is not the case, and this makes it more attractive.’

She added that some parents use their children as pawns, sending them over to get asylum before following them to the UK.

The Mail visited one village in northern Albania where residents spoke of sending their children for a better life because there was ‘no future for them’ there.

But Flamur Dauti, a school headmaster in the village of Krume, warned Facebook pages were fuelling a false promise. ‘It’s all a lie. Social media is helping to feed the myth,’ he said. ‘There are pictures of them surrounded by cash, but usually this is all the takings from the car wash for a day they’ve been made to count. It doesn’t belong to them.

‘Life is very hard for those who go and they would be much better off staying in Albania.’

Residents also scorned the British ambassador to Albania, Duncan Norman, who has visited the area and declared that Albanians living illegally in the UK should return home.

They called him a hypocrite because ‘he would do the same for his children’ if he did not live in luxury. Meanwhile Albanian MP Ervin Salianji warned that high charges for human traffickers meant migrants were often forced to take jobs with ruthless Albanian crime gangs operating in the UK to pay their huge debts.

He said: ‘ These gangs will not only take money from the family but also use the kids in the streets to be drug mules and [commit] theft in Britain.’

The National Crime Agency warned earlier this year that Albanian gangs have established a high-profile influ- ence in organised crime, with ‘considerable control’ across the UK drugs market. Kathryn Holloway, the Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner, recently said that the ‘sheer brutality’ of the gangs made them ‘the most ruthless the UK has ever seen’.

According to the Home Office, last year 407 unaccompanied Albanian children travelling alone claimed asylum in the UK. Only Afghanistan had a higher number.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘The UK has a proud history of hosting, supporting and protecting those in need, including some of the most vulnerable children affected by the migrant crisis.

‘ Most Albanian unaccompanied children who claim asylum in the UK are found not to be in need of international protection. We are working to establish a safe and effective way to return those unaccompanied children to their home country, where in many cases they will be able to reunite with their family.’

A Facebook spokesman said: ‘People smuggling is illegal and any posts, pages or groups that co-ordinate this activity are not allowed on Facebook.

‘We thank the Mail for alerting us to these posts and where content has been found to breach our people smuggling policies, we have removed them.

‘We urge people to continue using our reporting tools to flag any content that they suspect may be illegal.’

‘Britain is more attractive’

LIKE most social media trolls, Sheila Sullivan chooses Twitter as her preferred medium for spreading bile across the internet.

A vehement supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, she’s posted almost 12,000 messages in the past two years ( that’s around 16 per day), many attacking Conservative politicians, and those who vote for them.

For example, she refers to Theresa May as ‘Cruella De Vil’ [the evil woman in One Hundred And One Dalmatians], says Chancellor Philip Hammond ‘ looks like he has died and been dug up’, and calls George Osborne a ‘slimy git’. For good measure, she has frequently attacked Conservative voters (who totalled 13.6 million in June’s General Election) as ‘f***ing thick’ [she did not use asterisks] and saying she would ‘disinherit’ her children if they married one.

Tories aren’t the only group of people the charmless Ms Sullivan, from Manchester, appears to hate. Like many a Corbynista ultra, she has it in for Jews.

This month, she urged her online followers to look at a vile YouTube film entitled ‘ Why the Rothschilds want Syria controlled,’ which propagates the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that a shadowy cabal of Jewish financiers secretly orchestrate Western foreign policy.

It was created by a fake news outlet called ‘Exclusive Good News’, whose other recent handiwork includes a revoltingly racist video which claims to have ‘proof’ that Michelle Obama is a man.

Sadly, such unpoliced offensiveness is typical of the new Wild West of the internet — a world where anyone is free to spread disinformation, lies and repellent views, or to abuse people they dislike. Ms Sullivan, in common with many others from the angry fascist Left, is now using another technique to further her political agenda via social media.

Last weekend, she was one of a few hundred self-appointed activists who joined a campaign to silence Britain’s free Press, which is enjoyed by millions, and force it to promote their views.

Together, they persuaded the High Street retailer Paperchase to apologise for offering free wrapping paper to Daily Mail readers.

This group’s campaign was organised by Stop Funding Hate, a small lobby group seeking to censor popular newspapers whose editorial lines it disagrees with.

