An estimated 27 people died trying to cross the English Channel in a rubber dinghy yesterday. Who’s fault is it? Theirs, for being so stupid? The evil people smugglers, for taking their money and giving them a high-probability death sentence? The French government’s, for allowing them to go to a beach and get in a boat? The UK government’s, because everything else is anyway?
The blame doesn’t really matter. The question is how do you stop it happening?
Honest Boris and his Merry Men (narrowly) won the 2016 Brexit Opinion Poll (it wasn’t a referendum) with a proclamation to “Take Back Control” from some unelected foreigners. This tragedy is a perfect example of how that claim was false.
Why do people subject themselves to such danger and misery to come here? It’s not for any of the Daily Mail reasons (and no, we’re not a top destination, we’re way down the migrant target-list). It’s because they think they’ll have a better life. Their lives must be pretty awful to think life-savings, debt to criminals, years in squalor and finally high risk of death is a worthwhile price to pay for getting to the west. Yes, there are some pretty awful places in the world.
Why do they come in rubber dinghies? Because there were too many coming in trucks, it didn’t look good in the papers so we tightened security on those. Obviously if you don’t like a river flow you block it completely, of course it won’t find an alternate route.
So how do we stop them? Make their homes better – safer and wealthier – places to live.
But we, just one country, can’t possibly do that to all the awful places. Quite right. But as a significant part of a half-billion-people largest economy in the world we could. That we didn’t very well isn’t the issue. We don’t have that chance to any more. Paring our international development spending to the bone doesn’t help much though.
And what about the mechanics? The right-wing populist media keep telling us they should all be sent back (to somewhere). While part of the EU we had arrangements for doing just that. Now that we’ve taken back control those arrangements are gone. We can ask, but why would any of our EU ex-partners, who are busy integrating more refugees that us, be bothered with our whines? We could ask very very nicely? We could. Who would be our chief asker: David Frost? Priti Patel?
We could always just throw them back in the sea, or turn their dinghies around (much the same thing). Interestingly, Mrs Patel has proposed that. It being in direct contravention of our international law responsibilities to refugees is obviously not an issue. Boris and Team have form on their approach to treaties. The irony can’t be lost on Honest Boris that these responsibilities to refugees were enshrined in law after the catastrophe of the NAZIs, from which his hero Churchill gained his fame – and British forces spilled so much blood – defeating.
So, in summary: there is a problem. Its cures can only be strategic, they must be done in concert with many nations, and the power to initiate them and manage the intervening details requires scale. By leaving the EU we’ve blown the chance to initiate cures, direct or manage any cures, or manage any symptoms of the problem.
Well done Boris.