Responding to refugees
Pity. Surely that is the only legitimate response to seeing a three-year-erstwhile boy, drowned and washed up on a Turkish embankment, fleeing with his family unit from the mode in Syrian arab republic. Information technology was especially poignant yesterday, since it mingled on my Facebook feed with photographs of other boys, dressing in a reddish top, set up for the kickoff day at school. Andy Walton offers a very helpful short summary of V Things Yous Can Do To Help on Christian Today.
The showtime is to petition; I have signed two petitions on Change.Org and encouraged others to do the same. Andy also mentions the official Parliamentary petition, which now has enough signatures to trigger a contend in the bedchamber. The second action is to antechamber. Simon Butler offers this text of the letter he wrote to his MP:
This just sent to my MP, the Public Wellness Minister
Love Jane
I write in the briefest terms to urge Her Majesty'south Government to drastically amend its response to the unfolding refugee crunch. This is just a thing of humanitarian compassion and should stand up apart from longer term strategic or political considerations.
The unfortunate language of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor in recent days has focused on long term solutions to a long term trouble. Exist that as it may, people are dying in meaning numbers in a simple attempt to flee from war and violence, and United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland has a long-continuing tradition of receiving such people with open up-handed generosity. Such generosity has been significantly absent from the words and actions of ministers in recent weeks and this something I believe the Government should alter with immediate event.
I urge you to advocate such a change in policy in the strongest terms. Human dignity and Christian compassion demand it.
With very best wishes
Catechism Simon Butler
Vicar of St Mary's Battersea
Thirdly, Andy suggests the radical challenge to offer hospitality. This was reinforced past Justin Welby in his argument:
The Church has always been a place of sanctuary for those in demand, and Churches in the UK and beyond Europe accept been meeting the need they are presented with. I reaffirm our delivery to the principle of sanctuary for those who require our help and love. The people of these islands take a long and wonderful history of offering shelter and refuge, going back centuries – whether information technology be Huguenot Christians, Jewish refugees, Ugandan Asians, Vietnamese gunkhole people or many, many more.
Finally, Andy suggests donation and prayer.
Only it is worth asking: why the UK has been so poor in its response?
In Austria, 20,000 people, horrified by the plight of the refugees, marched in favour of taking more. Iceland, with a population of 330,000, offered to take 50; its government was shamed by the response of its people, ten,000 of whom offered to open their homes to people in demand. Germany has offered to have 800,000. Greece and Italy are existence overwhelmed. Republic of hungary is building a contend to keep refugees out. Great britain took effectually 10,000 last year; on a per capita basis this makes it one of the meanest countries in Europe. Its respond to the migrants at Calais is more than dogs and razor wire.
This has masked a deeper bankruptcy in United kingdom foreign policy—quite apart from our responsibility for fomenting this crunch, non to the lowest degree in the reckless policy of intervention in Libya. For many years now, our policy has been to defend 'whatsoever maintains our national interest'; in other words, we should make friends with whoever will support us, regardless of their own internal or strange policies. This is neatly illustrated by the pic in a higher place, courtesy of Jeremy Moodey, the CEO of Cover ME. As someone commented by way of caption:
I think it's important to point out that the epitome above represents the nations of Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain etc, who are taking no refugees, simply who have helped fund and create the crunch and those who are terrorising the region. Simply hang on, they are also our close allies in the war which we besides are perpetuating and helping to arm….
Thirdly, the refugee crisis (as the BBC are now first to call it) has been overlaid on a much larger and longer term migration 'crunch'. The Eu policy of free movement of labour assumes that we take a shared civilization across Europe (which we don't) and that no member state will be bothered nearly the influx of economic migrants (which we are). This is going to be a crucial issue in the forthcoming referendum on membership of the Eu.
Nick Spencer is rightly disquisitional of the response of the Hungarian PM to the firsthand crisis:
"Those arriving take been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture," Mr Orban has said. "Near of them are not Christians, merely Muslims." This is relevant, apparently, because "Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is information technology not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? At that place is no culling, and we have no option but to defend our borders."
Such sentiments, as the proverb goes, invent whole new means of beingness wrong. Information technology is difficult to know how Mr Orban understands Christianity but it doesn't appear to exist the way Jesus does.
(Run across also the response from the Coptic Bishop Angaelos). Simply Orban is highlighting 1 very important affair: migration changes countries and cultures. And we take not even begun to talk over this. One of the most significant contempo migrations to the Uk has been from rural Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s. It was an economic migration—but invited from this end to remedy the labour shortages in manufacturing. It transformed many inner cities, specially in the north. The problem is that no-one asked the residents of Bradford whether they wanted this change; similarly no-one asked the residents of Leicester whether they wanted it to become the largest Asian city in the Western world. Whether this change is judged to be challenging or enriching, it is modify, and it is usually change that no-one wants to talk about and certainly that no-one has had the foresight to plan for.
As Adrian Hilton points out, the most popular proper name for babies for many years has not been Oliver, Jack or Harry, simply Mohammed. But this reality is disguised, not to the lowest degree because such social changes don't touch on the center classes as much as they impact the working classes—and they don't bear upon the political classes at all. But a couple of years agone, one prominent MP expressed surprise to discover that immigrant communities tended to stick together. When I was the only manager at Mars Confectionery actually living in Slough (rather than Windsor or the Burnham Beeches) in the 1980s, I knew you could draw a line around the different Sikh, Muslim and Hindu communities. You could name the ethnic identity of individual streets.
Our response to the refugee crisis must exist compassion at present. But when this crisis passes (assuming it does) there are some much bigger questions we must tackle.
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