The booze that floods the Channel

As Customs officers turn a blind eye to vanloads of cheap French beer and cigarettes crossing the Channel, ordinary citizens like Dan Ehrlich can end up feeling victimised

WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING FOR?

HM Customs & Excise say emphatically that they are not interested only in drugs. A spokesman remarked wryly that, if a middle-aged businessman travelling alone, particularly from Amsterdam, was stopped and searched, it was as likely that officers were looking for pornography. (They are concerned also, of course, about firearms, explosives, household pets, enangered species, certain plants...) And you can break the duty-free rules with impunity, only inasmuch as you can break any rule with impunity - it is a matter, merely, of not getting caught. Be warned: there are people in ports and aboard ferries, watching for cheats: anyone making a series of cross-Channel journeys for duty-free goods risks seizure of those goods and an on-the-spot fine.

Ferry companies themselves are increasingly alert to scams, and are introducing tighter vending controls. Some will ask to see, and stamp, your boarding card. If anyone asks you to swap cards with him (for a modest consideration) you will know why.

Most bootlegging is small-time, and involves duty-paid goods, particularly beer and rolling tobacco, where the greatest profits are to be made. In some cases a car or van may be confiscated, and the worst offenders could wind up in court.

The death knell for duty-free sales was sounded in 1993 with the introduction of the single market. Britain begged for a stay of execution until 1999.

For now, if you are travelling within the European Union, you can pass through the green channel with a personal allowance of 200 cigarettes, or 100 cigarillos, or 50 cigars, or 250g of tobacco; 2 litres of still table wine; 1 litre of spirits or strong liqueurs; 2 litres of fortified wine, sparkling wine or other liqueurs; 60ml of perfume, 250ml of toilet water, and pounds 75 worth of all other goods, gifts, souvenirs.

White, middle-aged American men too old to pick up women in wine bars, but too young to qualify for a pension, wearing faded jeans and deck shoes, and carrying overnight bags ... these people, to judge by my experience of HM Customs, are prime drug-courier suspects.

Had I been wearing more "respectable" clothes and lugging a couple of large team bags brimming with three times my legal allowance of duty-free booze, I doubt that the boys at Dover would have stopped me.

Dover, Britain's busiest port, has two main problems - scandalously poor public transport in and out of town, and being the first stop for massive amounts of black-market booze ... much of it, I fear, being sold right in White Cliffs County.

I have been a legal resident here for 20 years. For the past three, I've been berthing my 24ft bateau a voile in Calais, mainly because, even with ferry fares, it is still much cheaper than English marinas. During summer, I travel to and from France two to four times a month. Yet it wasn't until this summer, my US passport crammed with Dover stamps, that HM Customs began stopping and searching me, even though it was obvious that all I was carrying was dirty and often less-than-aromatic laundry. In fact, as a lowly foot passenger, I have been stopped and searched on four of the past five trips. The one time I wasn't stopped it was lunchtime, and there were no Customs agents about.

The last time, anger bubbling over, I pointed out that, while innocent people such as myself were being hassled, several other travellers were walking through the arrivals hall, overburdened, for all we knew, with all manner of contraband. "We're looking for drugs," was the reply from the familiar agent.

Hard drugs, it seems to me, are all the Government is after, in the realisation that it is a lost cause to try to catch people in cars and lorries loaded with drinks and smokes for sale on the multi-million-pound black market - tax money lost to the Government and the people. This is clearly the case in Dover.

If you walk around this town for long enough, you can't help spotting a few things that arouse your suspicion, such as unmarked Transit vans unloading case after case of Fosters and Skol beer at pubs. Only two days before my most recent stop-and-search experience, I spotted a large white van being loaded brimful of Fosters and Stella Artois from a motor spares van. With five companies now taking people to and from France on or under the sea, the competition for passengers is intense. Business analysts doubt if all will survive. And while the Channel Tunnel may have caused increased unemployment within the shipping industry, it hasn't stopped ferry firms and the ports of Dover and Calais from actually expanding their facilities to meet the Chunnel challenge.

Alert to the changing nature of customs control, the cross-channel ferry companies seem now to have taken duty-free drinks and tobacco into a competitive battlefield. All advertise special deals involving double a single person's allowance. Sea France Ferries currently has one-for-two booze and smokes on offer. And, on some ferries, on the return journey, all you have to tell the cashier as you display your two litres of whisky and two cartons of cigarettes is, "I'm buying for two" and they let you through.

But nothing prepares a normal person for the daily, apparently legal abnormality that occurs at the Hoverspeed terminal. When the weather is decent, there's no quicker way to cross the Channel. As duty-free punters know - and as Hoverspeed knows the punters know - it can take as little as 30 minutes.

A "French Flyer" is not a sex aid, but a ticket to paradise for hundreds of people every week who pick up their duty-free allowance on an outward crossing, pick up a second allowance on the return journey, then go back for more, and so on, all day.

They park their cars and vans at the Hoverport. Often, they work in teams, legally buying double or treble their permissible double allocation. Hoverspeed offers French Flyer tickets on either a reserved booking at pounds 8, or a standby at pounds 5. It has become so popular, a special French Flyer ticket booth now operates alongside the car park, where people queue for standbys.

The game can work this way - you and your mates make an initial pounds 8 booking. You cross to Calais with one load of liquor, beer and cigarettes, then head back with a second. While your mates are loading the goods in your van, you queue for a standby ticket. They follow. It may take one or two hours, or no time at all. The lucky ones on a slow, off-peak day, can make several return half-hour journeys.

But after a hard day's work, you can literally have a van filled with cases of legally purchased booze and smokes, ready for illegal sale. The bulk of the traffic appears to be in premium beers sold at less than the low French hypermarket prices. Each member of a team can carry back eight cases per trip.

So, there I am, once again being harassed by HM Customs, who are trying to find the hidden dope compartment in my overnight bag to come up with nothing more illicit than a few bars of addictive chocolat noir. They tell me I have the look of a drugs runner, at which time I point out that, if I wanted to bring dope into the country, all I would have to do would be to sail my boat back across and into any number of British ports, including Dover, and, so long as I didn't pass through the arrivals hall, there would be no one to greet me.