The refugee crisis and when Britain led the world in compassion
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Version 0 of 1. I am one of the 10,000 children who were admitted to this country on a mass visa in the kindertransports of 1938-39. Without this unique act of generosity by the Chamberlain government I would without doubt have shared the cruel fate of my whole German-Jewish family, who were murdered by the Germans in the woods near Riga in October 1942. Our government’s negative response to the present refuge crisis is shockingly heartless and one can only hope that there will soon be a change of policy. For the PM to say that admitting more refugees into the UK wouldn’t solve the problem is a complete cop-out: no one claims that rescuing refugees would solve the problem, but that does not absolve us from rescuing as many as possible, and Germany is here a shining example. The only possible solution might be to help those fighting the brutal dictator Assad return Syria to a state approaching normality. Together with many other Jewish refugees, I joined the army in the middle of the second world war, was demobbed with the rank of captain in 1947, and have done as much as possible to return Britain’s hospitality in one way or another. I’ve no doubt that refugees admitted in the present crisis would likewise serve their adopted country to the best of their ability.Leslie Brent(Emeritus professor), London • We don’t have to look as far back as the kindertransport to find an example where we have done it before and welcomed large numbers of refugees in a short space of time and on a far greater scale. I was a councillor in the London borough of Brent and vice-chair of the housing committee when the borough received over 10,000 Ugandan Asian refugees in under six weeks in 1972. Similar numbers went to Leicester, also with a settled East African community. With the settled East African Asian community and local voluntary organisations, Brent council worked up a plan for coping with the influx, including a shopping list of demands, which we presented to the Heath government. After a meeting with ministers, chaired by the home secretary, all these demands were met, including houses in multiple occupation and immediate funding for new schools, local health, social services and local advice and community support services. Perhaps most challenging, then and now, is handling the politics of migration and harnessing the generosity and human empathy of our settled communities. After consultation and with the cooperation of the local media, we took an openly welcoming approach to the borough’s new citizens, who have gone on to contribute so much to the economy, culture and vibrancy of the borough over the last four decades.Iain RoxburghCoventry • A collective amnesia seems to have developed about the millions of European refugees fleeing the ravages of war-torn Europe in 1945: stateless, homeless, starving and freezing in the winters of 1945 and 46. We seem to have forgotten that Britain too faced starvation and a chronic shortage of essential resources for survival as did the rest of Europe at the end of the second world war. The people of Europe were saved because governments accepted the moral responsibility for all peoples, allies and ex-enemies alike. We acted together, empowered by the generosity of the US via the Marshall plan. Europe now has another moral crisis as people flee from war, tyranny and economic misery in the Middle East and north Africa. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is right when she says, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed.” We need political vision and bravery. It is time to support Merkel’s call for a common European asylum policy with an immediate collective response to ease the misery of refugees fleeing to Europe, including a fairer distribution of asylum seekers and coordinated reprisals against people smugglers. We need to address the political injustices across north Africa and the Middle East for which we carry much historic responsibility: Palestine, Iraq and Syria to name but three.Ian G L JonesChair, North-east Liberal Democrats, Middlesbrough • They are welcome here. That must be our response to refugees escaping horrendous conditions, for which decades of failed western foreign policy (focused on oil revenues and profit not civil rights and poverty) must take responsibility. The function of racism is to transfer blame for this failure onto its victims. In 1938, the Daily Mail ran the headline: “German Jews pouring in to this country […] is becoming an outrage.” Cameron’s “swarm” is the same racism, just a different target. I am a 71-year-old Jew whose family fled eastern European pogroms. The door was briefly ajar, then closed. I was a school teacher and a child protection social worker. My children are in the medical profession. Probably we would not exist if my ancestors had not slipped in in time, our family would have made no contribution. The health and social care services would grind to a halt without their migrant workforce. Europe must open its doors, with planned programmes of support. The UK’s egregious policy must go. Then traffickers would lose their market. We bailed out the banks and their shareholders with billions of our money. The financial adviser to the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, explained: “The financial crisis […] was about banks seeking high returns to remit to shareholders […] by borrowing too much.” It was a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Now Europe must bail out the refugees. It should be the banks’ payback, from the top to the bottom.Glyn SeckerLondon • I am disgusted by David Cameron’s continuing arrogant obduracy in denying a fair proportion of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and north Africa sanctuary in the UK. If his blind insistence that the “most important thing is to bring peace and stability to that part of the world” had been the sole consideration in the 1930s and 40s, Britain would have played its part in fighting Nazism while simultaneously protesting that it could not be expected to take in economic migrants and refugees from Germany and elsewhere in Europe. My father and his German family would not have been welcomed with open arms in London, and I would not be here today.Hilary SternbergWeymouth, Dorset |