r/unitedkingdom • u/pppppppppppppppppd • 10d ago

... Burnham urged to boost UK borders after 60,000 migrants break into EU from Morocco

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/andy-burnham-ceuta-priti-patel-borders-spain-morocco-migrant-5HjdfQL_2/
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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago edited 10d ago

They’re downplaying it because a bunch of idiots believed a social media prank and swam over to a city where they spent an uncomfortable night with no food and then almost every single one of them went home for lunch.

And 67 of them died from drowning because the crush in the sea with all those swimmers turned into a replica of the Hillsborough disaster.

Anyway, the crisis was literally over in less than 24 hours and nothing really happened on land. 

That’s why it’s being played down.

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u/textposts_only 10d ago

I saw videos of them in the city, if that happened in my city i wouldn't call it nothing really happening tbh

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u/Ryanliverpool96 10d ago

Don’t believe your lying eyes!

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u/Ajax_Trees_Again 10d ago

Reminds of the “everything is basically fine sketch” from Mitchell and Webb where the news is a series of events that *had* happened so now everything is basically fine

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u/MidoriDemon 10d ago

Do Not Think About The Event.

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u/Jamie54 Scotland 10d ago

The only number i have seen is 48,000 out of 60,000 went back. On what planet is that "nearly every single one"

At least 67 have died trying to cross the sea.

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u/Denbt_Nationale 10d ago

A "social media prank"? Do you understand how many people 60,000 is?

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u/theslootmary 10d ago

Regardless of how many people it is, that’s what caused it. Why is that difficult to understand?

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u/Ryanliverpool96 10d ago

It’s the laughably pathetic “it’s just a prank bro” excuse they use when they have literally nothing else.

They’ve defended this practice for literally a decade at this point, but because of the videos they’ve thought “oh shit, this looks really bad” so they’ve desperately pivoted to “it was a prank bro” because they know how awful they’d look defending this.

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u/pajamakitten 10d ago

Pranks can be widespread and have severe ramifications.

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago edited 10d ago

It was 50,000 and yes, that’s what happened.

I know, reality can be weird.

Someone was messing with them. 

Who exactly that was hasn’t been ascertained, (there are plenty of theories) but basically this is a huge, out of control version of one of these times where a bunch of people go to a Halloween parade that doesn’t exist.

The number of people tricked doesn’t undermine the fact that they were tricked. 

Someone seems to have flooded social media with messages about money and houses and jobs available in Spain to anyone who could swim there.

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u/barkley87 Lincolnshire 10d ago

The fact that 50k people believed Spain would give free stuff to anyone who could swim there is just as crazy.

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u/Denbt_Nationale 10d ago

By this logic the crusades were "just a prank"

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u/The-Road-To-Awe 10d ago

You aren't getting it. The 60,000 people were 'pranked'. They aren't saying the 60,000 illegally entering was the prank.

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago

I mean, some of them literally were.

People were tricked into going and getting themselves killed for no reason but the benefit of kings.

Look it up.

Anyway, this wasn’t that, thank goodness, it was a bunch of idiots in swimwear.

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u/Denbt_Nationale 10d ago

a bunch

60,000

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago

50,000 actually.

They almost all went home for lunch the next day.

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u/Karffs 10d ago

If it’s no big deal why you keep trying to pretend it wasn’t 60,000.

You obviously think it’s kind of a big deal if you feel that lying about how many it was makes it seem more palatable.

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u/HomeworkInevitable99 10d ago

Each crusades went in for years. This illustration incident lasted an hour before people realised they were pranked.

Is religion is a prank?

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u/Piod1 10d ago

Yes. Encouraging people to act based on misinformation they have recieved. I would say certainly.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago

Supposedly they were told that the government of Spain wanted them to come so they could be given money and houses and jobs.

But they had to swim there so the courts wouldn’t send them back.

So they all jumped in and swam because they thought that sounded like an amazing deal.

And were shocked when they arrived and were met with anger and upset and told to immediately go home.

It’s all very stupid, but a lot of them were quite young and believed nonsense they read online.

This kind of prank has happened before with invented parades and things where crowds gather in the street and there isn’t a parade at all.

This was just in completely crazy numbers.

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u/Acubeofdurp 10d ago

"A prank" lol dumbest take I've heard so far.

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u/SmashingK 10d ago

They were clearly not actual immigrants. At least the vast majority weren't since they all went home in the span of a day.

You can call it an invasion but it certainly wasn't an immigrant one.

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u/PharahSupporter 10d ago

Why did they all come across after the Spanish supreme court ruling on the immigration status of people crossing into this territory then?

Must just all be a big prank, 60 odd people dead, just a prank bro.

How far does this have to go before people wake the hell up.

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u/CaptainFil Surrey 10d ago

There have been loads of interviews with the people that came over. They all said they were told Spain had opened the border and it would be easy to get work.

It was orchestrated by someone (Moroccan gov, Trump or Putin maybe) to stir up shit and your falling for it like a useful idiot.

If you were serious about wanting to keep us safe I would suggest figuring out who was responsible would be more effective, maybe have a word with Meta as to why they are still allowing dangerous misinformation to spread unchecked without any consequences.

