It isn't over

Three weeks ago we wrote that Ceuta was not a flood but a rupture at the single point where a foreign government holds the valve. The story has not ended. It has simply stopped being filmed.

This morning Spanish police cleared an estimated 4,000 people from the beach camp at Playa del Trampolín in a dawn operation. Three weeks of shelters built from reeds, rope and cardboard, gone by breakfast.

Nobody was deported. They were moved indoors — to a hangar at Loma Margarita, and to a car park at Loma Colmenar where tents have gone up. The director of the state reception centre walked among them telling people to stay seated and calm, and that this was a humanitarian operation rather than the removal many feared.

The clearance followed weeks of rising tension on the sand between different groups sharing it, including a mass brawl days ago that began over a stolen phone. Residents had complained. The far-right party Vox had spent days pressing the city to use its beach bylaw banning camping, so the camp could be removed on public-health grounds rather than through immigration law.

Read that again, because it is the tell. To clear a beach the authorities reached for a municipal bylaw about tents. The immigration powers either did not work or would not be used, so a rule written for holidaymakers did the job instead.

Meanwhile the border itself has not closed. Last Saturday Moroccan police arrested 111 people attempting the same crossing, after fresh calls circulated on social media for another mass attempt. Spain has installed a maritime barrier and shipped in police from the mainland. Morocco keeps more than 20,000 security personnel on that border every day, at a cost of hundreds of millions.

That is what a rented frontier costs, and it is not a solution. It is a standing bill for holding back something nobody has any intention of resolving.

The final figures for July have settled higher than first reported: more than 72,000 people crossed, and at least 96 died.

The camp is gone. The cameras have moved on. Roughly 5,000 people remain in a city of 80,000, now housed in a hangar and a car park while the state decides what it is willing to do — which so far is neither to admit them nor to remove them, but simply to move them somewhere less visible.

That is the European asylum system in one morning's work. Not cruelty and not kindness. Just the tidying away of a problem that nobody in office intends to answer, until the next call goes out on Facebook and it all happens again.