Watching a news report (from Oz probably a BBC one) on the blockade and the immigrants trying to get over the border. The stereotypes are all in there..

Brit Couple in camper van – probably Daily Mail readers, they locked their doors in case they got flooded by immigrants.
Calais Mayor – Channeling cross channel hatred and how the Brits have disdain for Calais
Brit BMW driver – as guys are trying to climb into the back of the truck trying to tailgate closer to make sure he gets them if they fall off the back

I feel for the Truck Drivers.
Can’t do much apart from being caught up in something you have no control over.

Five Live this morning went with the posh couple most put out that the tide of human misery, combined with tardy, uppity French lefties had spoiled their trip to their holiday home.

How frightful!

bikebouy – a mate is a HGV driver. They’ve been ordered not to stop, for any reason, within 60 miles of Callais

binners it’s good to see somebody put some perspective on these things. I’m sure plenty would be happy to go camping in Calais

British police where advising all motorists to lock their doors.

Calais mayor has mainly been saying Britain should be forced to adopt the Shengren Agreement (which we opted out of) so that all thes eimmigrants can pass without checks into the UK – fact chance. UK will be reminding her it was stupid France who signed up and she should be complaining to her colleagues in the South and East who just wave these people through.

I assume BMW driver was tailgating the lorry to try and stop the migrants running after the trucks and opening the doors

UK press reported French police attempts to stop migrants was pretty half hearted

I’m pretty glad I came back Monday night as otherwise I would have been stuck there. Some pretty furious French at St Pancrus apologising to the UK and saying what a bad image this gives of France

French TV had hardly any coverage of the migrants, just the tyre burning blocking the motorway and train tracks

As an aside I wonder how the migrants got into the actual tunnel, broke in or let in ?

I assume BMW driver was tailgating the lorry to try and stop the migrants running after the trucks and opening the doors

From the film was just driving like a [insert term for BMW driver]

I assume BMW driver was tailgating the lorry to try and stop the migrants running after the trucks and opening the doors

Why is it you can just open the doors?

Brit Couple in camper van – probably Daily Mail readers, they locked their doors in case they got flooded by immigrants.

Fantastic insight and analysis there Mike !

What would you do ?………..consult the Guardian ??

I can’t understand why the doors of the trucks are unlocked.

Also looking at the TV footage it seemed to me that there were one or two individuals amongst the refugees who seemed to be taking a distinctly supervisory role, holding doors open, encouraging refugees, not jumping in and then closing the truck doors as they drove off. Who were they?

mostly just make a flippant comment, FWIW they looked and sounded like like your typical DM reader 🙂 not quite mounting anti immigrant guns on the camper but getting close

Brit Couple in camper van – probably Daily Mail readers, they locked their doors in case they got flooded by immigrants.

In their 60’s/70’s and unthinkingly racist. Could be my dad, though he said he was off to Slovenia for 3 weeks from Midi-Pyrenees area and he doesn’t read a paper often.

My brother was at the Gatwick sorting office last week and as they opened the back of the lorry a bloke jumps out and scarpers.
Makes you wonder what his next step is. Must be like being an escaped POW. Does he hide out at night,what does he do for food?
Can’t imagine he has a welcoming host awaiting. Does he even know where he is?
If it was winter I don’t think he would last long.

What makes you think they were unlocked ? Bolt-cutters are probably high up on the list of must-haves for anyone looking to stowaway in a truck.

What’s so bad about France?

Some of the trucks were opening the doors, think they were fixed open so that they could see it was hard to get in and be spotted once they got into the tunnel compound. I’d guess most trucks were being searched/cleaned out before boarding.

Brit Couple in camper van – probably Daily Mail readers, they locked their doors in case they got flooded by immigrants.
Calais Mayor – Channeling cross channel hatred and how the Brits have disdain for Calais
Brit BMW driver – as guys are trying to climb into the back of the truck trying to tailgate closer to make sure he gets them if they fall off the back

Some great stereotyping and conclusion jumping from the OP.

I wonder what the people leaving Bradford for Syria think of all this?

Does nobody get irony here……

honestly looking from the other side of the world it was almost a good bit of Harry Enfield style characters

I can’t understand why the doors of the trucks are unlocked.

Most will be soft-sided, so saves someone tearing that – also containers have to be opened by many folk on their journey across the world so I guess it’s not as easy as ‘locking’.

But I’m sure someone who knows better will be along.

If France is such a fantastic place why do all these poor migrants try so desperately to get out. What a sad situation.

Who shuts the door after? Someone who doesn’t want to leave?

Does nobody get irony here……

honestly looking from the other side of the world it was almost a good bit of Harry Enfield style characters

No just the usual smuggery from a stereotypical expat 😀

looking from the other side of the world

And getting a full picture of what is going on 🙄

In a country where the National Front has 17% of the Presidential vote if I was not French/White I’d not be looking to stay. Also I’f I’d picked English as a language to learn/pick up I’d want to head there.