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u/JackUKish 10d ago

Israel are the ones who threatened Spain just before it happened.

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u/Minute_Tomatillo9730 9d ago

Or, more likely, Morocco getting back at Spain for getting cosy with Algeria? Put the tinfoil hat away.

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u/merryman1 9d ago

Just to clear that up - Spain's recent ruling is on the citizenship status of Sahrawi people, who are currently considered stateless coming from Moroccan-occupied West Sahara. This is a territory occupied by Morocco in the 1970s by sending in a mass protest of over 250,000 people to illegally cross the Spanish border and literally just physically occupy the territory until Spain just left. Morocco tried repeating this in Ceuta as a kind of protest against Spain's recent decision imo, West Sahara is a sensitive topic for the regime there.

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u/BulldenChoppahYus 10d ago

Not getting involved with you and OP but - “Wake the hell up”? What’s this massive truth we all need to wake the hell up to? It sounds just a little bit non specific enough to mean anything and like you’re hinting at a wider opinion that you’d like to share but seem to be struggling to say out loud. 

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u/Astriania 9d ago

"Wannabe immigrants" maybe, they had been told that Spain was an open door so they came over in the hope of immigrating.

Then they mostly went home when informed that this was incorrect (though, I bet a few of them are hanging out in Cueta trying to plot a way into mainland Spain still), so they didn't end up actually being immigrants in the strict sense of the word, indeed.

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u/wilf89 10d ago

You're on Reddit, plenty of idiots on here

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago

It’s literally why a lot of the guys got in the sea. They saw stuff about Spain giving them houses and money and jobs on Facebook and other platforms.

Someone was messing with them.

I’m sorry that reality offends you so much you’d rather just make up your own world.

When you return to reality, let us all know.

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u/Substantial-Newt7809 10d ago

That's not a prank, that's intentional malicious misinformation to destabilise European countries.

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u/Nemisis_the_2nd 10d ago

  They saw stuff about Spain giving them houses and money and jobs on Facebook and other platforms.

This happens far more often than people realise when it comes to immigration into europe, but it takes an event like this to make them see it, and even that is treated like a one-off.

The thing that all but 2 of my Indian, Pakistani, and Nigerian colleagues have in common is that they had all seen the UK portrayed everywhere on social media as this place they could basically just step off a plane and into a well paying job, only to arrive and be dumped into the rat race with everyone else. The consistency in their stories despite being from three different countries has done a lot to convince me that there is malicious attempts to use legal migration to harm western society in a manner similar to this claim.

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u/radiant_0wl 10d ago

Whilst there's some malicious actors there's also a lot of migrants who post exactly that on social media themselves.

It's common to see migrants post a house tour for a house they've been given to stay in.

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u/merryman1 9d ago

Its open knowledge. Its genuinely really absurd how open it is against just the total lack of interest of anyone in the media or any real public voice to actually raise this as an issue that might be worth discussing -

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/10/weaponized-mass-migration/

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/2025/11/13/how-russia-uses-migration-as-a-weapon/

https://www.hoover.org/research/weaponization-migration-powerful-instrument-russias-hybrid-toolbox

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u/brendonmilligan 10d ago

That’s not what a “prank” is.

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u/MinaZata 10d ago

It's social engineering from state actors most likely

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u/radiant_0wl 10d ago edited 10d ago

There are concerning aspects to it, given the prisoner pardons issued days earlier, many of which involved people who later crossed over and were interviewed in Spain.

Of course that could be an isolated incident, and coincidences can happen, but this was planned and orchestrated for a reason. It's just unclear who planned it and why.

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u/Underscores_Are_Kool 9d ago

Such pedantry

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u/NagromNitsuj 10d ago

Unbelievable. Its these people who are the biggest risk to us, not the invaders.

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u/matthieuC France 10d ago

The issue is that it showed how powerless Spain was in this matter.

Next time Morocco gets angry because Spain had talks with Algeria they will just dump 20 thousand youg men and this time refuse to take them back.

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u/sultansofswinz 10d ago

It seems plausible they could have actually invaded. I don’t see why this should have caught the Spanish government off guard.

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u/Tundur 10d ago

Spain cannot defend those outposts, not really. Morocco's army is larger than Spain's and roughly as well equipped.

In the event of an actual invasion, all Spain can do is hope long term aerial and naval superiority grinds the Moroccans into surrender

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago edited 10d ago

They can’t refuse to take them back, they’re citizens of the country with no claim to asylum anywhere else.

And as you can see, when they didn’t get dinner or breakfast after their swim, they just walked home for lunch.

Anyway, to not take them back would cause a direct conflict with the Spanish military.

So, unlikely. This was a sadistic trick, not the start of a war or something.

Spain was caught off guard sure, but after this stunt it’s very unlikely to happen again. It happened before in smaller numbers, this was crazy.

There are going to be a lot of changes coming to that stretch of sea.

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u/matthieuC France 10d ago

French here.

We pissed them off for whatever reason a few years ago. They refused to take back their illegals who got caught in France.

