Naughty Boy

Mishal Husain had her schoolteacher’s voice on again while interrogating His Excellency Mr Péter Szabadhegy, the Hungarian Ambassador to the UK.

“What do you say to the accusation that your country is breaking the Geneva convention?” she said, accusingly.

He said: “200,000 migrants have crossed Hungary’s borders exceeding the population of our second largest city.”

Mishal was unsympathetic, and started making those impatient noises. The thrust of her interview, and she is not alone in this type of thrusting, was that all immigrants are the same. 

“Am I right in understanding that your own parents were refugees?” She said coldly.

Throughout this crisis, time after time, we get this superficial analogy between asylum seekers, economic migrants and all manner of refugees. Very often a comparison is made  - of all the comparisons,  in all the world - with Kindertransport. 

(Just ask MI5 if they think the 10,000 Jewish children, given sanctuary from the Nazis in 1938-40  posed any threat to the security of this country)   

Refugee crisis, dead babies, and Kindertransport

There is an unfortunate trend towards citing Kindertransport to justify this country taking in more refugees. 

It goes without saying that there are so many differences in circumstances between parents trying desperately to save their children from Hitler’s final solution and families fleeing from Islamic-fueled turmoil or ‘looking for better lives’,  but if we simply see them all as people in dire need of rescue or sanctuary we should also be able to discuss what is actually meant by ‘taking in”.

Does it mean housing, feeding families and perhaps employing them? For how long? Does it include any conditions, like willingness to assimilate, for example?

Taking in ten thousand children between 1938 and 1940 whose parents were destined for the death camps and assigning them to volunteer host families is one thing, but Yvette Cooper’s suggestion, asking cash-strapped councils to provide for ten thousand families (who might not be entirely supportive of the British way of life) is another. 

                                     

We should devise a plan tout de suite. Perhaps shelter them temporarily until all the international, wealthy, stable countries co-operate to create safe places in or near the refugees’  countries of origin. Or something. 

Surely we cannot let the ’dead baby photo’ propaganda dictate knee-jerk foreign policy.

The previous Labour government’s open door immigration / multicultural / diversity policies have really cooked their goose as far as (the majority of) the public’s attitude to Muslim immigration is concerned, with the exception of the BBC and the Metropolitan Bubble we hear a lot about.

Look at our friend Abdul Muhid. He’s from London, believe it or not. Him and his beard want their passport back. Give it back! Some in - some out.