The BBC, our greatest national institution after the NHS, is really beginning to bug me with its coverage of the refugee crisis engulfing large parts of the world. I expect the gutter press, which these days includes the Telegraph, I’m afraid, to refer to refugees as though they were all merrily making their way to Britain for their share of our general benefits system (it isn’t) but I expected better from the BBC.
The “in” word is migrants. Yes, those fleeing war, disease and famine are merely migrants. It’s offensive drivel. I sense a change of mood is at hand.
The media treatment of Calais, which is very small beer compared to what is happening in the rest of the world, has given the impression, wrongly, that we are about to have our livelihoods threatened by migrants. The foreign secretary Phillip Hammond said so. And David Cameron referred to immigrants as being a swarm. Not only is this unpleasant talk, aimed at appeasing the right wing of his own party and trying to prevent others lining up behind Nigel Farage’s ugly rhetoric, but it’s downright dangerous.
The change of mood I sense has come about following the tragic discovery of 71 dead men, women, children and babies in a truck in Austria. Suddenly, people realised that this was about much more than migration. These were desperate people with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide apart from in the west. Whilst many of these people might speak a different language to us and have different colour skin, it has dawned on people that they are human beings just like us.
I cannot imagine how things were on that lorry. I don’t really want to. No one should be subjected to anything like that. It is not their fault that their countries have been ravaged for all manner of reasons, but in many instances, we should bear some responsibility for the decisions made by our own governments. We might not like it, but much of the instabilities, from Blair’s war in Iraq to Cameron taking his eye off the ball in Libya, have our fingerprints all over them.
Yes, I know the argument that we should look after our own first, before looking after anyone else. We certainly do that in many instances, but those at home we don’t look out for properly or actively neglect, are in the position because of the choices of politicians. In our rich country, there is no economic need to force people into using food banks, there is no economic argument that decrees that the poor and disabled should have their benefits slashed. We can afford to help those at home and abroad if we really want to. That is a simple truth we are never told.
But I don’t want to read more stories like the 71 on the lorry. It’s an enough’s enough moment for many of us. Our chillaxing prime minister is currently enjoying his holidays – note the plural – whilst poor people are dying in the worst of circumstances. I don’t begrudge him his holidays – it really must take it out of you working flat out to make the lives of a large number of people as miserable as possible – but I do take issue with his crass rhetoric and the dog whistle politics of his friends in the media, including the BBC.
They may not look like us, these poor wretched people who have left everything behind and now cross the continent with literally nothing, but we have a duty to help them.