@Binners I’m very happy to not see that view in the mornings on the way to work

I worked in the haulage industry during the Kosovo conflict.

One Friday morning, I took a phone call from one of our drivers, who’d checked the load of his curtainside trailer to discover a family of Kosovan refugees in there. He did the decent thing, he fed them and gave them water before driving straight to the nearest Police station.

Wind forward to 2015 and it’s worth remembering the uncomfortable fact that we all need to consider here is that the behaviour of our governments and our need for oil has in part created a refugee crisis.

Apologies Pigface, I’ll retire from any discussion, it is possible to be aware of what is going on around the world without living there. I must make sure not to make fun of people on a TV report who looked like they were playing characters and performing rather than being themselves.

Makes you wonder what his next step is. Must be like being an escaped POW. Does he hide out at night,what does he do for food?
Can’t imagine he has a welcoming host awaiting. Does he even know where he is?
If it was winter I don’t think he would last long.

One of the attractions of the UK is that every nation in the world is already represented here and a refugee can be certain that once he’s made it to London he will be welcomed, sheltered and helped by others who came here before him. Amongst Africans for example family and tribal loyalty are far more important than national identity so shelter is guaranteed. This expectation is often a problem for small professional families in cities like Lagos, Kinshasa or Nairobi who find their house or apartment is a magnet for favour-seeking “relatives” who arrive from the country looking for shelter and a job in the big city. My British colleage who is married to a Nigerian gets pretty frustrated at the comings and goings of various relatives who turn up at his house.

Alongside this is Britain’s remarkable tolerance for people of different races or nationalities. Why do you think, for example, no refugee stops in the Balkans? Because you almost never see black people in countries like Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia where people are downright racist.

If France is such a fantastic place why do all these poor migrants try so desperately to get out.

Most of them speak English so the UK is the natural destination. They also believe the same myths about benefits that British racists do. And of course the migrant camps at Calais are a tiny percentage of the immigrants entering Europe.

Apology accepted

Why is it that everyone is so keen to come here and camp out in the off-chance they can hide in a lorry when they can freely pass into other European countries that are just as nice to live in – Belgium, Holland, Germany?

it wasn’t an apology Pigface… it seems the sarcasm filter is also broken in some regions

Some sort of alarm to go off when doors opened? Then just drive tell immigration people to take a look? A lot of food stuffs has to be destroyed when the immigrants get amongst it so not great for the drivers – fines too of course.

As above migrants are cutting open the doors/locks. Police advice is for lorries not to stop within 100km of Calais as the doors are getting cut open where-ever lorries slow down/stop.

If France is such a fantastic place why do all these poor migrants try so desperately to get out. What a sad situation.

These migrants are English speaking – they have travlled 1000’s of miles through many countries to try and get into the UK. Calais mayor claims it’s easier to work illegally in UK and the rates of illegal pay are higher than in France. Certainly everyone in France is obliged to carry ID whereas in the UK you can just blag the police and disappear again.

Large numbers of migrants in France, generally from French speaking African countries. There was a huge camp under a bridge in Paris they tried to clear recently.

Why is it that everyone is so keen to come here and camp out in the off-chance they can hide in a lorry when they can freely pass into other European countries that are just as nice to live in – Belgium, Holland, Germany?

You may enjoy vising those countries but as I wrote above, people there are a good deal less tolerant of foreigners than we are and the communities just don’t exist.

A bit like zippykona, we had warehouse staff open a truck and 7 souls ran out and legged it.

Upon realising they were in rural Oxfordshire, at a disused ww2 airfield, with nothing to see but fields and empty airfield, they came back to the hangar and office and asked for a brew and biscuits while we awaited the arrival of the police…! 😆

Why is it that everyone a small percentage of migrants are so keen to come here and camp out in the off-chance they can hide in a lorry when they can freely pass the majority settle into other European countries that are just as nice to live in – Belgium, Holland, Germany?

FTFY

You may enjoy vising those countries but as I wrote above, people there are a good deal less tolerant of foreigners than we are and the communities just don’t exist.

What absolute bollocks

My opinion of all these poor dehumanised, desperate people we see on these news reports is that

a) They’re demonstrating impecable logic by wanting to get the **** out of an area of the world over-run by brutal dictators or pychotic fundamentalist nut-jobs.

b) By the time they get to Calais they’ve not only made it across an entire continent, under their own steam, they’ve navigated thousands of miles of oceans and deserts before that

Perhaps these are exactly the kind of people we want coming to this country?

It’d be even better if we could run some kind of exchange programme, with clueless, don’t-know-they’re-born, BMW-driving middle class couples, whining about the delay in getting to their continental second home, going in the other direction, to give them a bit of ****ing perspective!!

yep, tone of BBC reporting about the marauding migrant mass also noted. Can we have some interviews please with individuals and their perspectives/experiences of geopolitics?

Story amplified when placed back to back with Queen having to temporarily move to one of her other palaces or some such.

So much for universal human rights.

Probably time for a bit of Wil Anderson on migrants
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wMd0tkSVu0[/video]