Last week, the British government announced plans for legislation to ban anyone attempting the dangerous journey across the English Channel in a small boat from claiming asylum in the UK. Those victims of such criminal people-smuggling operations will instead be deported to central Africa and barred from ever entering the country again.

This could of course prove diplomatically embarrassing if one of them rises through the society of the nation into which they’ve been planted, eventually becomes prime minister or president, and is invited back to London one day on an official state visit.

However, with its typical flag-waving bullishness, the Mail on Sunday declared that the policy would “put a brake on the human rights farce which allows migrants to resist deportation from the UK”.

Though hailed by the Mail, the Illegal Migration Bill has been slammed as “flawed” and “unworkable” by the Refugee Council.

Nonetheless, the Daily Express has gone so far as to suggest that this populist strategy could win the Conservative Party the next general election.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman told parliament that 100 million people who could qualify for asylum are “coming here” and that they had to be stopped. She admitted that her proposals were probably not consistent with Britain’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. That didn’t seem to worry her so much.

Ms. Braverman is possibly not the most evil person to hold high office in British political history, but she often seems the most sinister.

Her move comes in the wake of a series of violent protests across England stirred up by far-right anti-immigration groups. It might well be seen by some as capitulating to their xenophobic agendas.

In response to such local resistance, the Home Office recently abandoned plans to house refugees at a holiday camp near Liverpool.

The Tory administration’s ongoing plans to send them to Rwanda are bad enough. But the cruel and unusual punishment which would have consigned them to a camp on Merseyside would clearly have been going too far.

This is a country which once led the world in its calls for respect for human rights – although, we might admit, it had always done so with a certain degree of condescension and cant.

This is, nevertheless, the nation that gave the world Amnesty International, Magna Carta, William Wilberforce, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emmeline Pankhurst, Oxfam, and a seminal 1689 Bill of Rights which set the model for such constitutional conventions across western democracies… a nation whose current Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister are the children of immigrants, whose last four Chancellors had migrant backgrounds, and whose new Doctor Who was himself a Rwandan refugee.

Related News

Ireland’s protests – will Varadkar go full Trudeau?

The Invisible People

This is a country whose economic wealth and richness of cultural diversity was for centuries founded upon its willingness to welcome within its borders all the races and cultures of the world. (And to sail off to their countries, exploit their resources, and steal their land.)

Great Britain’s greatness was founded on its capacity to connect with the rest of the world, but things are very different these days, on this shrinkingly small island. Brexit has cut us off from our closest partners. The lunatics really are now running the asylum.

And Liverpool, a city whose riches were once built upon successive waves of immigration, was last month shamed by rioters seeking to repulse its latest influx of refugees.

On the opposite coast of Northern England, the seaside town of Skegness was also recently the scene of violent far-right demonstrations, following the deployment of empty hotels in the area to house people seeking asylum in the UK.

The reasons for the British government dropping proposals to accommodate asylum-seekers near Liverpool had been related to residents’ concerns – as had the ditching of plans to put a holiday camp in East Sussex, in southeast England, to a similar use.

It appears that we English are very happy to welcome the dispossessed of the world to our shores… just so long as they aren’t intending to settle anywhere near where any of us actually live. Which is why we prefer to try to relocate our fellow human beings, at the time of their most desperate need, to another continent altogether.

This doesn’t necessarily paint the best picture of our once-respected nation to the eyes of the rest of the world.

Last month, the UK government announced that it would be addressing the cases of about twelve thousand asylum-seekers not through the usual interview processes but by asking them to complete a questionnaire. This attempt to streamline decision-making is aimed at reducing a backlog of about 150,000 asylum cases, more than 90,000 of whom have been waiting more than six months for the Home Office to determine their fate. It is, however, unclear whether this will make these proceedings any more just or equitable.

There’s a growing sense of a lack of moral leadership amongst wealthy western societies, ones which are currently so beset by problems closer to home that they seem incapable of seeing the bigger picture.

Thus, the ongoing failure of the planet’s richest nations to respond with sufficient speed and focus to external events has exacerbated the humanitarian crises which followed the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

We seem to have forgotten that it was never sabre-rattling isolationism that gave us our authority on the world stage, such as it ever was, but our capacity for open-handedness and open-heartedness.

Those who recognize that it’s not the size of our armories but the extent of our fellowship and generosity which counts; those who extend their arms not in hostility but in warmth and welcome will gain the high ground necessary to secure international influence for what remains of this challenging century.

And those who continue to cling to a belligerent insularity will become increasingly irrelevant, an obscure footnote in the history of the latter years of our globalized civilization.

Next week marks the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. It is another timely reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when we discard our moral compasses and choose to flout international law.