by Jim Chimirie on X
Thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in a single day this week, many swimming around the border fence from Morocco. At least eleven bodies have been recovered. Spain has sent in the army. Residents describe it as an invasion.
Giorgia Meloni’s response arrived within hours. She spoke directly with her interior minister, convened the relevant government bodies, and said Italy was prepared to act with what she called extraordinary measures, including suspending the Schengen area between Italy and Spain. Her foreign minister went further, calling Madrid’s decision to grant citizenship to more than 500,000 irregular immigrants profoundly wrong, arguing it incentivises the trafficking that produced this week’s deaths. This is a government treating uncontrolled entry as exactly what it is: a threat to border security serious enough to warrant suspending free movement with a fellow EU member state.
Compare that to Britain’s government this same week. A French police officer told the shadow home secretary, on camera, that his standing order is to let migrants board dinghies and cross the Channel unimpeded. Up to 700 people crossed on a single day, close to this year’s record. Britain’s response was not extraordinary measures. It was £662 million paid to France for drones and patrols that, on the same week’s evidence, do not intercept a single crossing at the one point interception would work.
The contrast is not about resources. Italy is not a larger or wealthier state than Britain. The contrast is about willingness. Meloni looked at footage from Ceuta and treated it as a national security emergency requiring an immediate, visible response. Britain looked at a police officer confirming an order to wave boats through and produced a statement about ongoing cooperation.
Nobody should pretend suspending Schengen with Spain is a simple or costless step. It would restrict free movement between two EU states and carries real diplomatic weight. Meloni is choosing that cost anyway, because she has judged the alternative, unmonitored mass entry into European territory, to be worse. That is what a government weighing genuine trade-offs looks like. Britain has faced a comparable trade-off for years, between deterrence and the diplomatic discomfort of enforcing it, and has consistently chosen the discomfort of doing nothing over the discomfort of acting.