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“It’s the right thing to do” – the politicians’ mantra to justify policy
When Home Office minister Baroness Williams and the French Ambassador to the Court of St James assured us that the demolition of the Calais refugee camp (“the jungle”) would not begin until all the children there were safeguarded, many people of goodwill believed them. Moreover, at a higher level, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and her French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, also apparently agreed that children must be protected.
Yesterday’s Guardian report shows these promises to be empty words. Instead, children were abandoned,
“lured out of … the camp in the afternoon with the promise of transport to a reception centre where they could be assessed for asylum or reunification with families in the UK. However, after an hour, no bus had arrived. Police units emerged in force, with riot shields, teargas and taser guns, and began to kettle the group, pressing them into a side street in an industrial estate. Some of the refugees were in tears as it appeared that they would be sleeping on the streets again.”
Once news of this began to circulate, a badly acted charade took place, as Amber was said to have called up Bernard and told him that the children had to be “properly protected”.
Tell that to 16-year-old Hussein from Darfur, where he had already spent five years in a refugee camp. In Calais, after queuing before dawn on three successive days,
“he never made it to the head of the line to be processed, and on Wednesday night became one of the estimated 200 unaccompanied children left to sleep rough. Now he faces a second night in the grass with temperatures dropping and despondency setting in.”
Tell it to the despairing kids being helped by charity workers:
“An atmosphere of despair among charity workers was mirrored by the behaviour of the children, all aged approximately 14 to 17, some of whom huddled against the wall in blankets as the temperature plummeted. One Afghan teenager, wrapped in a yellow and green sleeping bag, said: ‘Fuck France, Fuck Britain. You are racists.’ He was in tears as a French volunteer tried to console him by asking him not to be angry with aid workers. He retorted: ‘You didn’t have to sleep on the side of the road last night – you have documentation, you have money. Fuck France.’”
The boy has insight. “No French or British officials were on the scene with the children,” says the report. Of course they weren’t. The agreement to protect between diplomats and politicians is a charade. Their intent is to punish, and to discourage others. That was David Cameron’s intent when he withdrew support from the Italian-based rescue operation in the Mediterranean in the days of the Tory-LibDem coalition. The song that was sung then was that these people must be taught a lesson – that they will die if they come to Europe. Stop rescuing them. We must let them drown.
It’s the same story now. Punish the kids who came, warn future migrants: “Don’t come here if you’re persecuted, or bombed out of your home or even out of your hospital. We don’t want you.”
You see, despite having earlier agreed, unwillingly and under strong pressure, to bring a tiny proportion of the children into the UK, what’s happened to these remaining kids in Calais is not a mistake or down to bad organisation. It’s deliberate. It’s policy. “It’s the right thing to do.”
And if you don’t like it being done in your name, tell your MP to object. Now.
Here’s the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/27/calais-camp-minors-children-abandoned-uk-france-human-rights?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=196826&subid=12991040&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
EU 2: You will be voting against migrants whichever way you vote
How to vote in the referendum if you support a humane response to the current migration crisis? Many in the No camp sound like they just want to “secure our borders” and keep the migrants out. But if we want a humane response what do we do?
In 2014, when rickety boats filled with people fleeing war and persecution began to sink, dragging their passengers to the bottom of the Mediterranean, or their bodies got washed up on the nearest shore, there were some who shouted, “Close the borders”. The Tory-led coalition (really the Tories dragging the pathetic so-called Liberal Democrats behind them) said, in effect, “Let them drown” and withdrew its support for the Italian-led rescue operations. Under pressure after this common Tory gut reaction Cameron said they would take in a tiny number of refugees – but not from the Mediterranean. They would take them from the refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere. Because, you see, people contemplating a journey across the Mediterranean had to learn a lesson: “Don’t set out in the first place.” So when, predictably, the drowning continued, presumably the Tories thought, “Don’t come whining to us – it’s your own fault.” By April 2015 there were fifteen times more deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean that year than in the whole of 2014.
More recently, during the crisis in Calais, in the camp called “the Jungle”, Cameron seems to have been forced (through actual or threatened legal action in the courts) to concede that at least some children there, with family in the UK, have the right to come here. But he’s done bugger all about it and most of them are still in Calais.
It’s arguable that if we vote to leave the EU we will be turning our backs on desperate people and putting their fate in the hands of a politician (whether Cameron or Boris Johnson) who would let migrants drown, let them rot in the garbage of Calais or send them packing back to where they came from.
So what would we be doing if we voted to stay in the EU? Other EU states seemed at first to be different. Germany took large numbers of refugees and there was talk of sharing responsibility across the EU states. But many were reluctant from the start, they couldn’t agree how this might be done and they began to squabble amongst themselves. So there was deadlock and some of them began to close their borders – those borders which, under the Schengen Convention, were the pride and joy of the EU, open borders within the Union. Another cry went up: “Schengen is finished.”
For those who don’t like the EU because they don’t like foreigners this is good news. For them the EU is finished, and good riddance. For those who hoped that the EU would provide a humanitarian solution it is bad news. So how to vote? Jeremy Corbyn is still optimistic as, on behalf of the Labour Party, he argues to vote Yes to the EU:
“‘There has to be an agreement all across Europe that [the EU states] all take a proportion of [the refugees],’ he said. ‘The problem is that the degree of inward-looking politics that’s going on has meant that Greece is making a huge effort, Italy is making a huge effort and Germany is making a huge effort. Every other country is putting barbed wire entanglements along their borders to keep desperate people out … Surely in the 21st century the least we can do is reach out and try to help these people in some way; by the political solution in Syria; by the support for what the Greek government is trying to do and take a proportion all across Europe.’”[1]
That, presumably, would be the policy if there was a Labour government. But yesterday the French began to bulldoze the people in Calais out of their makeshift homes. The French had originally said that the process of moving people would be done by gentle persuasion over many weeks, not with force or violence, not with bulldozers. The French Minister of the Interior spelt this out only last week: the government’s plan, he said, was not “to carry out a brutal evacuation of the camp by using bulldozers, this is not how we operate.” But yesterday the bulldozers appeared and the destruction began.
On Channel 4 News last night Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador to the UK: “Why did you say ‘no bulldozers’ and then use them?”
Bermann: I think we are using bulldozers to clear the camp, not to force all these migrants to go.
Guru-Murthy: But you said you wouldn’t.
Bermann: Well, our ministers said we wouldn’t force people to go, but at the same time what I cannot understand is – well, your reporter said it was filthy, stinking conditions. So how could you consider it better to live in these squalid conditions than to be relocated in accommodations [sic] where you have water, heating, electricity?
Guru-Murthy: But you don’t have enough space. There are thousands living there and there aren’t enough spaces in the shipping containers. They’re not flats, are they, they’re shipping containers, where you’re suggesting they go and live in?
Bermann: They are temporary accommodations, that’s true, but some of them will be relocated in other camps in France.
Guru-Murthy: Can you guarantee every one of them a comfortable roof over their heads?
Bermann: They will be relocated, but conditions will be far much better [sic] than it was in the Jungle.[2]
At the end of all this ducking and diving, there was no answer to the question, “Why use bulldozers when you said ‘no bulldozers’?” But then Sylvie is a diplomat.
So referendum voters who want a humanitarian solution to the migration crisis aren’t going to get one, in or out of the EU. The Tories will close the UK’s borders either way; the EU states will do the same; and France, our nearest neighbour, will bring out the bulldozers at the drop of a hat despite its much-vaunted pride in being the home of human rights.
How to vote? With some difficulty.
[1] The Guardian, 29 February 2016.
[2] Channel 4 News, 29 February 2016.
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