This afternoon, Heidi Alexander (Labour MP for Lewisham East) asked David Cameron a question. She deplored the fact that people have drowned in the Mediterranean “because they are simply fleeing war, violence and poverty”, and she continued: “Is the reason why the UK is failing to take its fair share of refugees because this government finds human suffering easier to bear if it is just made someone else’s problem?”

In his reply David Cameron boasted about British rescue operations rescuing 4,000 people from the sea. (He failed to mention that British rescue operations only exist at all because the previous government’s policy of “let them drown” had caused such an uproar that he’d had to change it.) He then answered the question:

“But do I think that it is somehow a – the correct act to be part of a relocation scheme for people who’ve already arrived in the EU? No, I do not, because I believe it would add to the business models of the smugglers. So, you know, the idea that you can only have a moral, upright position on this if you take part in a European scheme that I believe to be misguided I think is just wrong.”

So, in fact, it’s worse than Heidi thought: he doesn’t actually want anybody to be relocated anywhere in Europe. Just sent back to the war, violence and poverty they fled from. He didn’t stop to explain how this puts him in “a moral, upright position”.

But he did apparently want to reassure us that he was in favour of cooperation and “taking part” in things when it really mattered. In answer to a question on the migrants in Calais, Cameron explained that he had had discussions with the French president about how we could help the French. We are going to spend money, he said. On what? Well, of course, “on providing fencing and other action, including sniffer-dog teams and the like, to try and help the French and work together with them to reduce the problems in Calais.”

So “let them drown” has been replaced by “set the dogs on them”. There’s progress for you.

Back to the Mediterranean migrants. Lest we forget.

The response of the previous government was to abandon rescue operations and let the migrants drown. The response of the present government is to send them back to the countries they fled from, increase the help given to those countries in policing their own borders and engage in military operations against the traffickers’ vessels. What the government doesn’t want to do if it can possibly help it is provide shelter for desperate people. It doesn’t want them here. As Chancellor George Osborne sees it:

“We are a humanitarian nation … But in the end you have to break the link that enables someone to get on a boat and then claim asylum in Europe and spend the rest of their lives on the European continent.”

All this is based on an old, worn-out background narrative of “They come over here to live off our benefits and steal our jobs and homes.” Plus, “If they can afford to pay the traffickers, they can afford to stay where they are.” Well, I can provide some answers to that one.

There was the case of a Kurd who had suffered political persecution in Turkey and was put in jail. He escaped – and his family, who owned a couple of shops, sold one of them to finance his escape to the UK in the 1990s. (The story, however, doesn’t end well: disgracefully, the narrative about benefits, jobs and homes had done its work in the minds of some and he was murdered while walking to his home on a Glasgow housing scheme.)

When I was researching the treatment of asylum seekers I met a woman from Côte D’Ivoire who, together with her family, had suffered political persecution at home. She was put in jail and, while there, needed hospital treatment. One of the doctors at the hospital turned out to be a friend of the family and he helped her escape from the hospital and arranged her journey to the UK, no doubt at some risk to himself.

I also met a computer engineer from Iran who had suffered political persecution. At his asylum interview in the UK his Home Office interviewer told him he was not a refugee but an “economic migrant”. He had made the hazardous journey on foot and by lorry not for asylum, said the interviewer, but “for money, for work”. The surprised Iranian replied:

“No. I was computer engineer [in Iran] and I had computer shop. Every month I [had my] salary – it’s about 600 dollars – and you can live just in bad situation in Iran, 300 dollars, you know. Every month I [get] 600, or more [than] that. But I leave Iran just for save my life.”

So he had paid the agent and escaped.

Sometimes people with little money to pay the agent are still trafficked, but the agent keeps track of them once they are here (there may be a package deal in which the agent has found them a job, knows where they live) and keeps tabs on them until the “debt” is paid. In cases like this, the trafficker may remain a threatening presence for years.

But however they manage it, people are still coming and many are still drowning. Some who survive their journey across continents and seas get themselves to Calais, hoping to get across to the UK. Last night, Channel 4 News reported (23 June) on how a ferry workers’ strike in Calais resulted in traffic jams of lorries on both sides of the Channel and on the opportunity this gave to desperate migrants. Waiting by the motorway, and faced with a traffic jam stretching back miles, hundreds of the migrants organised themselves into a great cooperative operation. Too often in the past, much of the news media have portrayed the migrants as a disunited rabble, fighting among themselves. There was no sign of that last night in Calais, just mutual help, brilliantly undertaken. Matt Frei watched as the migrants converged on the traffic-jammed lorries:

“Watch carefully. The trick is to run up behind the lorry and jump on with the help of your friend, preferably unnoticed by the driver. There is no shortage of trucks, no shortage of passengers, and no shortage of willing assistance: this is a truly communal effort.”

The UK government thinks nothing of the migrants’ desperation and despises their communal spirit. Its main concern is to keep them out. So if stowaways are found in lorries on arrival in the UK the drivers are fined £2000 per passenger. That’s why a lorry driver who spotted an attempt to board his vehicle jumped down and went to the back of the lorry to check inside, then closed the door.

