Down in the far west of Cornwall are two Cornish communities about a quarter of a mile apart. One, down in the cove has always been a fishing community, the other up the hill, has always farmed. During the First World Way the men who volunteered or were drafted refused to serve alongside one another because they had never got on.
The world has shrunk a bit since then of course but the attitude still prevails especially when the going gets tough at home. In times of crisis we tend to emphasise difference; colour of skin, gender, faith (or lack of it), nationality, language and other things all allow us to hunker down into tribal animosity. Political parties, particularly on the far right, love difference; it gives them (and us) someone to blame. It’s a tried and tested technique; Hitler did it brilliantly . In the UK today the line is drawn between ‘hard-working families’ and benefit scroungers and benefit tourists and there is a strong lobby to cut foreign aid and look after those ‘nearer to home’. The truth is, I think, that the world’s problems are our problems and we can’t hide from them and prosper. That’s why I support Freedom from Torture, a charity which helps and supports victims of brutal and inhuman treatment whoever they are and wherever they come from. It’s not a popular cause in the way that animal and children’s charities are popular; most people don’t really want to think about the terrible crimes which are committed across the globe . This makes the charity even more important at times like these and I tell myself that every few pounds raised may make a difference to the recovery of a son or daughter or their parent.
It’s not easy for anyone to get into the U.K. these days and the initial experience of some refugees, already traumatised at the hands of brutal regimes or individuals, can be imprisonment in a detention centre.
I remember as a youth, sitting in the university common room reading ‘Time’ on Vietnam and thinking the world had gone mad. The most powerful country in the world was spraying toxic weedkiller, killing everything from jungle to subsistence peasants, all in the name of freedom. Mad then is a lot madder now. Fences to keep out refugees and an absolute bar on economic migrants (unless they’re very rich economic migrants) means, not gated communities keeping out the poor, but gated countries. Logically, in the end we’ll move from letting ‘them’ die to killing them. The Mail’s headline today (28th August ) read ‘Migrants: how many more can we take?’ The Guardian of August 10th clarified the ‘swarming’ that is claimed to threaten us:
Estimates suggest that between 2,000-5,000 migrants have reached Calais, which is between 1% and 2.5% of the more than 200,000 who have landed in Italy and Greece……In reality, the number of migrants to have arrived so far this year (200,000) is so minuscule that it constitutes just 0.027% of Europe’s total population of 740 million. The world’s wealthiest continent can easily handle such a comparatively small influx.
There are countries with social infrastructure at breaking point because of the refugee crisis – but they aren’t in Europe. The most obvious example is Lebanon, which houses 1.2 million Syrian refugees within a total population of roughly 4.5 million. To put that in context, a country that is more than 100 times smaller than the EU has already taken in more than 50 times as many refugees as the EU will even consider resettling in the future. Lebanon has a refugee crisis. Europe – and, in particular, Britain – does not.
Each asylum seeker in Britain gets a meagre £36.95 to live on (and they are not usually allowed to work to supplement this sum). In France, whose policies are supposedly driving up the numbers at Calais, migrants actually receive substantially more. According to the Asylum Information Database, asylum seekers in France receive up to £56.62 a week. Germany and Sweden – the two most popular migrant destinations – pay out £35.21 and £36.84 a week respectively, only fractionally less than Britain.
….the number of African migrants is significantly less than half (of the total). ……many of them – especially those from Eritrea, Darfur, and Somalia – have legitimate claims to refugee status.
Contrary to the perception of the UK as the high altar of immigration, it is not a particularly major magnet for refugees. In 2014, just 25,870 people sought asylum in the UK, and only 10,050 were accepted. Germany (97275), France (68500), Sweden (39,905) and Italy (35,180) were all far more affected. When the ratings are calculated as a proportion to population size, the UK slips even further down the table – behind Belgium, Holland and Austria. If the ratings were calculated on 2015 rates, then even impoverished Greece would rise above the UK in the table. Just as tellingly, the UK has welcomed just 187 Syrians through legal mechanisms at the last count. Turkey has around 1.6 million.
