Chaos returns to Calais as five hurt in gunfight
FIVE Afghan migrants were wounded in a gunfight between people smuggling gangs in Calais.
It came just hours before French police opened fire on a car full of migrants after it crashed through a roadblock in a bid to reach Britain.
The incidents took place as the port descends further into chaos as increasing numbers are trying to sneak across the Channel.
Smugglers charge as much as £13,000 to bring a migrant to Britain and the trade means rival gangs resort to violence to settle turf wars.
Gunshots were exchanged between the groups at about 6pm on Saturday near the Secours Catholique charity on the outskirts of Calais. Three migrants were treated in a Calais hospital and a fourth, who was more seriously injured, was taken to a hospital in Lille. A fifth was treated at the scene. A local police source said it was common for rival groups to fall out over smuggling routes. The source added: ‘It is likely that smugglers were involved in this gunfight.’
Soon after, a car holding nine migrants crashed into a roadblock, injuring a riot police officer.
A local government source said people smugglers were among the six Iraqis and three Afghans arrested.
The chaos comes after it was revealed Britain may give tens of millions of pounds extra to France to ramp up security. Since 2015 the UK has handed over £124 million.
In October last year, the squalid Jungle camp at Calais was razed and 8,000 people were relocated across France. But hundreds have since returned to the area.
THERE can be few nations, if any, with as much concern for the welfare of animals as the British. It goes back a long way: this was the first country to pass legislation protecting farm animals, in 1822. More recently, we were the first country in the EU to ban fur farming.
This trait is also manifested in our charitable giving. One of the most popular charities in the UK is Guide Dogs For The Blind — and I have often thought this reflects our love for dogs as much as our concern for sightless humans.
Yet, according to many of those who seek to thwart the British people’s decision to leave the European Union, our departure will unavoidably lead to a deterioration in our standards of animal welfare.
To this end, they put out a story that Conservative MPs, during a vote on the Great Repeal Bill removing us from the legislative grip of the EU, had backed a clause denying that animals are sentient creatures which can feel pain.
Nothing of the sort happened, although this fake news went viral, furiously endorsed on Twitter by sundry so-called ‘celebrities’.
Heritage
It is true that the Tories voted that we will no longer be bound by the Lisbon Treaty, and specifically its accord that ‘the member states, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals’.
That is in any case little more than declaratory guff; more to the point, what the anti-Brexit animal lovers fail to realise (or admit) is that this EU declaration continues with the caveat: ‘ . . . while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions of the member states, relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.’
So, for example, respecting Spain’s ‘cultural traditions and regional heritage’ means that country can remain fully compliant with EU law while continuing with the practice of bull fighting, in which the unfortunate creature is the unwitting participant in a gory theatre of ritualised execution.
Similarly, France’s ‘ cultural traditions and regional heritage’ mean it can continue to practise the forced feeding of ducks and geese via a tube stuffed down their throats, to produce the delicacy known as foie gras.
As it happens, I don’t believe the European Commission in Brussels should order the Spanish or the French to abandon such customs; they should be made illegal in those countries only if their own people desire it.
But the point is that the view of the EU as a legislative paradise for animals is mistaken. Still more misguided is the anti-Brexit animal-lovers’ belief that the EU in general represents a Garden of Eden from which we are about to be expelled, leaving our furry friends defenceless against the depredations of an unconstrained and cruel British Government.
Governments in democracies broadly represent the desires and prejudices of their electorates. So, given the British people’s vaunted concern for animal welfare, why would any government want to show its contempt for such public sentiment?
For example, five years ago it was necessary for our Army’s surgeons to travel to Denmark to take part in experiments in which anaesthetised pigs suspended in wooden cages were shot at by Danish marksmen with AK-47s.
This was not a weird Nordic sport, of cultural significance to the good people of Denmark. Our medics were sent out to operate on the gruesomely maimed pigs as part of their training to deal with battlefield injuries: this was actually nicknamed Operation Danish Bacon.
But the reason they had to go to Denmark to do it is that this form of experimentation is banned in the UK. And our leaving the legislative purview of Brussels makes it not an iota more likely that a future British Government would license such experiments — which in any case were found at the time not to be in breach of EU law.
In fact, and in direct contrast to the claims of those who see Brexit as a threat to animal welfare in this country, leaving frees our Government to introduce safeguards which we could not do while still a member of the EU.
This was actually made clear in the 2017 Conservative manifesto, which declared that, once fully independent of Brussels law, the Government would ‘ take early steps to control the export of live farm animals for slaughter’. And in a recent interview, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Michael Gove, declared that he was ‘very attracted’ to the idea of banning ‘the live exports of animals over the sea’.
Standards
The reason no British Government could do this while we were a member state is that it would be viewed by Brussels as an unlawful restriction of trade within the EU.
Thus, when the British Government suspected that the treatment of soon-tobeslaughtered sheep in Spain was unacceptably cruel, it was nevertheless prevented from restricting firms in this country from continuing to ship the animals to that other member state.
The essence of EU rules on trade is (reasonably enough) that such regulations have to be identical across its territory: and there are maximum standards as well as minimum ones. This applies, for example, to the trade in puppies — creatures much closer to the hearts of the British than sheep (which, after all, we do slaughter to eat: and very delicious they are too).
Mr Gove wants to bring in legislation banning the import of puppies less than six months old. Under our membership of the EU, no British Government could do that, since EU law specifically allows the importation of puppies aged 11 weeks and upwards. And there are puppy farms in some of the eastern states of the EU which, to put it mildly, don’t meet the standards of welfare which we would regard as acceptable in this country.
Indeed, one animal charity, Dogs Trust, last week welcomed the opportunity there now is to deal more severely with this matter: ‘ Brexit provides a crucial opportunity to ensure that puppies entering this country are healthy, not underage, and not being brought in to sell on to the unsuspecting public.’
Progress
Still, we shouldn’t be surprised that untruths about the prospects for vulnerable creatures have been manufactured by those most opposed to Brexit, to foment public anxiety about the terrible (but unspecified) things which might happen as a result of regaining full parliamentary sovereignty.
In the final weeks of last year’s referendum debate, the Remain campaign’s ‘Project Fear’ warned that disabled people would suffer most if we voted for Brexit.
A group of disabled pro-Remain peers wrote a letter to The Times declaring that Brexit would cause ‘an unravelling of decades of progress that would not have been made if it were not for Britain’s membership of the EU . . . after many years of progress, disabled people will be banished to the margins of British life once more’.
As with the claim that our animal welfare is reliant on being a member of the EU, this was contemptible, scare-mongering nonsense. In 1970, before we even joined what was then the European Economic Community, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act was introduced, the first in the world to assign particular duties towards those with disabilities.
This was succeeded by other purely domestic pieces of legislation, notably the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 and the Carers and Disabled Children’s Act of 2000 ( the latter being of particular relevance to my family, as our younger daughter has Down’s syndrome).
Those who think the EU has some essential and irreplaceable role in the protection of disabled children should go to Romania or Bulgaria, and see how much EU membership really ‘guarantees their rights’.
This doesn’t mean that, as a nation independent of the EU law- making machine, we will get everything right. Our Parliament will be quite capable of passing foolish laws, without any assistance from Brussels.
But the idea it will become less sensitive to the concerns of the British people — and therefore more hostile to animal welfare — is for the birds.