A young child drowns as his parents force him into a tiny boat to go from Turkey to Europe and it turns over not long into the trip throwing all into the sea. The boy, his brother and many of the adults drown.
Those who are demanding the borders be opened wide to immigrants are delighted, who can doubt that this is what they have longed for, a tragedy to use as ‘click-bait’ and Twitter-agitprop, to exploit as propaganda to ‘shake the conscience of the world’?
The BBC indeed has recognised the importance of the photographs as it is being ruthlessly exploited by the likes of the Independent and the Guardian…as every journalist knows ‘the tears of a child says more than a thousand words ever can.’
The BBC however, to be fair, has stepped back slightly from such exploitation of a dead child, but it is usually more than happy to paint a picture of terrible tragedy and use migrant deaths to leverage our ‘moral obligations’.
The question that is not asked is why the parents of these children decided to make such an obviously dangerous journey in an overcrowded boat with no life jackets for their children when they had no need to leave Turkey, a safe location for them…they decided to make the journey not because of real need but because they wanted, not a safe life, but a better life. They risked their children’s lives completely unnecessarily. This is not a ‘refugee’ tragedy but an economic migrant one. Remember the complete outrage at this...’Bear Grylls blasted by RNLI for ‘leaving young son on rocks’ during lifeboat training exercise’ and yet no such outraged opprobrium for the wreckless parents of these two kids aged 3 and 5.
Yesterday we had the self-righteous Tony Livesey on 5Live tag-teaming with the LibDem’s morally challenged Tim Farron against the Tory Tim Laughton and making the dubious connection between the deaths of the migrants in the lorry in Austria, the Iraq War and our ‘obligation’ to take in migrants.
The LibDems say Cameron is playing politics…
“When mothers are desperately trying to stop their babies from drowning when their boat has capsized, when people are being left to suffocate in the backs of lorries by evil gangs of traffickers and when children’s bodies are being washed to shore, Britain needs to act.”
“It is heartbreaking what is happening on our continent. We cannot keep turning our backs on this. We can – and must – do more.”
The smart way to meet the duty to rescue is to incubate that economic recovery now, before the conflict ends.
Europe can do that by fostering a Syria–in-exile economy located in Jordan and other neighbouring countries. Working in this economy would restore some dignity to the daily lives of refugees and offer them credible hope of a return to normality.
Europe has a duty to fish refugees out of the sea because it is morally responsible for tempting them on to the sea. So whatever else Europe does, it must stop this policy of temptation. Paying a crook thousands of dollars for a place on a boat should not entitle a Syrian refugee to a more privileged entry to Europe. It is profoundly unfair to the other suffering refugees.
Montague didn’t take issue with Verhofstadt when he claimed that the issue of economic migration within Europe has nothing to do with how many refugees we can take. The reality is that of course it has everything to do with that issue. When you are taking in over 330,000 new people a year, and that’s just the legal migrants we know about, you have to recognise the difficulties, the pressures on resources,that creates.
The BBC has been trumpeting that ‘A number of Conservative MPs have called for the government to take in more migrants’ trying to create the impression that the world stands in judgement against Cameron, even his own party, but coming up with only two…so they must have had high hopes for this interview…..
Today Jim Naughtie inteviewed Baroness Warsi.(around 08:10)..I’m sure you like me, and Naughtie, might have expected this to go one way as Warsi is well known to be highly critical of Cameron and his Middle East and associated policies. Wrong.
Warsi was far more circumspect and measured, refusing to be drawn into making emotive statements about accepting unlimited numbers of migrants and the heartlessness of government policy. Instead she the key was to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants who are effecting the willingness of EU countries to accept refugees.
Naughtie’s interpretation of that was that ‘That must mean we have to take in more [refugees]‘ rather than the obvious take from her words that ‘We should be taking in far fewer EU economic migrants so that resources are freed up to cope with the genuine refugees.’
Curious how the BBC keeps dodging that conclusion….and that Germany, that saviour of the migrants, is deporting what it considers economic migrants…
More than a third of all asylum-seekers arriving in Germany come from Albania, Kosovo and Serbia. Young, poor and disillusioned with their home countries, they are searching for a better future. But almost none of them will be allowed to stay.
Here admitting that economic migrants are ‘blocking’ the refugees….
Migrants from Kosovo are blocking the lodging capacities, “that we urgently need for actual refugee cases”, said Bavarian Internal Affairs Minister Joachim Hermann. Kosovars “unnecessarily cost the state a load of money”, he said.
Warsi made the point that perhaps the most eligible candidates for bringing to the UK are the children who are separated or orphaned a point made by Toby Young in the Telegraph saying ‘I think the moral case for allowing 1,500 unaccompanied refugee children to settle here is overwhelming. ‘
What was interesting in the interview with Warsi was that Naughtie actually raised the suggestion that maybe the answer was to try and deal with the actual cause of the crisis, the conflict in Syria, though he did say ‘not necessarily militarily’.…but that was obviously also in his thoughts, the option was on the table.
Perhaps that is the start of a genuine debate about the causes and the real solution rather than the moral posturing and bullying from the likes of other BBC presenters such as Montague and Livesey and the exploitation of the tragic death of a baby who in reality was a victim of his parent’s bad decision not David Cameron’s ‘cold and heartless’ policies.
Peter Dominiczak 
Steve Beasant 
Lib Dem Press Office