ONN A daily basis, it urges people to use Twitter and Facebook to send complaints against any company which advertises in the Daily Mail, Sun and Express newspapers.

The aim is to persuade firms to withdraw advertising. Stop Funding Hate’s founder declares: ‘The end point for us is a media that does the job we all want it to.’

In other words, a handful of zealots want newspapers to reflect only their values, which, of course, may very well be unpalatable to the values of the millions who chose to read them.

Stop Funding Hate seems particularly concerned that the Press discusses subjects such as immigration and gender politics.

And freedom of expression can, apparently, go to hell in a handcart.

Not surprisingly, the Advertising Association, the ad industry’s trade body, has accused it of ‘intimidation’ which will ‘put our free and competitive free Press at risk’. Happily, major retailers such as John Lewis and Marks & Spencer won’t be cowed by such bullying by this small band of zealous Corbynites and Remainers.

Indeed, John Lewis pledged to resist them. It says: ‘Withdrawing advertising on the basis of editorial coverage would be inconsistent with our democratic principles, which include freedom of speech and remaining apolitical.’

However, some smaller firms — such as Paperchase — with less experience of handling hostile social media, have caved in. On Saturday, the

stationer received about 500 messages (many anonymous or from abroad) criticising its Daily Mail promotion. Two days later, it issued a grovelling statement saying it was ‘truly sorry’ for having associated with this paper, which has four million readers.

For Stop Funding Hate, this was a major victory in its war against newspapers which it claims are ‘spreading hate’ and ‘fuelling hatecrime on our streets’.

Yet behind this pious bluster lies an extraordinary hypocrisy.

The fact is that many of its most active supporters, such as the deeply unpleasant Sheila Sullivan, are themselves prolific spreaders of hate.

Stop Funding Hate insist its campaign is ‘ all about polite and friendly customer engagement’ and, to be fair, the social media messages sent on its behalf to advertisers are usually reasonable in tone.

But many of those who targeted Paperchase have used the internet on other occasions to troll politicians, journalists, celebrities and other public figures — while also spreading vile slurs about political groups they despise.

Typical is someone called Gary Cook — as with many users of social media, this may be a fake name or his real one — who claims to be a designer from Enfield in London. He Tweets under the pseudonym @honeypotdesigns.

In recent months, he has called Tory minister Andrea Leadsom ‘f***ing scum’, said Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is a ‘worthless piece of scum,’ branded Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-Mogg a ‘f***ing tw*t’ and said the 17 million people who voted Leave are ‘xenophobic retarded sheep’.

Not to be outdone, Matthew Whibley, a blogger from Manchester who tweets as @nythe_one, said Mrs May ‘looks like a rabid gerbil’, calls Tories ‘ filth’ and ‘d*cks’, and recently contacted the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer to say she is a ‘knob’. Both men were to be found on Saturday lobbying Paperchase on behalf of Stop Funding Hate. Ms Hartley-Brewer, who has publicly criticised the lobby group, is a regular recipient of such nastiness from its supporters.

Mel Greenwood, a Corbyn supporter who lobbied Paperchase and Tweets as @byeckitsparky, has, for example said Ms HartleyBrewer is ‘ a shameful f*** ing excuse for a human being!’

What extraordinarily offensive remarks, for people who profess to be worried about ‘hate’!

YET in the Orwellian world of Stop Funding Hate, it seems that spreading hate is frequently permissible — provided your views accord with those of this tiny motley bunch of Left-wing Twitter warriors.

A Hackney-based Stop Funding Hate activist called Phil (who tweets as @goodlegs) has used Twitter to say ‘f*** off ’ to, variously, the Prime Minister, Cabinet minister Liam Fox, anti-EU Labour MP Kate Hoey and Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

Meanwhile, a self-styled poet who tweets as @weakling9191 joined the lobbying campaign against Paperchase last Saturday, just days after using Twitter to share two highly offensive poems suggesting that it might be nice to physically harm Mrs May.

One read: ‘Theresa May is f***ing lifeless / Dodging tax and such / I wish she’d go to Belarus / Get shot up by some thugs.’ The other: ‘Theresa May is a tw*t / Let her play with other rats / Shove her right in the back / Throw her on the torture rack.’

