MAX HASTINGS
The horror is unspeakable. But a purely emotional response could put at risk our very way of life, says MAX HASTINGS
THErE’S no doubt that it is an image to touch the stoniest heart — a symbol of tens of thousands of refugees from tragedy in Syria and Iraq, who have died this year while attempting a similar passage.
Hundreds of thousands more are still in transit: hidden in vans and trucks by people-traffickers; clinging to the underside of rail freight wagons; scrambling over border fences; fighting their way into Hungarian railway stations; even cycling to Scandinavia.
It is a spectacle such as Europe has not witnessed since the dark days following the end of World War II, inspiring in equal measure wonder, confusion, compassion — and fear.
More than a few politicians and commentators around the world are pouring scorn and anger upon European governments for their stumbling response to the migration crisis.
They denounce the callousness of nations which refuse to open their hearts and doors to human suffering on such a scale.
An American columnist suggested yesterday that we should welcome all-comers, to solve our working-age demographic deficit.
David Cameron is the target of bitter recriminations, some of it from Germans who are his most important European allies, for refusing to agree that Britain should ‘take its share’ of refugees.
This criticism will not be remotely satisfied by last night’s announcement from Downing Street that we shall receive some thousands of refugee camp inmates.
Meanwhile, the rival candidates for the Labour leadership vie with each other to attack Mr Cameron’s supposed lack of compassion, and some Tory MPs are jumping on the bandwagon. Johnny Mercer, a Plymouth MP, says that drowning mothers struggling to keep their children afloat in the Mediterranean should not think of Britain as a place that does not welcome them.
However, any discussion of this immensely intractable and important issue should start by recognising that it is not just about what is happening in Calais. Nor does it begin or end with hundreds of thousands of tragic victims of the wars in Syria and Iraq, fleeing from Assad and ISIS.
We are facing one of the largest mass movements of population since 1945.
Tens of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa are bent upon quitting their native lands to make a new life in Europe.
SOME are indeed victims of war and famine. Many others, though, especially from West Africa, are trying to take advantage of the fact that our continent offers a vastly more promising future for them than they could have in their own countries.
A few decades ago, when I worked as a foreign correspondent in many of the countries from which migrants are now fleeing, I witnessed wars, droughts and famines which embraced as much innocent suffering as those of today.
But in those days, such people could scarcely begin to comprehend Western societies with their wealth and security, far less consider travelling to them. Our countries seemed as remote to them as the far side of the Moon.
Now, by contrast, through TV and the internet, inhabitants of even the most primitive nations see daily on their screens what we have got and they have not, above all physical security. I have met more than a few who are passionate Manchester United supporters. They are prepared to endure any hardship, accept any risk, in a manic quest to get to our promised lands. The more that people see their friends and families embark on the quest, the more that others are moved to emulate them. The more who succeed, the more who follow.
Neither the people nor the governments of Europe should be in any doubt about the historic nature of this vast migration, nor about the gravity of the challenge that it presents to the stability and very nature of our societies.
If anything like the numbers of people attempting to become citizens of Europe are successful in doing so, our homelands will be transformed in ways few of their existing inhabitants want.
Thus far, the response of Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and her counterparts across Europe has been that of small children seeking to stem the tide from their sandcastles on a holiday beach. They stare almost paralysed at waves of refugees and migrants sweeping through skimpy border controls, overwhelming police-posts and then social services. Europe’s leaders exchange petty protests about quotas and rejectionism.
Yet this is not a short-term crisis, spanning weeks and months. There is every prospect that massive waves of migrants will continue to surge towards Europe for years to come.
Those who clamour for us to accept the victims of the Syrian calamity as a matter of common humanity are guilty of a refusal to acknowledge that these represent only a small fraction of the host of
people bent upon making themselves Europeans. Those to blame for what is happening are many. Above all, the EU’s policy of permitting untrammelled internal movement, and the consequent dismantling of frontiers, has been a ghastly mistake.
Any further emergency relaxation of the level of border security, so as to permit a fresh wave of migrants and refugees, would simply produce results little less effective than if we abandoned our national defences to permit an invasion of armed enemies.
The European nations must reestablish controls. In Britain, if we wish to have any sort of check on who belongs here and who does not, I suggest that we must abandon our principled libertarian objections to identity cards.
Responsibility for the drowning of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, his brother and thousands like them can be distributed much further afield.
However desperate were his parents to escape their plight, it was madness for them to subject small children to the terrible peril of the sea-crossing, in the hands of people-traffickers.
Syria’s President Assad, ISIS and the country’s other warring factions are alike steeped in blood. Do you remember all that ridiculous sentimentality a few years ago, about how Assad’s wife is the British-born daughter of a Harley Street cardiologist who would keep him on the straight and narrow? That same ‘London girl’ has proved merely the defiant consort of a mass murderer.
Then there is the toothless United Nations, and the Islamic militants who preached jihad.
