The refugee crisis isn’t an ‘industry’, it is a humanitarian disaster - Yorkshire Post Letters

The new deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson believes that charities supporting asylum seekers in Calais are involved in a ‘multimillion-pound industry’ alongside people smugglers, camps, hotels and ‘lefty lawyers’. He is wrong: about as wrong as a person of power and privilege can be about one of the most serious and urgent problems facing our country. And that matters.

If the work of NGOs such as Care4Calais and the range of other charities providing essential life support to the hundreds of destitute people living in atrocious conditions around Calais were part of an industry it’s not a very successful one. A glance at the squalor and neglect suffered by asylum seekers in the makeshift camps and the inability of any system so far devised to prevent the illegal and all too often lethal crossings of the Channel in unsafe boats surely prove that.

The refugee crisis is no co-ordinated, well-oiled machine of co-operating parts; no competitive market with producers, customers and choices; no regulated economy – all of the things that might characterise an ‘industry’. It is no less than a humanitarian catastrophe and our government is failing to show any leadership or imagination in response.

But why should we be surprised when a leading Tory misuses one word to caricature what is a complex and desperate situation? ‘Industry’ falls hard on the heels of ‘invasion’ – grossly equating the appeal of the destitute asylum seeker arriving battered and broken on our shores needing nothing but our help with the massed armies of Putin rolling across Ukraine.

Such a disgraceful misrepresentation should disqualify anyone from holding high office, yet Suella Braverman remains Home Secretary, continuing to inflict a kind of anti-humanitarian ignorance on a situation that requires so much more understanding and compassion. And if only these ministers would put half as much creativity and imagination into finding real solutions to this problem as they do into slandering the people whose real needs or whose compassionate actions they find inconvenient – in stoking culture wars instead of governing – then they may find ways to prevent the evils they claim to oppose.

The vast majority of those arriving under the current rules – 76 per cent in 2022 – eventually have their claims for asylum accepted by the Home Office. But under those same rules there is no legal or safe way for them to arrive in the UK and yet the UK does far less than equivalent economies in response to the needs of refugees.

I’ve seen the makeshift camps, the hundreds of asylum seekers huddled around fires, queuing for meals with nothing to their name but the clothes they stand in, abused by the French security services, having lost everything to the terrors of their journey and whatever horrors sent them on it.

People like Lee Anderson can sneer and stoke hatred but to speak up for asylum seekers and to support efforts to ensure they are cared for is both the right and the duty of anyone who has seen for themselves the truth of what they face. Their treatment and the poverty of the politics surrounding it shames our country: one with a proud history of diversity, tolerance, justice and compassion towards those in need.