A duty of rescue?
By Pete North - November 24, 2021
Professor Paul Collier’s book, Refuge, is a decent enough exploration of the issues, and last I read it, we were looking at dinghies between Turkey and Greece. Now it’s a little closer to home it warrants a re-read.
Collier has it that we do have a duty of rescue. He cites a case some years back when a child fell into a pond in a park and the two park wardens refused to help explaining that they had not been trained for such an emergency. The child drowned. Though, legally innocent, the wardens were morally guilty. That was the media and public consensus. Our common morality.
Collier goes further, saying rescue of the child is the bare minimum, but compassion dictates we provide food, warmth and shelter if the mother is not present. Who would merely abandon a shivering wet child by the side of the pond? The is the exercise of basic compassion which he transposes to the subject of refuge. We are to show compassion to those driven from their homes by war and oppression. They are forced to flee thereby we have an obligation to do what we can, where we can.
This analogy, however, does not hold on the matter of the Dover dinghies. These are people of means, paying smugglers, leaving a territory where they would be safe to another they simply prefer. This is not simply a child falling in a pond. These are adults with agency who choose to put themselves at risk, therefore obliging others to put their lives at risk. It’s calculated and deliberate blackmail. The very last thing we ought to do, lest we encourage more of it, is reward it.
We still have a basic human obligation not to let these people drown (though I don’t feel any great sorrow or remorse when some of them do), and one cannot blame border force patrols for not wanting to engage on pushback tactics which endanger everyone’s lives and could easily turn violent. Whatever the solution is, it cannot be this. I couldn’t do it. This is what separates Britain from the rest of the world.
At the same time, though, we’re not in the main rescuing hapless children. Some of them will be criminals (they already show a complete disregard for Britain’s borders) and some of them will be terrorists. Most are economic migrants seeking to establish themselves then bring in their families. The asylum system is used as a channel of permanent settlement which is not what it’s there for. We have a system for immigration and these are people who’ve elected to circumvent it.
This is why I am not persuaded by the argument that it’s “only a relative handful”. It doesn’t matter if it’s five or fifty thousand. Our immigration system, though it may have flaws, is designed to strike a balance between all stakeholders in an attempt to be fair, and to pay regard to the fact that the majority wants to see less immigration. For economic migrants to punch a hole in that system, thereby undermining the principles of it, cannot be tolerated.
Meanwhile, the NGOcracy tells us migrants are suffering from the “worst conditions ever” in the UK but makes no mention of the shanty towns in Northern France where there are zero provisions and French authorities periodically take great pleasure in bulldozing, driving more migrants towards Britain. If conditions in the UK for asylum seekers is suboptimal it’s because the system is already saturated and France is quite deliberately exacerbating the problem.
One wonders if part of the solution is to set up a large scale camp in Northern France, agree to part fund it, and take a quota of migrants, on the understanding that all dinghy arrivals are immediate returned and put to the back of the queue. That, though, means trusting the French to uphold their end of the bargain, which they probably won’t because migrants are leverage in all manner of blackmail. If France wants to destabilise a British government, it need only drive another wave of migrants into Northern France and turn a blind eye.
More to the point, any solution has to fly politically. If the Tories submit to French blackmail they will have a full blown insurrection on the right and lose out to anti-immigration parties who will not compromise on the issue. The ill founded expectation was that a Brexit government would dramatically reduce immigration. Though freedom of movement has come to an end, it was never the central problem. It isn’t Polish plumbers charging down Birmingham streets with machetes.
It was said that following Brexit there had been a softening of attitudes on immigration, but if that was real then it was temporary. Since Brexit we’ve seen a number of small and large scale atrocities committed by asylum seekers, some of them were even on the terror watch list. Meanwhile, though the courts are catching up on the backlog of historic grooming cases, there is reason to believe that it’s still happening and the attitude of local authorities is much the same. We have failed to properly integrate successive waves of migrants and the influx at Dover looks to be pouring more petrol on the bonfire.
As much as anything, the political class has done nothing to change attitudes. They volunteer Doncaster and Rotherham to house migrants and force overstretched councils to take unaccompanied children, and though the likes of Tim Farron would have us take in more, it won’t be his constituency that bears the social and financial brunt. They dump the problem on the poorest places then wash their hands of it. These being the same people who casually vote to push up our energy bills and council tax.
Right now there are people waking up across the country hesitant to put the heating on because Ed Davey thought we shouldn’t build gas storage and the Tories think windmills are a good idea. Thanks to the Tories, for the lowest income families and the elderly poor, heating is already a luxury expenditure, and for many a warm home is a thing of the past. It is then hard to expect the public to have broad shoulders or feel particularly compassionate toward economic migrants who gamed the system, having better legal representation than most Brits have access to.
All of this, however, is secondary to the matter of sovereignty. Again we see ministers unable and unwilling to act as they’re hamstring by international conventions, thereby failing to do what they were elected to do. It reinforces the idea that votes don’t matter and the public has no say in what happens. The consequences of that are potentially far more dangerous than even a suicide bomber. Democracy is a substitute for political violence, but if it doesn’t work we slide toward the ugly default.