Our EU leaders have had a summit on the Mediterranean disaster (see previous blog). A confidential draft summit statement has been leaked to The Guardian. Our leaders seem to have made a promise, or perhaps have set themselves a target: about 5,000 resettlement places will be offered to refugees who have survived the Mediterranean.

Sounds good? No. These are European politicians posing as benefactors. Because what it means, as The Guardian puts it today, is that

“the vast majority of those who survive the journey and make it to Italy – 150,000 did so last year – will be sent back as irregular migrants under a new rapid-return programme co-ordinated by the EU’s border agency, Frontex.”

Sent back. To the persecution, war, abuse and poverty that they fled from. Plus, the UK, and other European governments, will collaborate with their persecutors and abusers in their attempts to prevent their fleeing citizens from leaving. The EU will be “cooperating with the countries of origin” to this end. It’s not clear how new this is though. To their shame UK governments have for years been sending “Airline Liaison Officers” to “refugee-producing countries” to do this very job.

What else? EU governments will operate a new “rapid-return programme”, coordinated by Frontex. We’ve been here before too. The UK Border Agency has long had a fast-track system which gets refugees through the asylum-application process at such a rate of knots their feet hardly touch the ground. That’s the point of it. There’s little chance that their asylum applications will get what Home Office propaganda calls “a fair hearing”. There’s no time for that. Just go, is the message. The result has been that many have returned to imprisonment or death.

One more thing. The EU summit statement will try to assure us that search and rescue efforts will continue, despite the abandonment of the earlier system last year. It will say that the EU is to increase the funding of the existing border-survey operation (Triton) and that this “should increase the search and rescue possibilities within the mandate of Frontex.” We may not be persuaded, particularly since the head of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, has made it quite clear that, in his view, “Triton cannot be a search and rescue operation.” He continued:

“I mean, in our operational plan, we cannot have provisions for proactive search-and-rescue action. This is not in Frontex’s mandate, and this is, in my understanding, not in the mandate of the European Union.”

So that’s about it, really. Except, perhaps, for the intervention of a joint letter to EU leaders. It’s signed by more than 50 former European prime ministers, former foreign ministers, and others. It calls for an increase in search and rescue operations, “with a mandate and a level of funding that match the humanitarian emergency that confronts us.”

Fine words. Chris Patten is one of these former persons. He is a former EU commissioner and a former Tory Party chairman. He says that the EU leaders should address “the drivers of migration, from conflict to human trafficking, climate change to human rights abuses.” The trouble is, Chris, none of you former government persons ever seriously set out to “address” any of those issues when you had the chance. That was your failure. So your letter and your advice are nothing but hypocrisy. Please go away.