Why the panic over poor souls in boats?

I AM very interested in “local history”, but my knowledge of world history is very vague and my knowledge of the history of the isles of Britain is not much better, especially when it comes to invasions.

I suppose we can assume that when the “Celtic” people arrived here they made the neolithic native people their subjects and we became the Britons.

Then I’m led to believe the mighty army (mostly mercenaries) of the Roman Empire marched in and made most of our mainland Britons their subjects, except for the far north.

Some centuries later, large gangs of thugs arrived called Angles and Saxons and Norsemen. They took over what is now England.

After a while another organised army, originally of Viking descent, came over from Normandy, France, calling themselves Normans, and made conquest of what has now become England within a few weeks. A few centuries later they took over all of the British Isles. It took them 216 years to fully conquer Wales.

Since then, what is now called the UK has been threatened, but not conquered, by the huge fleet called the Spanish Armada, and later by the French under Napoleon, and only 80 years ago by Adolf Hitler in WW2.

We survived those threats by our own courage and sacrifice.

Now in 2019 we witness about only 200 people, in fragmented small dishevelled groups, arriving in tiny rubber dinghies, and in the backs of lorries, and most of the nation goes into quivering reaction, calling on cutter ships to patrol our coasts. We witness desperate anti-foreigner phobias. Some of these 200 people are genuine asylum-seekers who need to be legally assessed, while some are just people seeking to take advantage of our welfare state who should be sent back after due proper process. However, in all reality, about 200 poor souls, many of them children, are not a mass invasion force on a mission of conquest, as happened in the past 2,000 years. This begs the serious question: why all the phobic current mass insular national reactionary panic? Does it suit the current political climate agenda?

I Richard Craigcefnparc, Swansea