Comment by jakub_g
3 days ago
> It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey
Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...
This is because the UK doesn't have exit checks. They rely on airlines to submit the information to them.
I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...
The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left.
To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him.
That was it. Immigrated.
In 2014 I landed on either Heathrow or another London airport I don’t remember coming from Spain after a vacation
I read on a sign “travellers from Europe this way” and I thought ok my flight came from Spain I’m going that way … when I saw I was out of the airport with no immigration whatsoever
In hindsight it obviously meant if you’re European (which I’m not), I was in shock how easy someone could get in the UK !
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2 years ago I landed at London City (from Zurich), got off the plane and then we all walked all the way to the exit without being stopped by a single human to check passports or customs. I couldn't believe it.
I am not a British or EU citizen
20+ years of lighting our hair on fire over immigration and we still have no idea who is in the country.
Starmer addressed this a while back, accusing the Tories of campaigning on reducing immigration while actually running an experiment in open borders. Having made this statement, he then proceeded to do nothing about immigration himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2024/nov/28/keir-...
It seems to be a bipartisan thing in the UK to recognize that the electorate really doesn’t want immigration, and then not to fulfill the will of the electorate. Instead, the politicians use that will to accomplish unrelated goals like imposing a national digital ID.
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GCHQ has metadata on all digital communications - even among homeless and immigrant populations have near 100% mobile daily usage.
"We" surely have pretty good information about number of adults in the UK, and if the security services are worth their salt we know their names and associations.
Heck, the main supermarkets can probably tell you within a percent or two what the live demographics of the country are.
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> I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland.
Weren't the other borders with the Schengen area open, too? Eg if you take a small boat from England to Denmark, no one needed to check anything.
In the context of the issue that doesn't really make sense. The issue is that the home office think you left and didn't come back. How would an exit check tell the home office you have come back into the country?
In a country that has exit checks, in order to go airside, a border agent will stamp you out and record your exit. If you were to get stamped out and then decide that you don't want to catch your flight after all, you'd have to get stamped back in again (often not a real stamp these days).
In the UK there's no exit checks. The only information they have is that you booked a flight. This is "Advance Passenger Information" which all airlines are legally required to submit. They don't know if you've actually boarded the flight, they just assume that if you booked a flight that it means you left the country.
The exit check doesn't tell them that you've come back, they know that already unless you cross the land border. But it does tell them that you truly left and stop the guesswork.
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> Ireland dislikes the UK since the UK invaded it
This was centuries before the UK. The Normans came to Ireland by invitation of Macmurphy, King of Leinster, to help him restore his power, in exchange for promises of territory. This barely counts as a conquest CB, but with certainty not as an invasion.
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> The open border treaty was put in place because the alternative was either giving the territory back, or nonstop terrorism (look up the Irish Republican Army) until they gave the territory back.
The Common Travel Area's origins are in the the period 1923-1925[0], although it wasn't called that back then...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Travel_Area
this is a genuinely awful description of Irish history
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Speak for yourself, not the Irish.