“Instead of reporting the disastrous situations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – all of them countries where regime change was effected by Britain, along with its allies – instead we are presented with a news story which suggests that these refugees have nothing to do with Britain.”
In the past week we have seen Home Secretary Priti Patel take to the seas, the navy called out to police the English Channel, and the BBC and Sky News charter boats to film dinghies full of refugees in distress at sea.
All this in response to a few hundred refugees trying to cross the Channel in tiny boats and in very dangerous conditions, because they are desperate to get to Britain.
This has, typically, been labelled by right-wing media and politicians as akin to an invasion. A YouGov poll showed that nearly half of British people have little or no sympathy for their plight — although figures among Labour voters were much more favourable.
The lack of humanity reflects the way asylum-seekers and refugees have been demonised and scapegoated by successive governments and large sections of the media. Yet any honest appraisal of the refugee situation would demonstrate that Britain has a legal responsibility to give people fleeing danger the protection they need.
It would also demonstrate that the refugees are not something separate from British politics and society but absolutely bound up with it.
There is something particularly sickening about the chorus of condemnation of those arriving on Britain’s coast to claim asylum.
The refugees now embarking on dangerous journeys to cross the English Channel have crossed half a world to try to reach safety. They come in large part from the Middle East and from Afghanistan, in their majority victims of the wars waged in those countries, wars in which Britain has played a central part.
More than that, the media and politicians now denouncing them — and demanding that military force is deployed to deter them — are, almost to a man and woman, the same people who cheered those wars, claiming that they would improve the lives of exactly those people who now attempt this dangerous journey in rubber dinghies. It was a lie then and it remains a lie now.
Instead of reporting the disastrous situations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — all of them countries where regime change was effected by Britain, along with its allies — we are presented with a news story which suggests that these refugees have nothing to do with Britain. These countries are the main starting points for the bulk of those seeking asylum, along with Syria, where Britain has also intervened.
Wars, air strikes, interventions and the beginning of occupations are covered in breathless detail, boosted by Ministry of Defence press handouts and endless interviews with military figures. But after the regime is changed, much less is heard — for understandable reasons — because things do not get better, but worse. In Libya, civil war continues. The situation in Iraq is still dangerous and unstable, nearly two decades after the war.
Afghanistan, which was invaded 19 years ago, remains one of the poorest and most dangerous countries to live in anywhere in the world.
This coming week, “peace talks” are taking place in Doha between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the organisation overthrown by the invasion all those years ago. These talks are part of a deal between the US and Taliban in return for the withdrawal of US troops, promised by Obama and Trump, but which has never happened. The deal begs the question: why was it necessary to go through so many years of war and occupation in order to end up in a similar place to 2001? To answer that would pose far too much of a challenge to the BBC and the rest of the media, let alone the politicians who continue to defend these barbaric actions.
There are three major legacies of Britain’s 21st century interventions:
Most refugees don’t get very far — they are in Pakistan, Jordan, and other countries neighbouring the war zones. Only a minority get to Europe.
These legacies are the responsibility of countries like Britain. In any civilised country those who justify and perpetrate these wars should also have to be held accountable for them. The costs of welcoming and caring for these refugees are minimal compared with the costs of even a very short war. If we are to use navy boats it should be to protect them, not to force them back.
And their arrival should not be the cause of outrage and furore but the basis for an examination of why those wars were wrong and how we can end them.
We should not be scapegoating those whose livelihoods we have put at risk. Instead we should show our solidarity while making clear that the wars are not here today and gone tomorrow, but having lasting consequences for millions of people.
Lindsey German is convener of the Stop the War Coalition
