Why blame the driver?
Page 6
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Picture the scene if you will. Tony, Cherie and the kids step ashore at Dover after a fortnight's holiday in Tuscany. "Just a minute, Sir," calls an Immigration Officer. "We've just found 16 Albanians in the back of your caravan. Didn't check they were there? That'll be £32,000."
Not very likely, is it? Not for a Prime Minister anyway. But for any British truck driver returning from the Continent it's a lot closer to the truth than we care to imagine. What we can't understand is how the whole procedure will work. Sixty days to pay, and 30 days to appeal—if you can prove you checked your vehicle properly.. .the appeal tribunal will be inundated.
Meanwhile, no one has yet worked out how to deal with the people who are putting all these illegal
immigrants into the back of trailers; namely, the organised criminals on the other side of the Channel who are trafficking in human misery. Instead of fining British operators, or making them pay private companies to "sanitise" their wagons as they leave the Continent, every time an illegal alien is found in the back of a truck at Dover we should deduct £2,000 from Britain's contribution to the European Union.
And we should keep deducting it until the authorities on the Continent, and especially those around Calais, start doing their job. After all, if British Customs and Immigration officers can find all these illegal immigrants on British wagons, why the hell can't they?