An extraordinary open letter appeared in the Guardian on October 12th. Signatories included 12 retired judges, 102 QCs, 29 partners and directors, 24 law professors, 127 barristers, 24 solicitors and 23 law academics. It called on the government to do more to help the EU attempts to aid the refugees making their way to safer European shores. Specifically it called on government to do four things:
- take a fair and proportionate share of refugees;
- help establish safe and legal routes to the UK as well as the EU;
- help establish safe and legal routes within the EU, including the UK;
- help establish access to fair and thorough procedures to determine eligibility for international protection wherever it is sought.
Of course our more responsible journals were a tad discommoded and wasted no time in putting the truth out there:
Luvvies and lawyers should shut up about the Syrian …
Fury after judges tell Cameron to take MORE refugees
So this dastardly attempt to sway right-thinking Brits can can be safely ignored, thank goodness.
However, in what can only be seen as a conspiracy, another far left radical group then weighed in. Apparently in September 84 bishops signed a letter to our leader (Diddy David) asking him to increase the number of refugees we will take (over 5 years) from 20000 to 50000 and offering to mobilise the church in a national effort to provide accommodation. Government’s response to the crisis (and the letter, which received a cursory acknowledgement) was described as ‘increasingly inadequate’. The bishops letter letter also had a four point plan (more evidence of conspiracy I think) and referenced this country’s ‘great tradition of sanctuary’, calling for a drawing together of ‘civic, corporate and government leadership to co-ordinate efforts and mobilize the nation as in times past’.
Fortunately our free press were on hand again:
Conservatives criticise bishops for attack on Syrian refugee …
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”?
The Second World War saw huge movements of displaced people fleeing conflict. We generally focus on local, that is British or, at best, European issues, but these movements took place on every continent. In Burma, for example, 600,000 people were displaced when the Japanese invaded and as many as 80,000 of them died (the total displaced across the world during the conflict is estimated as anything from 11 to 20 million. Of course that was wartime wasn’t it and this is different….. except……
Wars, conflict and persecution have forced more people than at any other time since records began to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere, according to a new report from the UN refugee agency.
UNHCR’s 2014 Global Trends Report: World at War said that worldwide displacement was at the highest level ever recorded. The number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago. In 1945 the world population was around 2.3 billion compared with 7+ billion now so we have proportionately as many refugees world-wide now as we did then but not much sign of the kind of efforts seen then to address the problem.
Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest.
UNHCR, June 18 2014
Media reports now in the UK are focusing on a hardening of attitudes in countries like Germany, and that allows our benighted government, smugly looking on from the sidelines, to think they got it right. I suppose they did, as long as we are able to ignore the terror, pain and suffering of those the UK government has elected not to shelter. Our leader calculates that his refusal to join an EU-wide initiative will prove a useful demonstration that he is someone who cannot be bossed by Europe and spike UKIP’s guns more effectively than poor old Teresa managed to do in her conference address (described as ‘thoroughly chilling’ by the Refugee Council and ‘irresponsible’ by the Institute of Directors (another looney-left group).
There was plenty of bigotry and racism around in the 1940s as a glance at the Mass Observation Archive will quickly reveal (try ‘Private Battles, how the war nearly defeated us‘) and there’s plenty of evidence in on-line threads on the current crisis to show those qualities are still around (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/refugee-crisis-governments-inadequate-response-attacked-by-church-of-england-a6699166.html).
Best to leave the last word to actor Juliet Stevenson:
‘History will judge us and our response to this crisis. Many people feel ashamed to be in a country where we say we will only take 20,000 over five years….your house is being bombed this week, you are living in a refugee camp where typhoid is rife – it is no good to say we will come back in five years.’