He seems oblivious to the hypocrisy of saying this while supporting Stop Funding Hate in its campaign against newspapers for apparently ‘funding hate’. Kind-hearted Phil has also called former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith a ‘f***ing scumbag’ and contacted Tory MP Alec Shelbrook in June to call him ‘Tory Scum’.

Then there is a prolific anti-Brexit campaigner and Stop Funding Hate activist called George Dukesh, who tweets as @ the_flaneur16.

He recently said of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson: ‘I have met this f***ing toad. He is not charming. He is a vile scheming sh*t.’ He’s called Jacob Rees-Mogg a ‘ vile f*** er’, Environment Secretary Michael Gove a ‘f***ing little worm, makes my skin crawl’ and says Tory MP Bob Stewart is ‘an unpleasant pompous c**t and a bully’.

He’s also shared the ‘ joke’: ‘What’s the difference between computers and Brexiteers? You only have to punch information into a computer once!’

Imagine Stop Funding Hate’s rage if a newspaper columnist ever wrote so insultingly about Labour politicians (which, of course, they never would) or called for people with whom they disagree about politics to be punched. The bile posted by Stop Funding Hate’s supporters peaked during the last General Election campaign, when a 29-year- old Labour supporter from Newcastle, who tweets as @captain_pyjamas, passed on the message: ‘Voting Tory just once increases your chance of sudden death by a punch to the face by 800%.’ In other posts, she’s said ‘Theresa May looks like a face at the window at night in a horror movie’ who would ‘slap a toddler for a 2p coin’. Another of her Stop Funding Hate comrades tweets as @ drdanstreetment. Joining the campaign against Paperchase, he said: ‘I shall walk straight past your shop until your policy changes.’ A few months earlier, this supposed opponent of hatred used Twitter to contact George Osborne, saying: ‘You’re a lying, coke-snorting posh boy who has no idea how real people live’; and ‘you, sir, are a c**t. And the sir is just good manners!’

ALL of which leads to several important points: predictably, a huge proportion of Stop Funding Hate supporters only target Conservatives, almost certainly don’t read the Mail and probably don’t shop at Paperchase.

For example, another Paperchase-baiter last weekend was @ jc4pmnow, an anonymous proCorbyn Twitter feed. Just days earlier, it posted images of posters which used language of the sort utilised by Nazi propagandists — saying Tories are ‘destructive parasites’ who ‘spread diseases’.

Another Corbynist in their ranks, @janfelicity, referred to ‘ blood sucking Theresa May,’ while Steve Rice (@stevericetweets) said Mrs Rudd is ‘quite hard and vile’.

Is it a mere coincidence that such trolls have joined Stop Funding Hate, which only campaigns against newspapers guilty of generally endorsing the Conservatives?

Is it also a coincidence that they have hitched their colours to the mast of an organisation which almost exclusively seeks to silence newspapers that supported Brexit?

Doubtless they may exist, but the Mail has been unable to find a single Stop Funding Hate activist, out of the hundreds who contacted Paperchase on Saturday, who said they were among the 52 per cent of British voters who backed Brexit.

Meanwhile, there are ample examples of Stop Funding Hate activists who have directed virulent abuse at those who led the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

Dr Vicky Forster, a research fellow educated at Durham, contacted Ukip’s Nigel Farage via Twitter shortly before the referendum to say ‘you make me embarrassed to be British’ and more recently called him ‘ a scumbag on pretty much every imaginable level’.

With regard to anyone who has ever voted for Ukip — that is about 15 per cent of the British elector-

ate — she describes them as ‘the most gullible, easily led people on the planet’.

Then there’s Becca Miller, an interior designer from Leeds, who described Ukip as Mr Farage’s ‘scum of a party’.

MS Miller, who professes to be aghast at the ‘hatred’ she encounters in popular newspapers, also used Twitter during the London riots some years ago to share messages about ‘ Tory scumbags’, saying, perhaps in jest: ‘I guess we should go set some things on fire and put some windows through.’

In case you hadn’t guessed, she is a Labour voter. As are almost all of the stop Funding Hate supporters who contacted Paperchase last saturday and who’ve previously expressed a political allegiance on the social network.

Indeed, the Mail was unable to identify a single one who had publicly endorsed the Conservatives. Perhaps they exist. But again, if so, they are keeping hidden.