George W Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion of Iraq, the first step in the descent to regional chaos. More recently, David Cameron and his allies have pursued juvenile strategies for deposing the Middle East’s dictators, without the faintest idea what to put in their place.
They precipitated fragmentation and mayhem for which they have yet to repent.
U.S. President Barack Obama, too, declines to offer leadership to the democracies. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin backs Assad, the Iranian regime and anyone else committed to making trouble for the West.
It is entirely right to say mass migration will only stop when conditions improve in the countries from which people flee, but it is desperately hard to achieve this. Much of the financial aid to which the British Government is an especially generous contributor is squandered or stolen by local rulers.
NO DECENT person could fail to wish to see peace in Syria, but what can we do to promote this? The warring parties are rival fanatics, morally indistinguishable from each other. Our attempts at military intervention to impose stability and democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, have failed dismally.
We have learned that battlefield successes are worthless unless supported by a neo- colonialist administration to impose order, which is politically unimaginable.
Yet we must not despair, because we cannot afford to do so.
We should recognise that there is no single ‘ solution’ to this crisis, which must instead be managed as best as we can, by a hundred expedients. For example, a modest number of Syrian refugees must be continue to be accepted by European nations, including Britain, but not for a moment can we consider taking the vast numbers who want to come.
A generation ago, this overcrowded island had a population of just 50 million. Now we have more than ten million more, and the number is increasing annually at a staggering rate, even before the latest surge.
As for those critics who denounce Britain’s cautious response to the refugee crisis as ‘racism’, how can it be wickedly ‘racist’ to resist opening our doors to untold numbers of people from entirely different cultures, whom experience suggests have no desire to embrace our values?
If refugees and migrants have claims on our pity, the British-born people of Britain also have rights and sensitivities which deserve respect. All human beings are tribal. We cherish and take pride in our loyalties to a certain heritage, literature and culture.
Like most people, I dislike and recoil from using intemperate language about immigration. But it seems no exaggeration to assert that the population upheaval now taking place threatens to swamp Europe.
UNLESS national governments respond effectively — which means keeping out most of those who want to come — our political class will face popular resentment and rage which will be entirely justified.
Last year, David Cameron said that if a Conservative Government gained office he would repeal the Human Rights Act, curb immigration and repatriate powers from Brussels. When he made those promises, he probably did not believe that he would ever command the mandate to be required to deliver on them.
Well, now he does. And the urgency of action is greater even than when he made those vows.
Theresa May talks a good game as Home Secretary, but it is a shocking indictment of her five years in the role, that far from immigration having been reduced, it has soared.
More than eight million people live in Britain who were not born here. Last year, the population increased by an acknowledged 330,000, probably far more with the inclusion of illegals.
If we go on like this, if we give way to the whims of the liberal judiciary, the compassion lobby, the eurofanatics, the character of this country — indeed, that of all Europe — will have changed beyond recognition within a generation.
I don’t believe that my view represents an extravagant statement of where we are or of the scale of the threat we face.
We may feel the deepest pity for those migrants who die while trying to get into Europe on boats; for the man from West Africa huddled, hidden beneath the bonnet of a car; the emotional mobs storming the Eurostar terminal at Calais.
But we must not feel either that their plight is our fault, or that we must put at risk our own society to assuage their condition or further their ambitions.
As David Cameron has rightly said, everything possible must be done to improve their lot in their own countries. But his first duty is not to those outside who wish to come here, but to the people of Britain.
We should not for a moment underrate the practical difficulties of stemming this tide, especially when most of Europe’s governments are supine. Of course, we Britons derive some advantage from the fact that we live on an offshore island but we must exploit it much more effectively than we have done in recent times, to defend our shores.
If any significant fraction of the hundreds of millions suffering hardship, persecution and famine in Africa and the Middle East succeed in transferring themselves to Europe, I fear that our civilisation will be transformed in ways that most of us cannot endorse, nor even find tolerable.
FUNNY how adults and children have swapped places in the course of my lifetime. When I was a boy in the Fifties and Sixties, to take an obvious example, we youngsters would be made to stand up in crowded buses or trains while the grown-ups sat.
On my journey to work these days, it’s not unusual to see whole parties of seven-yearold schoolchildren, kitted out in hi-viz jackets, bagging all the seats in the Tube carriage on their way to the South Kensington museums. Meanwhile, their teachers and elderly ladies (not to mention decrepit old hacks like me) have to stand.
Health and safety, apparently. When I last complained about this in print, I had letters from teachers saying they were instructed to make sure their pupils had seats, whenever possible, since schools could be sued if one of the little treasures fell over and bumped its head.
It’s the same with pubs. I spent much of my Berkshire boyhood banished with my siblings to the garden outside the Dundas Arms or the Pheasant, sipping our fizzy orange in all weathers while our parents and their fellow grown-ups enjoyed the welcoming tobacco fug inside.
True, some pubs offered designated ‘children’s rooms’. But I remember these as bleak prison cells, with bare walls and hard stripped-pine benches, where we’d sit for hours with nothing to do, tormented by the sounds of laughter and revelry coming from the adult world in the bar. How I longed to be old enough to join the fun.
