Migration poses the gravest threat since 1945. We need answers — not stunts

Two historians assess two very different immigration protests in London and Germany

PARLIAMENT Square witnessed a dramatic exhibition of compassion this week. A protest group headed by former Foreign Secretary David Miliband and supported by prominent actors, laid 2,500 used life jackets across the grass to symbolise refugees who have perished this year trying to cross the seas to Europe.

The display attracted huge publicity, just as an international refugee summit opened in New York, which aspires to persuade governments around the world to accept more newcomers and do more for them when they arrive.

Latest estimates suggest more than 65 million migrants are roaming the world in search of safe or rich havens. This is a believable figure, which highlights the scale of what is likely to prove the gravest crisis the developed nations have faced since 1945.

It is because the scale and intractability of this human catastrophe are so great that it is tempting to explode with exasperation about Monday’s choreographed shame-show — for that is what it was designed to be — in Parliament Square.

Distasteful

The Left and their supporters seek to make an emotional case that Britain is doing too little for refugees; that their plight is, in significant measure, our fault and our responsibility.

If they wish to play that game, I suggest a better place for the demonstration would have been Moscow’s Red Square, though I wish them luck in laying out life jackets there.

I will return to the Russian issue. We should first address the substitution of sentiment for reason in organising this distasteful stunt, and its roll call of inherent absurdities.

First, it was as much associated with the power struggle in the Labour Party as with the plight of refugees. It was organised by the New York-based International Rescue Committee, a refugee charity whose president is David Miliband.

He is believed to nurse private hopes of a return to British politics as saviour and leader of Labour, when bubbles cease to emerge from the spot where Jeremy Corbyn sinks.

Significantly, Miliband received permission from another fiercely ambitious Leftist (and critic of Corbyn), London Mayor Sadiq Khan, to hold the all-day demonstration. Khan, grandstanding in New York this week (ostentatiously throwing the first ball at a high-profile baseball game), waived the usual threehour limit on all Parliament Square protests in a gesture that could be seen as a favour to a prospective political ally.

Miliband is perceived by some who should know better as a standard bearer for ‘moderate’ Labour. Yet he was a party to its most disastrous policies.

The government in which he served joined with President Bush to launch the 2003 Iraq invasion that precipitated the wholesale collapse of stability across the Middle East and which has triggered the exodus of migrants.

Miliband was complicit, too, in the Blair government’s opendoor policy to immigrants, which has made Britain the destination of choice for the voyagers of the world.

No one at the Parliament Square demonstration said a word about the fact Britain contributes more than any other country apart from the U.S. to support Syrian refugees within their own region.

Odious

The organisers of this week’s demo used life jackets to symbolise refugees who have lost their lives in the seas while fleeing in search of better lives.

Their aim must have been to emulate the moving 2014 field of poppies at the Tower of London, each commemorating one of the 888,246 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in World War I.

While the life jackets were a cheap stunt, the poppies were an immensely moving tribute to a generation who made an incalculable sacrifice.

Of course, it has been noted that the Parliament Square event was held in the shadow of a statue of Winston Churchill — a man who shed ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ to fight for Britain’s national interest.

Critics have suggested the demonstration may encourage yet more people to brave the Mediterranean in small boats and further enrich the odious people-trafficking industry.

It has been shown that some funds from Miliband’s International Rescue Committee have ended up in the pockets of Turkish traffickers.

Beyond the questionable taste of the demo, the Western world and its leaders need to transcend sentiment and think rationally — even ruthlessly — about the migrant problem.

We must match sympathy and local humanitarian aid with a strong defence of our own vital interests.

Hundreds of millions of people, especially from Africa and the Middle East, yearn to come to Europe and North America to share what we have and they do not. If any

substantial fraction of them arrives, our societies will be fundamentally changed, in ways most present citizens do not wish.

Theresa May said last week that a sharper distinction must be drawn between conflict fugitives and economic migrants.

She is right, of course. But we need to think harder still about the numbers desperate to flee from the wars in the Middle East: 4.3million Syrians are refugees and a further seven million are displaced from their homes, together with an estimated three million in Iraq.

Many, if not most, of these people will move to Europe if they can.

I am a long-serving critic of British and U.S. policy that seeks to fight President Assad and ISIS in Syria. We had done enough harm already by toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Gaddafi with no thought for what would follow.

That said, the Syrian war has been made incomparably bloodier by President Putin’s brutal commitment to preserving his puppet.

Putin is not only bent upon saving Assad, he also rejoices in the confusion the Syrian shambles is inflicting on Western policy. Glasses are raised in the Kremlin to the flood of refugees, many of them made homeless by Russian bombs.

We should remember no refugee in history has ever sought to go to Russia, only to leave it.

Alarming

Every Syrian home wrecked, every family entering Turkish camps, serves Putin’s almost anarchistic purposes, embarrasses the West and even threatens the undoing of the EU. It is time we awoke to the scale of mischief the Russians are making in the world.

And we need to address the fundamental challenge to provide more support to keep the dispossessed of the Middle East in their own region rather than to fool ourselves that it is just, humane or prudent to bring them to Europe — explicitly to Britain.

This is not a problem about a few thousand people this year or even this decade. The forces in play in the Middle East and Africa threaten years of conflict and tragedy.

The only credible Western contributions are to avoid military interventions that make things worse; reluctantly to parley with the Russians; and to provide succour to the afflicted in their own territories.

The statistic given by charities is probably accurate: 3,000 people have died in the Mediterranean this year. And a quarter of a million people — a conservative estimate — crossed the sea successfully.

If this migration continues, the threat to the Continent’s political and social stability will be grave.

The demonstration in Parliament Square represented a wail of emotion by people who do not think, except about their own political purposes.

What we need instead are policies and tough decisions, which David Miliband is the last man — with his discredited and arguably cynical credentials — to provide from his home in New York.