What sort of country do we want to be?

Further to Craig’s Sunday Morning Live piece, I’m going to deliver my Sunday Morning Lecture. If you don’t like being lectured to, look away now.

If you don’t like being lectured, you certainly won’t like  being proselytised by the BBC.

The sanctimonious tone of all those heartwarming stories about virtuous immigrants is pretty counter-productive. 

The other day Mishal Husain interviewed a 20 year old who is now studying at Manchester University.  His mother sent him away from Afghanistan for a better future in England. He travelled alone at 12 years old. “She didn’t want me to be killed by the Taliban or the American forces”

He described a harrowing journey, and some equally harrowing experiences on arrival in the UK.  Somehow he is now a student.  He also has a massive chip on his shoulder, a decidedly subversive attitude and unless he calms down a bit he could be a potential troublemaker. He believes his predicament is ‘our fault’ for messing up his country (Afghanistan) and he thinks we have a duty to take responsibility. He didn’t say whether or not he’d have preferred the west to have stayed away from Afghanistan, or if he was willing to live under Taliban rule. 

The BBC’s left-wing ‘let them all come” agenda is so obvious and preachy that it antagonises recalcitrant viewers and makes it easier for them to harden their hearts.

Anecdotes about individual asylum seekers who overcame numerous insurmountable obstacles and are now “studying for their masters” or their PHD tend to invite reflection upon the ones who are not studying for anything apart from how to get around the welfare state.  Or, to be less emotive, at least the ones who are less industrious or less integrated.

  

The message from people like Owen Jones and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is that we must regard would-be migrants as potential professors and engineers, therefore we should welcome them all..

Of course, this is silly. Do they really believe that the Somali gangs who are here already, supposedly hanging about on street corners dealing drugs (or whatever they allegedly get up to) are the exception, and completely unrepresentative of all the potential philosophers and leaders of industry who are throwing themselves over, under or at lorries in desperation to get to Britain? 

The trouble is there is truth in there somewhere. Surely the struggle involved in getting so far indicates enterprise and dedication, especially when looked at in comparison to the ennui and apathy of some of the indigenes, whom Christina Patterson reminded us were only here by accident of birth?   Calling migrants ‘cockroaches’ and suggesting all manner of hard-hearted solutions seems very wrong as well.

We can’t ignore our instinctive humanitarian reaction to genuinely affecting stories, but however much we sympathise with the plight of the would-be migrant, at some point we have to ‘get real’.

Don’t we have enough problems already?’It’s one thing to keep repeating “What sort of country do we want to be?” as they did on Sunday Morning Live.

 Well, for a start we might say charity begins at home. We might say, as Liz Kendall and George Osborne seem to agree, that we need a strong economy before we can implement all our idealistic, charitable principles.

Immigration is already a shambles in this country, isn’t it? I understand that illegal immigrants keep disappearing. If the border agencies can’t even keep track of who’s coming and going, how on earth could they cope with hundreds or thousands more?

Did I hear Owen Jones saying that we should follow Germany, and take in our fair share?   What about this?

 "There are districts where immigrant gangs are taking over entire metro trains for themselves. Native residents and business people are being intimidated and silenced. People taking trams during the evening and nighttime describe their experiences as 'living nightmares.' Policemen, and especially policewomen, are subject to 'high levels of aggressiveness and disrespect.”

I don’t suppose those problems are caused by PHD students and philosophy graduates, although some of the most radical Jihadis apparently are from that milieu.

Did I hear you ask what was all that to do with BBC bias? I might be straying away from the core point, but I’d love to ask Jones and Alibhai-Brown and anyone else who asks “What sort of country do we want to be?” if they want it to be the sort of country that tolerates this?

H/T Daphne Anson

Personally I was disgusted and alarmed. Where’s the crackdown? 

In fact at the end of Sunday Morning Live, they managed to come to a sort of consensus. There should be a cap, or a quota. Although that lets Britain off the hook in terms of rich European countries taking equal responsibility for absorbing immigrants and refugees,  it doesn’t actually solve the moral dilemma, because once the cap is reached, we’re back to square one.