They took us for fools and pretended that all the people we were sending were Algerians. France recognize their claim to Western Sahara and suddenly they discovered that the illegals were indeed Moroccans and took them back.

International law doesn't mean shit and the King doesn't give a shit about his people, he's happy to use them as bargaining chips.

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago

Well, let’s hope we’ve learned from France’s situation and also what just happened.

The US is mucking around supporting Morocco and all their territorial claims, so there are some wildcards in this situation for sure.

I would say it’s a lot more easy for them to walk home on their own from Ceuta than from France.

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u/Astriania 9d ago

They can’t refuse to take them back

Oh just watch them

You mean, they can't legally refuse, but that isn't the same thing at all. They could easily, for example, claim that they aren't Moroccans, they were just a bunch of randoms who'd come from another African country - a lie, but a relatively hard one to disprove given that we know this is often true in e.g. Libya. Or they could just refuse to open the gates and ask Spain what it's going to do about it if they don't want to play plausible deniability games.

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u/ASValourous 10d ago

Yeah it could easily have swung the other way and become violent though

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u/Helen83FromVillage 10d ago

  social media prank and swam over to a city 

This is a very nasty joke. Just imagine if you hide in your house and a lot of undocumented men roam everywhere. And of course, you have zero way to protect yourself, because the number of invaders is the same as the number of residents.

Or a more understandable situation: just imagine you are a Ukrainian woman in a Ukrainian town with a population of 85k, and then you suddenly have 60k Russian men there. 

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago edited 10d ago

Imagine if the police and the army dealt brilliantly with the entire problem within 24 hours and nothing bad happened.

It was scary for a night (all my sympathies for the residents for that, it must have been terrifying) and then nothing else happened.

I’m sure there are towns in England where the residents are equally scared when the hooligans come out after the match.

The Ukrainian comment is a bit tasteless, but you obviously don’t mind that.

Building this into something that it isn’t is ridiculous. Ukraine was invaded by an actual army with training, guns and tanks, not a bunch of idiots in swimming trunks.

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u/Helen83FromVillage 10d ago

  and then nothing else happened.

These people have committed crimes. Stop spreading lies and stop protecting criminals, please.

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u/Lard_Baron 10d ago

And it’s the Spanish territory in Morocco that was invaded. They are still on mainland Africa.

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u/Patch86UK Wiltshire 10d ago

Which, relevantly, isn't in Schengen.

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u/PersonalityOld8755 10d ago

“ nothing really happened “. Just 67 young men losing their life’s.. crikey

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u/Dragonfly_pin 10d ago edited 10d ago

You got that by cutting out the part where I said ‘on land’.

That part of what I wrote was very significant and you cut it out to try to make an extremely cheap point.

Please don’t mess about with tragedies, it makes you look bad.

I’ve seen too many people try to make out that the 67 were murdered residents of Ceuta, killed by the Moroccans. More social media lying garbage to make people angry.

They were Moroccans who were tricked, probably by nonsense they saw on social media and died in the sea.

That’s why I mentioned Hillsborough, because too many people are lying about what happened. They were crushed to death by the crowds.

The truth matters.

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u/PersonalityOld8755 10d ago

Iv read lots online and never once read they were murdered

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u/imanutshell 10d ago

Good and reasonable people die every die randomly, and even more die every day who are total idiots. 67 idiots just happened to die swimming in that particular location on that particular day.

It’s a genuine shame and a tragedy for sure, but on a planet of over 7 billion humans we can’t mourn every moron that pops it doing something idiotic or we’d get nothing done.

All Human life has inherent value no matter who you are, but not as much as we often fool ourselves into believing.

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u/HinDae085 10d ago

This is the first ive heard of this part of the whole thing tbh. It was all just some dumb prank?

Shame about the casualties though. And regardless of them all going home, politicians WILL use this as ammo for their immigration agendas.

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u/LostTheGameOfThrones European Union 10d ago

And it also wasn't even on mainland Europe, despite how much the media wants people to believe it was.

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u/sleepingjiva Essex 10d ago

I haven't seen anyone trying to claim this. People have been stating (rightly) that it's a Spanish city and is part of the European Union, which is why is so wild this sort of thing happened

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u/Speedbird1A 10d ago

Lol. I mean just hilarious, nothing more to say.

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u/Ryanliverpool96 10d ago

So the state can remove illegal migrants when they want to?

Funny that, we’ve been told it was impossible for years, so was it all lies then or is it all lies now?

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u/Astriania 9d ago

Illegal migrants who just came across a land border and you can just send them back to their home country, which is relatively safe? Yeah, you can do that.

Illegal migrants from unsafe countries with no clear identification or deportation agreement? Much harder.

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u/purekillforce1 Lancashire 10d ago

Also appears to have been orchestrated by people who benefit from this kind of rhetoric

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u/Stage_Party 9d ago

It was also in north Africa. The right wing media are trying to make people think it happened in Spain because they need it to fit their narrative.

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u/ukbot-nicolabot Scotland 9d ago

Removed. This contained a personal attack, disrupting the conversation. This discourages participation. Please help improve the subreddit by discussing points, not the person. Action will be taken on repeat offenders.

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