--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7247470.stm
I don't know what it's like for those of you who live in the UK, but from the point of view of we other EU residents, your country must be going through some weird shit lately, possibly weirder even than under Blair. You're now officially the most surveilled society on the planet. Each of you are filmed on the average of 80 times a day, on closed circuit cameras that have all been networked (even if they're private, on ATMs and the like) so that the government can use them watch everybody. And, as attested to by friends who tried to travel there recently from Spain, you're "cracking down" on tourists who overstay their EU tourist visas. A couple of friends who were a few days over the limit of their three-month visa flew into Britain for a few days' visit last week, prior to their return to the US. The officials at the airport looked at their passports and dragged them out of line, took all of their possessions away from them, and wouldn't let them call anyone. They put them in a locked detention cell with no beds in it overnight where they had to sleep on the floor with 20 other detainees stopped for similar tourist visa violations, and then put them on the next plane back to where they had come from in the morning. This was a married couple who were obviously well off. They were just passing through, and had unintentionally gone over the limit on their tourist visas because they had been having fun touring Europe, moving from country to country. Each time they did they got new stamps on their passports, and thought that that was sufficient to renew their three-month tourist visas. Trouble was they never traveled outside EU countries, and the new crackdown says that tourists have to leave the EU *completely* after three months. Everyone treated this way had "black marks" stamped on their passport records such that they will prob- ably have trouble traveling anywhere in the world from now on, because they have been officially deported from a country. As far as I know, even though the overstaying the tourist visas thing IS a larger EU concern, no other country in the EU is reacting like this and getting all gestapo on people's asses. So tell me, those of you who live there...what the FUCK is going on? Are you aware that this is the new policy and that mass deportations now seem to be the order of the day? My friends said that the scene at the airport and in the detention cell was like something out of the film "Children Of Men," and that they will never under any circumstances set foot in the UK again.
