We must find moral courage to do more

THERE are many, very many, legitimate reasons to be concerned about an influx of desperate refugees into a small country struggling to provide — or establish — reliable social services but none of them carry enough weight to give us an excuse to avoid doing what is so obviously the right thing.

Doing the right thing, as it so often does, requires some moral courage and the self-confidence we sometimes lack — as our forefathers did when they repeatedly refused asylum to the persecuted Jews of Europe during World War II. In the face of the escalating refugee crisis we must learn from that shameful episode, one so very shaming it has all but slipped from public consciousness.

That so many millions of people born on this island were forced to become economic migrants must inform our response to the crisis too which, apart from our navy’s Herculean efforts in the Mediterranean, has been less than ambitious. We have, through our Government, offered to accept a few hundred refugees — as many as might be drowned trying to reach Europe from Libya in one week.

This paltry response has already been criticised by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who earlier this week called for a far more even distribution of refugees across the 28 member states of the EU. Germany has accepted tens of thousands of refugees and suggested that it expects to offer homes to as many as 800,000 over the coming years. This is a realistic, and powerfully moral, response to a growing worldwide challenge. It is also in stark contrast to the shamefully zenophobic response from Britain, a country whose fading pre-eminence was built on the most exploitative imperialism, an imperialsim responsible, in part at least, for the establishment of many of the states now collapsing in such terrible disarray across the Middle East. It is in stark contrast too to the racism of several of those dinosaurs who aspire to be the Republican candidate in next year’s White House elections.

So much for history. What can we do today to try to ensure that those desperate people — many of them young families with dependant children in tow — trying to reach the fringes Europe right now to escape tyranny are treated humanely when they reach the EU? What can we do to provide basic shelter and security to those who have run the gauntlet laid down by civil war, anarchy, Isis, criminal people traffickers and religious fanaticism? Surely we can do more than offer homes to less than a thousand desperate people?

Of course there are concerns; concerns that offering refuge to one group will encourge others to follow, concerns that refugees will displace the lowest paid workers in society as they always do because exploitative employers are always happy to employ those who will work for the lowest rates. There must be concerns too about importing an alien, sometimes aggressively assertive culture, but those fears must be overcome. The alternative is to continue to allow desperate people drown or suffocate and rot in trucks because they have the courage to dream that they might have a better life. We must find the courage and moral purpose to do more in what is one of the great challenges of our time.