(Via Instapundit) So, yeah, a British finger was probably hovering over the button that sets off the explosive charges in the Chunnel because of this one:
Invading migrants who stormed the Channel Tunnel in a desperate bid to break into Britain by force managed to get ten miles before they were caught, it has emerged.
A group of around 110 migrants, thought to be from Sudan and Eritrea, broke down security fences, pelted police with stones then made a dash for the tunnel in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The French eventually managed to stop the… well, it’s small to be an ‘invasion,’ honestly. ‘Reconnaissance in force?’ ‘Proof of concept?’ ‘Dress rehearsal?’ Anyway: I imagine that there are a lot of people yelling at each other in English and French right now. And wondering whether the English really did surreptitiously install explosive charges in the Chunnel. Or whether, even if the British didn’t, those charges can be quietly installed now…
By the way, this has happened before. What’s different here is that this action was a bit more comprehensive. The Daily Mail is claiming British anarchists; the Telegraph is a bit more measured, merely claiming that it was ‘coordinated’ and ‘organized*.’ How this ends is anybody’s guess; but the important thing to remember, of course, is that none of this would have happened if there had been anybody in the current administration with the nerve to sit the President down and gently tell him that you don’t go out and retroactively lose the war that your predecessor won for you. Or that you don’t call for the overthrow of a nasty regime and then neglect to do anything to follow up on that. Or any other of the twelve or so galloping disasters since 2009 that have directly spawned the resurgence of violent Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and Africa.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: If you’ll pardon the observations of an uncultured and proletarian Yank who has no business opining on European practices… Europe’s major problem in all of this is that they are betwixt and between. If the European Union really was the superstate of a Brussels bureaucrat’s fever dreams then they could have set an uniform border policy, made it stick, and processed this folk-migration in a more rational manner. And if the European union was instead merely a collection of sovereign nation-states they could each one of them set their own immigration policy, and not have to worry about anybody else’s. Instead, their current ‘migrant’ crisis seems almost designed to crash into the perennial problem that you never really know just who the heck is in charge of Europe at any given moment.
…Yes, it would be nice if we knew who was in charge of Europe at any given moment. It’s not nice to keep the rest of the world guessing. Forgive me for saying this, but: have the folks over there thought about maybe strengthening their half-a-nation-state in the traditional way? I’m sure that they could find a von Habsburg that’d be willing to take on the job.
*Well… ‘organised.’ British, you understand.
Fortunately, the recent ancestors of the British knew exactly how to deal with theses toes of situations.
Ready the maxim guns.
The historically correct phrase from the 1800’s Sudan is “Slosh them with Martinis.”
I believe there’s many gases that’d work nicely, even nonlethal ones.
No need for all that. The tunnel dips, yes? Fill the dip with dry nitrogen. Won’t bother the trains, they’re sealed. But it would make it very hard to walk through.