The story tonight (24 June) was the same. Ali came from Syria, fleeing “war, torture, prison, kidnapping”. Crispin Blunt MP, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, when asked why Ali should be stuck in a camp and reduced to jumping on lorries, seemed to think Ali only had himself to blame. He could have gone to a UNHCR camp in Lebanon or Jordan. Ali didn’t get the chance to answer that, so we’ll never know why he didn’t take that option, if option it was. Blunt then said that, since the first “safe country” that Ali had passed through was Turkey, he should have applied for asylum in Turkey, because that was the rule. But Ali knew a bit about Turkey, perhaps a bit more than Crispin, and had already expressed his view: “Turkey is not a stable country,” he said. “Problems may happen at any time and they may kick Syrians out of their country.”

Ali had earlier told Paraic O’Brien that in Syria he had been a teacher and had studied English language and literature. His favourite Shakespeare play was Antony and Cleopatra. O’Brien finished his report by quoting some Shakespeare. I don’t know if it was from Antony and Cleopatra – but it was apt:

“Hark! The land bids me tread no more upon it. It is ashamed to bear me.”

For the news reports mentioned, see:

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/display/playlistref/240615

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.

There have been fifteen times more deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean so far this year than in the whole of 2014.

Migrants who make this hazardous trip do so in rickety, overcrowded, easily capsized boats provided by people traffickers. The migrants come from dozens of countries. On Channel 4 News last night a Gambian migrant in a camp in Sicily told Matt Frei they included Somalis, Gambians, Libyans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Nigerians. That wasn’t an exhaustive list. They are fleeing war, persecution, human rights abuse and poverty. They are looking for shelter, work, respect. Many of the survivors will head for Germany, Sweden, France and the UK.

In a camp in Calais an unnamed African migrant translated into English what he’d written in French on a whiteboard he’d set up by the roadside:

“We have altogether to learn to live together. Without this we will die altogether like idiots.” (« Nous devons tous apprendre à vivre ensemble … sinon nous allons tous mourir ensemble comme des idiots. »)

Paraic O’Brien asked him, “Why have you written that there?”

“Because”, he said, “I do it [for] people – they thinking we are animals, some people here think we are idiots, but we show the people here … that we are human beings, we are not animals.”

A year ago the coalition government, together with other EU states, decided to replace the search and rescue programme off the coast of Italy with a coastguard service. They did so, they said, because the knowledge that they would be rescued was a “pull” factor on migrants, encouraging them to make the journey. If the programme stopped so would the migration. The migration of desperate people didn’t stop – and the death toll rose: there were about 800 deaths this week.

Jon Snow took advantage of an election interview last night to ask LibDem leader Nick Clegg whether he “regretted” the government’s decision to abandon the search and rescue programme. Clegg replied: “I actually think, funnily enough, with hindsight that was not the right decision …”

I immediately wondered why he said “funnily enough” – I could see nothing funny about the subject or the way the interview was conducted. But, more importantly, he slipped the words “with hindsight” into his answer. Why, I wondered, did he need hindsight? Everyone concerned about the welfare of forced migrants knew it was a wrong decision as soon as it was made, and most of them said so out loud. Why did he need a year’s hindsight?

Anyway, having used hindsight to distance himself from his support of the policy, he then attempted to widen that distance: even if there was a return to the old search and rescue programme, said he, “that still doesn’t provide you with a solution – a European solution – to a very real problem.”

And what was that problem? It was

“thousands of people, in wretched circumstances, travelling huge distances, exiting ports in North Africa in the hands of illegal human smugglers and traffickers, and perishing on the high seas in the Mediterranean.”

So faced with that, what did the leading politicians in our oh-so-advanced European civilisation decide to do? They abandoned desperate migrants and left them to drown.

Jon Snow attempted to get Clegg to take some responsibility for his actions: “The issue is that you supported it, and the consequence is what we are seeing now.”

Clegg took another distancing step away: “No, no, no, that’s a nonsense. The idea that—”

Snow: And let them drown.

Clegg: No, that’s nonsense. I’m afraid—. I’m afraid they were drowning whether you had a search and rescue operation or not. The solution to this is not to be found at sea. That’s the point.

Ultimately, of course, that is the point. There are issues of economic development to be addressed. There is the question of Western support for dictators who keep their people poor and abuse human rights. There is the question of Western arms sales to such states, who then use them on their own people. There is the question of whether Western military intervention is ever a solution to international problems. After all, two of the countries from which the Mediterranean migrants come were invaded (Iraq) or bombed (Libya) by the West, with no thought given to what would happen afterwards. What happened was division, chaos, ISIL and increased forced migration.

But a year ago Clegg and his coalition didn’t address any of those issues. They didn’t even think about addressing them.

They simply decided to leave people to drown. Job done then, eh Nick?

Joel Hames puts this quote from The Tempest at the start of his novel Bankers Town, to be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00I53L4NQ 

I also think the politicians should take heed of these words:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1