But now that I’m 61, I’m exiled once again from my natural home. Come high winds, hail or snow, you’ll see me shivering on the pavement outside the pub, or sitting on the patio wall with my pint. The difference is that this time I’ll be surrounded by fellow adults — kept out since that day of infamy, July 1, 2007, when the smoking ban came into force in England.
Meanwhile inside, children have the run of the place, darting around and squealing, tripping up grown-ups who dare venture in for a refill (what about our health and safety?), while baby-buggies block access to the bar and the Gents. Such is the grim consequence of John Major’s decision, 20 years ago, to lift the ban on admitting under-14s to the inner sanctum.
No wonder the latest edition of the Good Pub Guide, out this week, finds that its reviewers’ most common complaint is against noisy and ill-behaved children. Nor should anyone be surprised that a ban on babies and toddlers at Barton Marina’s Waterfront pub, near Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, has attracted new customers, while delighting most of the regulars.
Before I go any further, and risk being barred even from my perch on the wall outside, I should stress that I have no beef whatsoever with my weekday lunchtime local, three minutes from the office in upmarket Kensington.
Yes, it allows children in. But the few under-14s who come at lunchtime tend to be extremely well behaved. I reckon this is because most seem to be French, the offspring of millionaires driven into exile by the Great Hollande Terror.
As I remember from my days as a barman at a hotel in the Pas-de-Calais, the French have a fine tradition of eating out en famille and keeping their young in order.
If only the same could be said for us Brits. Indeed, now that our children have grown up, I’ve stopped going for Sunday lunch at our local in South London.
God knows, our four boys were no angels — and it was bad enough in the days, shortly after the ban on under-14s was lifted, when we used to inflict them on our fellow regulars (yes, we were sinners, too). But since then, word has spread that this is a ‘family-friendly’ pub — and if you drop in at Sunday lunchtime now, hoping for a quiet pint, you’ll think you’ve stumbled into the mother and toddler group from hell.
They even provide children’s books and games to attract the little blighters, who run around yelling their heads off or wail in their buggies.
NOW, I have enormous sympathy with publicans, struggling to stay afloat while the modernday Oliver Cromwells of Westminster try to drive them out of business. First came the blitz on drink- driving in 1967, when the introduction of the breathalyser delivered a hammer- blow to out- of-the-way country pubs. Then the nanny-knows-best smoking ban, brought in by the sort of people who never go near a pub, but relished shooing away the type who do — or did.
Next up will be George Osborne’s £9-perhour ‘living wage’, plucked out of his magician’s hat as a party-political stunt to wrong-foot Labour — and never mind the real-world consequences for pubs that depend on cheap labour or jobs for the likes of my sons, who could do with beer money for bar work. Against this sustained assault, it’s hardly surprising that landlords are driven to such desperate measures to attract customers as laying on colouring-in books, sit-upon Thomas the Tank Engines and copies of Postman Pat and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Mind you, there are other offenders against the ethos of the Great British Pub, almost as damnable as parents who let their children run riot.
I’m thinking of people who ask for a blinking cappuccino, when there’s a queue at the bar. And what about those who hold everyone up by paying for a round of drinks — usually Coca-Cola or lemonade — with a credit card? In my book, it should be a hanging offence to use anything but cash in a pub (though I may be prepared to soften my line as speedier contactless payment systems catch on).
No, it’s time for us proper pub-goers to rise up and call the shots against the puritans of Westminster and those fiends — with their squawking brats, Visa cards and demands for frothy coffee — who commit daily sacrilege against this most hallowed of all British institutions.
THIS week, a think tank supplied powerful ammunition for our cause, with a magnificent finding that we drinkers put more than twice as much into public services as we cost. True, as the anti-alcohol brigade protests, the report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) takes no account of the (unquantifiable) social costs of alcohol abuse, as measured by the acute distress often caused by drunks, whether to friends, strangers or their near and dear.
But after adding up the cash costs of dealing with the fallout from drink — incurred by the NHS, police and welfare system — the IEA finds drinkers are net contributors to the public purse, through alcohol duties and taxes, to the tune of a whopping £6.5 billion a year.
Indeed, in the week when Labour-run Nottinghamshire County Council announced a blanket ban on cigarette breaks for its employees, I’d be interested to see a similar cost/benefit analysis of smoking.
If past studies are any guide, we tobacco addicts are also hefty net contributors (not least, through having the decency to cut pension bills by dying young, and so offsetting the cost of treating our revolting diseases).
For the avoidance of all doubt, I’m absolutely not urging anyone to hit the bottle. Still less do I recommend anyone to take up smoking and risk following me into the cripplingly expensive slavery of tobacco addiction.
But instead of relentlessly persecuting drinkers and smokers, I do think the occasional ‘thank you’ might be in order from the sanctimoniously inclined.
Oh, and if you must bring your children to the pub, do tell the little swine to sit still and shut up.