412. ‘Safe, legal routes for refugees’ is a fiction to hide our shame.

 

I’m sure the usual drivel spewed out in the brief moment of shallow grief for the unnecessary and tragic loss of life in the Channel last week, will be repeated next time.

There will be a next time as the UK's vile and useless Home Secretary Priti Patel well knows.

But the truth is that talk of safe legal routes for refugees is a myth the comfortable West continues to tell itself so it can collectively sleep at night. It is a lie. A falsehood. A dark fantasy. It doesn’t matter how many times politicians say it – or how often it is repeated by a regurgitate-government-press-releases media. It is not true.

Basic rules for those seeking refugee status have changed little since the 1950s. There are – for example – no grounds for migrants seeking the magical and desired refugee status on the basis of the climate crisis we talked so passionately about during COP 26 (The futility is in the name...)which we know has created around 1.4 billion displaced souls worldwide.

There is much distracting talk of the evil of people-smugglers and the money some migrants may have if they can pay the astronomical fees demanded by those profiteering from their misery.  Again – these are smoke screens to hide our lack of humanity.

Clearly – it can be true that people smugglers are nasty AND that the migrants are desperate and in need of our help. It’s not an either/or situation.

Add to the predictable inane government response the fact that anti-French rhetoric almost immediately appears in the press, heated up by this dreadful, failed administration and our disgrace is almost complete. Except, of course, the opportunity to blame immigrants for overstretched and under-invested services rather than placing the blame where it belongs is never missed either.

Privatisation of almost everything that had any value in the UK has gone on unchecked since the 1980s so that potential investment has been creamed off as profit for the last forty years leaving UK infrastructure in the declining state we now see. 

Time for an old doodle (from 2013)…

 

Let us take a moment to remember that Britain and America have done a lot over the decades to destabilise the very places many of these desperate folk come from and have economically exploited them too. If we remember some facts in the face of this abomination – we may find ourselves feeling less faux sympathy and more shame.

 

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