Thomas Jenkins, executive director, European Tour Operators Association (Etoa)
Cox & Kings chief executive Peter Kerkar bemoaned the treatment of potential visitors to Europe when speaking at World Travel Market last week.
“The problem has grown so bad,” he said, “we don’t count the passengers we send overseas, we count those rejected. We have cases where fathers and children of families are allowed in and their mothers not admitted. The humiliation is incredible.” For “incredible”, read “normal”.
That was on the Tuesday. Kerkar did not know that the day before two senior officials of the UN World Tourism Organisation, who were supposed to attend the same summit meeting, had been denied boarding on their London-bound flight from Madrid.
They had previously been told by the British Embassy that “as UN passport holders” they did not require visas to enter the UK. Having nonetheless paid an extra charge for immediate visa appointments, they had been told again that visas were not required.
It appears we have reached a stage where there is a need for an official document to prove that no official documents are necessary. This is what the UK does to visitors. Yet this incompetent, slap-dash, humiliation is small change.
Anybody involved in the travel industry, anyone who travels, will have been dismayed at the welcome at our borders. The UK leads the developed world in creating home-grown terrorists, yet we treat every visitor as a potential threat. Queues grow to grotesque lengths as palpably safe individuals have their biometric passports checked.
We were told these passports were “more secure”. Presumably this is why Israel’s intelligence service Mossad used fake British passports for an assassination: a backhanded compliment to the potency of the security industry’s public-relations machine.
The lines running in the “non-EU/EEA” section at Heathrow and Gatwick are invariably longer. Former UK Border Agency head Brodie Clark admitted this in his resignation declaration:
“This summer saw queues of over three hours (non EU) on a regular basis at Heathrow,” he noted. He went on: “I never once contemplated cutting our essential controls to ease the flow.”
So he was doing his job, presenting an image of a country deeply ill at ease with itself. With police wandering around with machine pistols, we look like a paranoid Third World dictatorship.
Home secretary Teresa May is not in trouble because of the outrageous events that now form part of the routine of arrival. She is running scared because someone (herself or someone working for her) decided to lighten border controls in order to reduce the queues.
Whoever took this decision ought to be standing up to receive applause. For the controls at our borders (like the departure controls at airports) are less to do with security than the appearance of security and official fear of the tabloid newspapers.
These measures are introduced because they can be. London, Paris and Madrid have all suffered catastrophic strikes on their underground lines. Victoria station handles a similar volume of people to Heathrow. But no controls are in place.
It is in the interests of border officials that they be staffed up. It is in the interests of security-equipment manufacturers that the latest gadgets are made available and used on visitors. And it is vital for these people to cite “security” to justify this waste of time and money and the damage to our national image.