The Jungle: reducing refugees to hapless saints
The Jungle refugee camp in Calais is troubling Stella Creasy MP. She writes in The Guardian:
As signatories to the 1951 refugee convention, Britain should share responsibility for helping more people, not just in camps in poorer nations but across Europe too. That means providing more legal safe routes to sanctuary and funding the administrative mechanisms for people to access them.
France is a safe haven for refugees. A refugee has been forced to leave their home by fear. Creasy’s lament scratches the notion of sovereignty. Where does the UK’s powers and and the EU’s power begin? Is a democratic state allowed to say who lives in its country?
If we are for allowing people to live and work in the UK, we should debate it. Creasy writes:
We can’t abandon refugee children – and that includes us, the politicians…
Why wouldn’t it include politicians, the people we elect to make decisions? Who made them something other than us, the mere humans who vote for them?
Refugee camps are not a long-term solution. But demolishing them or hoping other countries will deal with the problem because it isn’t happening on our soil isn’t a sustainable or honourable response.
Instead of meaningful debate about human freedom, the issue is reduced to infantalized virtue signalling over who cares most for the refugees, portrayed either as hapless and saintly or criminal and dangerous.
Time to treat them as adults.
Posted: 2nd, September 2016 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
