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…
Tim Farron retweeted
#Cameron and#May should stop playing politics over humanitarian crisis says .@timfarron http://goo.gl/YAyXf3
Steve Beasant Which kind of suggests it is the LibDems who are actually playing politics as Cameron has not bowed to the sanctimonious moralisers but has actually stood firm against those, like Farron, and Livesey, who make grandly sanctimonious statements, which are more about them than the refugees/migrants….
Tim Farron retweeted
There is a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep, but UK Government appears disengaged, cold and irrelevant
Lib Dem Press Office Farron makes this meaningless statement that is only intended to burnish his compassionate and humane credentials but in fact says absolutley nothing at all about the problem or the solution…all it says is ‘let all the migrants come here’. It is empty, simplistic posturing for the cameras….
“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.”
Livesey was pretty much a disgrace, his programme had nothing to do with journalism, merely intent on berating those who take a more rational view of events and see that the issues will not be solved by short term grandiose gestures that are pure compassion ‘showbiz’…so we take in a few migrants…then what? Take in 10,000 as Labour suggest and then what? The migrants from around the world will suddenly go ‘Well OK then, that’s it…we’ll all go back home then…the UK has done it’s bit’? Like hell. They’ll keep on coming…in their thousands, millions.
Taking in a few migrants does nothing to solve the crisis.
Yesterday Sarah Montague struggled through an interview (08:14) with Guy Verhofstadt former Belgian prime minister, which she opened with the words of Germany’s Bild that Britain was among the ‘slackers of Europe’ when it comes to taking in migrants. She rather suggestively wanted to know if that was correct. Now the moral grandstander Tim Farron yesterday also drew support from those same words…even though he described Bild as a ‘scurrilous red top’…curious how alarmist sensationalism from a ‘scurrilous red top’ is now used by the normally sneeringly disdainful BBC to bolster its pro-migrant stance.
Verhofstadt went off thread though and stated that the root cause of this crisis was the failure of Europe to deal with the Syrian war and support the takedown of Assad…we are now suffering the consequences of that failure…a failure that the BBC and the Left had no small part in creating. Which is no doubt why Montague rapidly moved on and demanded to know ‘What is the chance that this crisis can be solved by accepting more migrants?’…so you know exactly what her priorities are…going on to proclaim ‘So the answer is quota’s’ [of migrants] and demanding to know ‘Is it acceptable that Britain has opted out?’
Whilst saying the UK should take some of the migrants who make it to Europe Verhofstad again went off message and said that the real solution was to stop migrants coming here in the first place and that their asylum claims should be processed in safe haven countries near the zone of conflict. Again Montague didn’t want to explore that suggestion.
Here The Spectator makes a similar point in a reasoned and measured manner that by far outstrips any of the ‘intellectually lazy feel-good policy for the bien‑pensant’ analysis the BBC does itself…Here’s the answer to your migrant crisis, Mr Cameron
If you step outside the usual angry ding-dong, the posturing of those both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant; if you resist the easy option taken by the chattering classes who claim the moral high ground by insisting on open borders, you can see that European policy is the result of moral confusion.
What does rescue imply and to whom does it apply? Just being poor does not make someone eligible for being ‘rescued’ by a life in Europe. Mass poverty has to be tackled, but the only way it can be done is for poor countries to catch up with the rich ones. There are ways in which we can help that process, but encouraging the mass emigration of their most enterprising young people is not one of them.
Europe has a moral obligation to rescue, not to make dreams come true.
How can Europe help these people?
Should we invite them to Europe? This has been the defining issue so far in European discussion of the Syrian refugee crisis: ‘How many refugees should Europe take?’ It’s all about us. Unfortunately, while well meaning, this approach is fundamentally irresponsible when judged from the perspective not of the consequences for Europe, but the consequences for Syrians.
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.
Nick Robinson 
