The home secretary talks of ‘invasion’. Council leaders say Kent is ‘at breaking point’. But what’s the mood on the street in the town at the heart of the small boat crossings?
On a Sunday morning at the end of October, a short while after a man had driven to an immigration centre in Dover and thrown three petrol bombs at it, Peter Martin arrived at a nearby pub, his local for 60 years and a place he comes, he says, “eight days a week”. There were a lot of police about, he reports, and an ambulance at the petrol station at the end of the road where Andrew Leak drove after his attack, before apparently killing himself.
“He was obviously annoyed, as we all are,” says Martin, sitting on a bar stool, wearing a T-shirt that reads Keep Calm and Drink in the Cinque Ports, with L-O-V-E tattooed across the knuckles of one hand. Not that he approves of Leak’s act. Martin saves his anger mainly for the French government who, he claims, “are not doing enough. They don’t want [asylum seekers] in their country, so they’re not trying to stop it.”