For the record, stop Funding Hate claims it is ‘not linked to, or aligned to, any political party’ — and claimed in a statement this week to ‘have supporters from a wide range of backgrounds and political viewpoints’.

Funny, then, that it only campaigns against newspapers which endorsed the Tories at the last election.

Unsurprisingly, in this context, its founder, 42-year- old writer and NGO worker Richard Wilson, supports both the Remain campaign and Jeremy Corbyn.

He has ‘liked’ or endorsed Facebook groups supporting the ‘Council of Europe’, ‘New Europeans’, ‘Better In than Out’, ‘I’m Voting Remain,’ ‘ UKtostay’, ‘Campaign to Remain’, ‘We are the 48’, ‘Environmentalists for Europe,’ ‘scientists for EU’ and ‘Jeremy Corbyn for PM’.

He’s also ‘liked’ the misleadingly named Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, which supports the anti-newspaper lobbyists Hacked Off.

Despite his current campaign against this newspaper, Wilson has been more than happy to accept money from associating with the Mail in the past. In 2006, when a book he wrote about the murder of his sister in Africa was published, serialisation rights were sold to the Mail for £1,000.

A second senior stop Funding Hate figure is Rosey Ellum, who, in 2016, came up with the idea of founding the organisation at a dinner party attended by Wilson. A 31-year-old vegan, who is both an NGO worker and a professional cat-sitter, she divides her political allegiances between Labour and the Green Party.

Her Facebook ‘likes’ include ‘Women against UKIP’, ‘ The struggling Vegan’. ‘ Hackney Greens’, ‘Fat Gay Vegan’, ‘sassy socialist Memes’, ‘ Womens Equality Party’ ‘ John McDonnell’, ‘ Tower Hamlets Green Party’ and ‘Jeremy Corbyn for PM’.

On the morning of the 2015 Conservative election victory, Ellum declared on Twitter: ‘so sad and depressed today. For selfish reasons and for people worse off than me. We’ll keep fighting the good fight!’

she’s also campaigned against what she calls Israel’s ‘illegal occupation of Palestine’, using Twitter to share petitions on behalf of the Palestine solidarity Campaign, which counts Corbyn among its patrons.

A third director of stop Funding Hate is Cate Taylor, a solicitor at law firm MacFarlanes and a long- standing Labour activist who took a year out of her job to work as Political Adviser to Labour’s then shadow scottish secretary.

Needless to say, stop Funding Hate rejects suggestions its campaign is in any way politically motivated. It also dislikes being described as ‘far Left’.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that some of its supporters who lobbied Paperchase have trolled a range of people who are

not Conservatives.

FOR example, earlier this year, one who Tweets as @ spinningmule and claims to be a professional spin doctor called the then Lib Dem leader Tim Farron ‘ a God-bothering homophobe’.

Another, David Morley, who tweets as @sussexran, remarked this week during an episode of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, in which former footballer Dennis Wise is a contestant, that he had ‘completely forgotten how much Dennis Wise’s face makes me want to leap up and punch the TV’.

Another, who calls himself @ actuallynotmatt said this month that the actor James Corden ‘is a despicable insensitive c**t.’

All this from supporters of an organisation which supposedly campaigns against ‘hate’.

Many stop Funding Hate activists have also targeted political commentators with whom they disagree.

In June, one @ appledaft Tweeted that Times columnist Iain Martin was ‘lower than vermin’. The same journalist was told to ‘f**k off’ by freelance TV director called Eddie Knicker (@eddieknocker) who has also called Piers Morgan ‘ a rightwing tw*t’.

That said, they tend to save the most vile slurs for Conservative politicians.

To that end, a female activist called @ iamdbrian recently shared a Tweet calling Boris Johnson an ‘idiot’ who is ‘f***ing awful at everything’.

Helen s, who calls herself a ‘proud European green socialist’ and Tweets as @futurestand, told Paperchase last week that the Mail (which has more than two million female readers) ‘puts women down’.

Just a few months earlier, the same Helen s Tweeted about Theresa May: ‘I wish she would stand down now, as her mental health is clearly suffering. This could be a learning point for empathy.’

speculating about mental illness. What kind of sisterly ‘empathy’ is that?

But then supporters of stop Funding Hate — blinded by their all-consuming self-righteousness — seem incapable of understanding just how vile and offensive their own behaviour often is.