Cap Gris-Nez seen from Spot Satellite. Image Source: Cnes – Spot Image – CC BY-SA 3.0
News rolls in, news rolls out. Somewhere in the waves we lose our compassion. Occasionally, on beaches, we find it again. Like a not so rigid inflatable, last week’s news rolled in with more than 70 people plucked from a cheap and nasty dinghy in the Channel above sea beds moneyed with lobster and crab. This was just off the Cap Gris-Nez coastline. Nothing new there, the more jaded were thinking. Move on. Amazing how impervious we become.
‘I pity the poor immigrant when his gladness comes to pass,’ sang Bob Dylan. According to French authorities, those on this ill-fated dinghy had refused to be rescued. A French local prosecutor’s office declared 10 females and two males dead, including a pregnant woman and six children. Dozens were crammed on board—with only eight wearing lifejackets—and the ‘load’ likely would have made $100,000 for the people smugglers. Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’ with its demented vision of deluge and destruction had nothing on this. Don’t people know the sea a double-dealer and that such dinghies rip apart—this one in two? I first saw their sulky grey like off the coast of Lesbos, even filmed Chinese markings on one of them. They come never as ducks to water.
It is the UK’s soft approach to illegal migrants—otherwise known as an appetite not to see people drown—which is responsible for such disasters, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart accuses the UK of being an ‘El Dorado’. Some in London remain sceptical of the various French adaptations in which the French come out best. At the same time, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper led a meeting of senior ministers plus members of the National Crime Agency (NCA) and intelligence services on this. Keir Starmer, less adenoidal these days, declared: ‘Take these gangs down.’
In total, 136,000 migrants have reached the UK via the Channel since the first small boat crossings in 2018. The divisions this has unleashed are upsetting for many. One despairing Brit was complaining last week about what he called the metropolitan elite whose immigration policies he claims have utterly blighted the lives of the working class. ‘So people really think these riots were about racism? And nothing else? They don’t think the working class have been devastated by open borders immigration?’
Zooming out again, we see people at war everywhere with the migrant crisis. The forthcoming US election is peppered with immigration anxiety—despite a 32% drop in Border Patrol-caught migrants recorded in July. New York City however is believed to have spent over $5 billion on the crisis—including almost $2 billion on housing new arrivals. I was in Uganda a few months ago where there are over one and a half million refugees. On the border between Belarus and Poland, coaxed migration has become famously weaponised, literally so with the recent Bill allowing Polish border guards to use firearms on those trying to enter. In Germany, journalist and historian Katja Hoyer says there is only one way to keep the far-right AfD at bay and that is to address the concerns it exploits. As German frustration grows, often over an unfamiliarly failing economy, a bogeyman—sound familiar?—has been found, namely those with Muslim backgrounds. When for the first time since World War Two a far-right German party becomes a serious political force, we are obliged to take notice. There is even a rise of anti-immigration leftists too. As Dylan also sang, ‘I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would’ve stayed home.’ Will some of Germany’s migrant community now switch patrons and attempt the UK Channel hop instead? There is certainly a well timed rise on social media of increasingly aggressive German police tactics against migrants.
Financial gain, payback, dividend, yield—these are killers too. We see spikes of activity farther south on the North African coast where Abdel-Rahman Milad, a senior member of the Libyan coastguard, was recently assassinated in the town of Sayyad just to the west of Tripoli. Reports from there suggested he was Mister Big when it came to people-smuggling, and that he was making a fortune out of it. Images of Milad’s bullet-splattered Land Cruiser with his body inside was scatter-gunned across North African social media. As many know, Libya is a major portal for people fleeing not just Africa but the Middle East, too. As thousands continue to reach the continent of Europe every day, it is safe to say increasing numbers of Europeans no longer crave the compliment.
Perspective in life is key. I had the privilege last week of dining with a group of journalists and writers and broadcasters made up of one Palestinian, an Israeli, a Saudi, a Lebanese, and a Cornishman. Despite the UK’s popularity for the dispossessed, the world is not about us any more. Our position in the world has already diminished. It is time to listen properly to everyone else. As it happens, I had just been reading English playwright David Hare describe protests in Tel Aviv as ‘a rare moment of encouragement for those of us who can hold more than one idea in our heads at any one time.’ Looking around the table with summer fading fast in the dusk behind, I was reminded genially of how we can take the man out of the conflict and the conflict out of the man. We all possess whatever it is required to get on—even if we don’t always administer this talent. Hare also reckoned that the protestors in Tel Aviv despised Hamas but loathed and distrusted Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in equal measure. Here in the UK, not long after the UK government decision to suspend around 30 licences for arms exported to Israel, the BBC was being accused of ‘a deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. Can such a thing as peace ever be imposed?
It seems an age for the UK since those soft power days of a now-closed DFID (Department for International Development) and SU (Stabilisation Unit), the latter replaced today by the Office for Conflict, Stabilisation, and Mediation, which is part of the FCDO (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office). Where are those conflict advisers now? Ukraine, most likely. I wonder what David Hare’s long-serving MI5 officer character, Johnny Worricker, would have made of all this. A master of discovering terrible things and having to flee his own country, it is likely—on purely humanitarian grounds—he would have been disturbed by the fact that as many as fifty percent of the refugees gathered on the French side of the Channel right now were Sudanese when the UK government policy—like the UK press—appears so lacking in all things Sudan.
Waiting in the cold tent of night to be cast off in the direction of the UK, what has brought these people to this place? In a word, war. War is the problem. Help stop the war in Sudan and end half of your problem. You might reasonably ask why the Sudanese would travel all the way to the UK and not just to France? Family. Sudanese people have many UK connections. (The UK did rule Sudan between 1899 and 1956 through the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium.) Many wonderful Sudanese are living here as British citizens and, indeed, leading doctors. Or is all this just preparation for the real migrant crisis still to come? The climate migrant crisis. News rolls in, news rolls out.
