No, there’s nothing humane about putting ‘illegal’ immigrants on a plane and sending them straight to another Country for them to be settled. Especially after a treacherous Channel crossing, whether the UK Taxpayer is picking up what will surely be the very expensive tab or not.
However, to believe or argue that the rights or wrongs of the Government Rwanda policy is the only debate there is to be had about migrants crossing the English Channel is just as ridiculous.
Whatever excuse anyone can come up with to justify unrestricted immigration, the reality is that we are adding unproductive inhabitants to the total of UK Residents in such numbers, that the growth and strain that is being inflicted upon the UK – in practical terms, before we even touch on anything ideological, is simply too great to sustain.
No. This isn’t racist. It isn’t far right. It isn’t prejudiced in any way to say that the UK cannot continue embracing a fast-track to chaos and that anyone who arrives here as an economic migrant, rather than as a genuine refugee, should quickly be returned home, or returned to the first country they crossed into that could have offered them safety.
It makes perfect sense to have a reasoned outlook and be honest with ourselves, given the strain that is being placed on public services and our infrastructure. Especially so, given that we have UK residents who are homeless and dying on our streets who should be the priority in this case.
It’s all very well making the idealistic arguments that we should be doing all that we can for anyone and everyone who needs our help. Indeed, in principle, this is certainly true.
But this argument faces only one way. It’s based on beliefs that exist in isolation from other facts. It is blind to the real costs that are being placed upon resources that the UK doesn’t have enough of, for people who are already here.
It also pays zero consideration to the fact that the people who are joining us as UK Citizens are NOT coming to the UK because they value the opportunity to be British or to be just like us. But because they want to take every material advantage, without giving anything back. They then want to change the systems, our culture and the way that everyone around them is living, so that it resembles or reflects the cultures and the countries where they have just come from.
There isn’t any history that justifies the approach that politicians on all sides are taking. No matter how hard any politician, media outlet or influencer tries to manufacture guilt, they represent the same establishment that created the problem in the first place.
Any obligation that we have to help others, either as individuals or as a Nation State, should never be fulfilled to our own detriment and certainly not when the inevitable cost is self-destruction.
Few of us were even alive when many of the issues that have ultimately displaced so many people were set in motion. And as far as the decisions that have been made by the politicians, we have had for the past 30 or more years, who have contributed or acquiesced in the foreign policies of other countries that have done no good but created endless mess; Yes, we may have elected them. But whatever it is they have been working for, the one thing we can all be sure of is that it certainly hasn’t been about benefiting any of us.
Yes, we do have to acknowledge and wake up to the mechanics of the very wide range of issues that self-interest and an obsession with money have caused for us all, as the true motivation for those with their hands on the levers of state.
But that awareness is as much about the damage being done to our own Country, as it has been to anywhere abroad.
The solutions to all of our problems and not least of all the issue of cross-Channel Illegal Immigration are big and very complex indeed.
They require leadership that is comfortable with significant political risk.
That’s because the UK will be one of the easier countries to convince that we all need to think differently and adopt non-interventionist foreign policies for the long term. And that productive relationships can only be built and become resilient by helping all the countries that are unsafe or in trouble to function properly again, without anyone from the west continually looking to make money or aim to benefit privately in return for what should only be the one-way help that we should give.
We cannot help anyone else by hamstringing ourselves. Yet this is exactly what we are doing each and every time that we take on more and more people looking for UK taxpayers to underwrite them. When even in a low-paid job, they are still costing the Country more than they contribute.
Adam Tugwell 