The Guardian view on Cameron’s refugee plans: small numbers, big distractions
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Version 0 of 1. Head and heart was the slogan of the day. But when David Cameron came to the House of Commons on Monday, calculation continued to come before compassion in his handling of the refugee crisis – and dubious calculation at that. After the unbearable sight of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless three-year-old limbs caused an abrupt about-turn in sentiment in the right-leaning press last week, a prime minister whose government had in March tightened the asylum rules confronting Syrians, grasped that he now needed to show a little more flexibility. But he was equally determined not to be bounced into any change in strategic course. His headline offer was for Britain to take an extra 20,000 Syrians, which sounded respectable enough, if not generous. Until, that is, Mr Cameron added that this was not an immediate quota in an immediate crisis, but a target total for the entire five years of this parliament. Set the figure against the near 20,000 who arrived at Munich station last weekend, and it is revealed as the antithesis of ambitious. Perhaps wishing to distract from this sort of unflattering scrutiny, the PM stirred varied ingredients into a statement, which the House had expected would answer just one question: how many refugees? He justly pointed to his proud record on international aid, and then argued that this was tackling the displacement problem closer to the source, in Turkish and Lebanese camps. More controversially, he said he would dip into that aid budget to subsidise the new arrivals’ first year in Britain. Couched as part of a broader spending review overhaul, which – as the chancellor had signalled at the weekend – will task the Department of International Development with concentrating more on the UK “national interest”, the fear must be a loss of focus on the interests of the poor world. At the same time, by providing only for one year of support for refugees who will likely be here for five years, it will fail to satisfy the town halls grappling with prosaic questions about housing and so on. When pressed with hard questions about hardship and hunger in Britain, Mr Cameron is often keen to shift the debate away from such so-called “symptoms” and towards nebulous “underlying causes”. The billing of Monday’s statement as being about “Refugees and Counter Terrorism” betrayed a parallel effort to make a similar shift from discussing hard numbers of refugees, and towards the shapeless horrors of the Syrian war that caused their displacement. The PM revealed that UK forces had carried out a targeted assassination of a young British man, Reyaad Khan, who had been fighting with Isis in Syria. Not least because the Commons had expressly rejected military involvement in the Syrian theatre in 2013, this was dramatic and disturbing news. It was bound to divert attention from the row about refugee numbers. True, this was Mr Cameron’s first meeting with the House since the recess, but if he had wanted to keep the two issues separate he could have asked his home secretary to set out the asylum plans. He chose, however, not merely to take the two issues together but to suggest that he had thoughts on the military front that might somehow enable more Syrians to stay home. The prime minister still rages at having been shunned by the Commons two years ago, and is perhaps also keen to remind the public, at a time of a Labour leadership contest in which defence policies are proving divisive, of the opposition’s part in that defeat. But it is far from clear that had the west pressed ahead with its plan for an attack at that time on the Assad regime – and not on its bitter enemies in Isis – that the situation would be happier today. What is clear is that there is currently no clean way to intervene in a war that pits murderous tyranny against brutal theocracy. There is in reality no military answer to the refugee problem within a remotely relevant timetable, but to pretend otherwise shifts attention away not only from a modest offer in the numbers stakes but also from London’s particular difficulty in working with European partners towards a continent-wide resolution. Instead of enrolling in EU schemes for which the admin and the funding are in place, Mr Cameron prefers the cost and complexities of UK-only schemes. It seems baffling, until you recall his simultaneous parliamentary difficulties with Conservative rebels on the EU referendum. Britain’s refugee policy puts cold calculation before any impulse to reach out. But with Europe, the story is of diehard Tory hearts trumping level heads. |