This child’s death was tragic but it was not our fault

By any standards, it was a horrible, harrowing, heart-wrenching image. a young boy, washed up dead on a Mediterranean beach, cradled in the arms of a Turkish policeman. I defy anyone with a shred of humanity not to be moved by the photograph, which was beamed into our living rooms by television and plastered over the front page of yesterday’s newspapers.

We are told that it was the body of Syrian three-year-old aylan Kurdi, who drowned along with his five-year-old brother, their mother and eight others when a recklessly overloaded rubber dinghy transporting them from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos capsized and sank.

But if this stark picture graphically illustrated the tragic human cost of the tidal wave of migrants currently trying to enter mainland Europe, the reaction to it has been deranged.

Objective reporting, especially on the broadcast media, has been thrown out of the window, to be replaced by new age emoting and political posturing on behalf of the ‘Let Them all In’ and ‘We’re all To Blame’ Brigade. It has proved once again Stalin’s cynical maxim that while one death is always a tragedy, a million deaths is a mere statistic.

In this case, one photogenic dead child is worth in propaganda terms a million times the lives of the estimated 2,000-plus people who have died trying to cross the Med in the past year. not to mention the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children still being slaughtered by ISIS, which the West refuses to properly confront.

Within minutes of this photo being screened, preening pundits were queueing up to parade their compassion.

The first sight I had of the picture was on Sky news, during the late-night newspaper review. The thick-as-Bisto former Labour Home Secretary ‘Jackboots’ Jacqui Smith immediately seized upon it as a convenient baseball bat to bash the Tories’ heartless immigration policies.

Her separated-at-birth, pseudo- sibling sidekick, the normally-sensible Iain Dale, an LBC radio presenter, worked himself up i nto such a l ather of righteous indignation, wondering how the likes of David Cameron could dare call themselves ‘Compassionate Conservatives’, that I thought he might spontaneously explode, like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote.

Since she was kicked out of Parliament by her constituents — following revelations about her creative expenses claims, involving patio heaters, porn movies and pretending her sister’s spare bedroom was her ‘main home’ — Jackboots has reinvented herself as a go-to, gob-on-a-stick for desperate radio and TV producers.

SHE’S swapped her jackboots for nude heels and submitted to the makeup artist’s full cosmetic palette, so much so that on Wednesday night she looked like a cross between an avon Lady and a barmaid from a Seventies northern nightclub.

Perhaps she’s tarted herself up so her husband no longer feels the need to blow part of her Parliamentary allowances relaxing in a gentleman’s way in front of College Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. (Or should that be pay-perv-view?)

I shouldn’t think for a moment it ever occurred to Jackboots that most of the blame for the present crisis can be laid at the door of the Labour government, of which she was such an ineffective and undistinguished member.

Smith was Home Secretary when Labour was, in Peter Mandelson’s worlds, ‘ scouring the world’ for immigrants. Labour utterly debased the term ‘asylum-seekers’ to embrace every one from economic migrants to african warlords guilty of genocide.

Perhaps if the demography of Britain had not been so speedily and irreversibly transformed by Labour’s outrageous and deliberately anti-democratic decision to dismantle our borders in the name of ‘diversity’, people might be prepared to be more accommodating.

Then up pops her ex-Labour Cabinet colleague and current leadership contender yvette Balls-Cooper to suggest that every town in Britain should take ten Syrian migrant families, as part of a scheme to let 10,000 settle here.

Sounds like a plan, eh? Who could argue with that? Britain has always found room for genuine refugees. as Stephen Glover observed in yesterday’s Mail, we don’t need any lectures from the Germans about how to deal with a refugee crisis.

The outdated, but still current, l aws governing asylum were created to deal with the massive refugee crisis created by nazi Germany. and it’s a waste of time expecting our EU ‘partners’ to show any solidarity. So thanks, angela, pet, but Nein Danke.

Unlike Germany, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I can remember as a young reporter in Peterborough in 1972, going along with the Labour council leader Charlie Swift to welcome Ugandan asians fleeing the tyrant Idi amin.

