Brexiteers are blaming the EU for wrecking their holidays

The sun is out, shortly to be followed by the Conservatives. Both these things are reasons for rejoicing, though we might have to wait a while yet for the latter. In the meantime, the former brings with it immediate thoughts of a rapidly approaching summer and of the long, lovely European holidays soon to come.

Yet even as we mentally stretch out our bleached-white legs on the hot plastic of the continent’s sunbeds, there is trouble ahead from the Europeans themselves. Or as the Brexity Daily Mail, the Brexity Daily Telegraph and the Brexity MP David Jones (Clwyd West) would probably say, a Spaniard in the works.

All three have noticed that 2024 will be the final summer before the EU’s Entry/Exit Scheme (EES) and Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) come into play. These will force British tourists to fill in extra forms and give biometric data before we are allowed to share our unique language skills (in the sense that we’re only skilled in one language) with the rest of Europe.

It is, of course, an outrage. “New EU rules could kill the Channel Tunnel dream”, raged the Telegraph, reporting that, 30 years after the Chunnel opened, “the average time of processing a car at Folkestone will rise from less than a minute to up to seven minutes, and Ashford Borough Council in Kent has warned of possible 14-hour delays at Dover port”.

The Mail moaned that an “EU plan to make Brits scan their fingerprints and take their photo at the border is likely to cause travel chaos for UK holidaymakers” and claimed “queues at the UK-France border will at least double”. The paper also revealed that Rishi Sunak had intended to bring all this up on a phone call with Emmanuel Macron the other day, but had ended up talking about other things instead. And when Rishi Sunak is not 100% bang on top of his brief and delivering for Britain, you KNOW things are serious.

Jones, a member of the European Research Group who thankfully at the time of writing had yet to defect to Labour, made his disgust clear in an appearance at a Commons committee. He droned of the schemes: “One would have thought, even given the tensions that have arisen as a consequence of Brexit, that they [the EU] would have got over all that by now, internalised it and decided to treat this country with respect.” It was left to more sensible heads to explain that this wasn’t “a question of the EU treating the UK differently” but of visitors from all non-EU countries having to adhere to the new border processes.

New border processes that are, in fact, exactly the same as the ones used by our American friends, which to have not been the subject of protests by the Mail, the Telegraph or David Jones MP. And new border processes that the Mail, Telegraph and David Jones MP might be rather keen on if they were done by Britain to keep out “undesirables”.

But the EU taking back control of its borders? Perish the thought!