Charlie was proud of the fact that his city was the first in the country to provide 50 council homes for these gifted and hard-working Commonwealth citizens. Since then, this properly compassionate and decent man has reluctantly changed his tune as Peterborough has been swamped by foreign newcomers, a direct result of the Blair/Brown government policies, without any popular consent.

In protest, Charlie has resigned his lifelong Labour membership. So it’s not just knuckle- scraping BnP skinheads and halitosis-stricken Ukippers in blazers questioning our ‘asylum’ policy, as the BBC would have you believe.

(Meanwhile, the dopey actress and Labour supporter Emma Thompson says Britain’s refusal to take more migrants is because we’re all ‘Ray-CIST!’ Oh, do grow up, love.)

Those who have been hardest hit are t he settled i mmigrant communities, who came here legally and have made Britain their true homeland.

For instance, take a walk down Green Lanes in Haringey, north London, and ask those remaining Turkish and Greek Cypriots, who haven’t yet f l ed to suburban Southgate and Palmers Green, just how delighted they are to have albanian and Kurdish gangsters fighting it out on their streets; itinerant Somalis spitting in the gutters; and Islamist recruiting sergeants spouting their poison on street corners.

This is the kind of joyous ‘diversity’ we are all ordered to ‘celebrate’ by self-righteous metropolitan Guardianistas — whose only interaction with immigrants is that nice woman who comes in to clean their toilet; that Stavros chap who runs the organic kebab van in Kentish Town; and the Eritrean taxi- driver who takes them to Broadcasting House to pontificate about immigration on newsnight.

If yvette is so keen on welcoming Syrian migrants, maybe she could invite a couple of families to live in one of her two, taxpayer-funded houses. I’m sure her husband, Ed Balls, a keen cook, would happily rustle them up his version of Kale Pesto Pasta, with added quinoa. He hasn’t got much else on these days.

PERHAPS she could roll out the red carpet Chez Balls-Cooper for some of those massing at Calais and on t he Hungarian border. The other distressing i mage doing the rounds yesterday was the father who lay down on the railway lines in Hungary, clutching his wife and baby, after being refused permission to catch a train bound for austria and Germany.

This was cited as evidence of the Hungarian government’s ‘heartlessness’ and further proof that Britain must do more for these poor migrants.

you can’t blame Hungary. When they signed up for the EU, they thought they were joining a democratic, free- trade union. They didn’t expect to be cast as a departure lounge for thousands of people who want to get into Europe illegally.

What wasn’t explained was where this man came from, or whether he was really ‘oppressed’. We are expected to take it as read that everyone laying siege to Europe is fleeing tyranny.

Sorry, but while I accept that many are genuine asylum cases, most aren’t. What about those bouncing up and down outside Budapest station chanting ‘Germany, Germany’?

If they were wearing red and white scarves and chanting ‘United’, the police would turn the flame-throwers on them.

Just as at Calais, 99 per cent of them are young men, aged between 15 and 25. Where are all the women and girls?

If you were truly fleeing tyranny and certain death, wouldn’t you bring your wives, sisters, mothers and daughters with you, instead of abandoning them to their fate?

The first thing any decent man would do, as per neil Diamond in Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show, is ‘pack up the babies and grab the old ladies’.

Which brings us back the child’s corpse on the beach in Turkey. I repeat, it’s awful. Heartbreaking. But it’s not our fault, and it’s not our re s ponsibility, however compassionate we might feel.

The father told the Mail that the family were fleeing the war in Syria when the dinghy capsized.

Miraculously, he survived, although he couldn’t save his wife and two children.

But here’s what puzzles me. They’d been living in Turkey for the past year. So why didn’t he apply for asylum there? after all, surely culturally Syria has more in common with Turkey, another Muslim c ountry, t han with Tunbridge Wells or Trondheim.

We’re also told that he’s a Kurd. So why didn’t he move to Kurdistan? Who knows? and that’s just the point. no one knows anything for sure.

Similarly, the shocking death of a child should never be exploited j ust because media tarts and ‘liberal’ luvvies such as Jackboots Jacqui and the absurd Emma Thompson can feel good about themselves.

However horrible, however tragic such cases are, they’re not a sensible basis for a realistic asylum policy.