Coming home to roost
Yesterday as per normal I spent my morning in my favourite arm chair surrounded by the Sunday newspapers and watching BBC1 – viz. The Andrew Marr Show, Nicky Campbell’s The Big Questions and Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics. It’s a habit that’s hard to break.
Something struck me as Nicky Campbell and his studio guests discussed the vexed question of immigration (the first of the three topics that his show addressed this week across its hour-long transmission slot) – presumably in the context of Brexit and the advent of President Trump and his attempted blanket ban on arrivals to the USA from seven named countries which latterly seems to have run into legal complications.
The angles you might have expected all got a mention: asylum seekers, refugees, economic migrants, the EU single market principle of ‘free movement’, the right (or not) for each country to control its own borders and ‘keep its own citizens safe’ and the developed Western world’s moral responsibility to assist those less fortunate than itself.
As ever, given that The Big Questions always fills its studio audience with protagonists and opinion holders on both sides of every argument relevant to all three of its topics of the week, (whatever views he or she holds coming to the programme) the TV onlooker gets to be a passive voyeur as the differing – and often irreconcilable – positions on each side are given an airing.
Two things characterise one’s reaction as the studio discussion unfolds.
First, of course, is the fact that on most topics most of us hold an opinion of some sort anyway – whether inherent, steeped in our DNA, acquired at our parents’ dining table, or reached through logic, rational thought, prejudice, principle … or sheer stupidity, lack of paying attention or just failure ever to confront the topic.
Second – and this is what prompts me to keep going back to The Big Questions – is that (putting the merits or otherwise of any of the arguments aside) it is sometimes fascinating to see how well (or the opposite) individual studio contributors manage to put their arguments and/or their responses to those of a different persuasion. I wouldn’t going so far as to suggest that the average viewer can be persuaded to change a long-held opinion by some insightful or charismatic and persuasive intervention during an edition of The Big Questions, or programmes like it, but part of my enjoyment is definitely grounded in the parlour game of deciding for oneself who – on the day – made the most convincing points and/or appeared to have the best of the exchanges.
Anyway, back to the purpose of today’s post.
Yesterday, on the topic of immigration, one of the key protagonists was the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan who has made something of a reputation for himself as an accomplished performer in front of an audience or camera.
During the course of the several times he intervened, or was invited to pronounce by Nicky Campbell, he trotted out some of the lines you might expect – e.g. that there was a significant difference between genuine asylum seekers (who should anyway seek sanctuary in the very first safe country they reach, not travel across Europe to try and get into the UK because of any perceived opinion and/or indeed devious propaganda that, if only you could get there, you’d immediately be given a five-bedroomed detached house in leafy Surrey with two acres of land, a swimming pool, half a dozen servants and £150,000 per annum in state benefits because that is what in the UK every citizen is entitled to) and your bog-standard economic migrant – whether from the EU or indeed anywhere else – (who was, of course, also labouring under a similar delusion as to what delights awaited them).
Apparently, in the recent past, Mr Hannan had spent an appreciable amount of time working at a hostel in Italy at which refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants [call them what you will] habitually stayed.
He made the case that what the Western world had failed so far to understand was that the vast influx of migrants trying at great danger to life and limb to get across the Mediterranean – or at least float about in it until convoys of EU vessels came and picked them up and took them on the next stage of their eventual journey to the UK – was not all to do with fleeing from wars mostly started, or made far worse, by Western intervention, but actually a reaction to a significant change in the way the modern world worked.
Whereas in hundreds of years gone past people in the Middle East and similar had rarely if ever thought of leaving their homes and countries and setting off to seek better lives in Western Europe, in this new age of Ryan Air, Easyjet, Apple iPhones, Samsung Galaxys, Twitter and Instagram every impoverished goat-herd on a Syrian hillside, every young widow with the young children left destitute in Mosul, believed it was possible – if only they could get there – to ‘live the good life and provide for their descendants forever going forward’ by going to Europe. And preferably Britain.
Hannan cited as evidence for his claim the fact that, almost without exception, the first thing that any new arrival in his Italian hostel asked ever was for the wi-fi password – so that they could connect their smartphone.
Never mind being impoverished and destitute, i.e. merely refugees seeking sanctuary from persecution for themselves and their loved ones – and also never mind Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Libya, Egypt – you were talking here about people coming from all over Africa and all other points north, south, east and west who were taking it upon themselves to make the journey to ‘The Promised Land’ (i.e. western Europe) purely and simply for the better lives they believed they would have there than if they remained where they were.
I’m not saying that Hannan was right, or that he persuaded me of anything – and indeed other studio contributors to the discussion then made contrary arguments to his, raising new angles and viewpoints (not least “And what’s wrong with that?”).
But what struck me yesterday morning was the thought that the average UK man and woman has much to be thankful for.
It does seem slightly absurd that in this great country of ours politicians and activists keep banging on about people being trapped in poverty, child poverty apparently increasing, housing issues, unemployment, caps (or even reductions) in benefits of every description and so on – when, compared to the average person trying to eke out a subsistence living in Somalia, we in Britain are extremely fortunate – enjoying a life of luxury if you like.
That is perhaps where Jeremy Corbyn’s leftist version of the Labour Party has acquired itself a bit of a problem. The UK is no longer a First Industrial Age ‘survival of the fittest’ jungle where arrogant, rich landowners, mill owners and similar exploit the workers by forcing people up chimneys and down mines for little or no wages – and thereby making ‘banding together’ in furtherance of a struggle for workers’ rights etc. not only a necessity but one accompanied by justifiable moral imperative.
These days the average UK working man and woman are, comparatively, reasonably well off and have access to all the comforts of modern life including foreign holidays, satellite television contracts and social media. They’d like to keep them and indeed acquire more of them if that were possible.
They don’t like the idea that hordes of foreigners are coming to this country and may thereby threaten their comfortable existences, e.g. by being given priority regarding housing, benefits, free health care and so on, simply because supposedly ‘their needs are greater’.
In summary, a sizable proportion of average ‘working class’ Brits want to pull up the ladder behind them. Hence the current threat to Labour of UKIP. (And possibly, in a wider context, even the rise of President Trump in the United States?).
None of this helps to resolve the general global refugee (migrant) problem but it is an added consideration facing ‘right thinking’ politicians [and here I don’t mean ‘right-wing thinking’].
I recall reading Yorkshire and England fast bowler Fred Trueman’s (I think it was first) autobiography as a schoolboy in the 1960s and being impressed by two comments reportedly made to him by his grandmother.
The first, aired in the context of encouraging him not to fuss about cleanliness and food, was “We all eat a ton of dirt in our lifetime, so why worry about a little speck now and again”.
[Funnily enough, my own grandmother had her own equivalent saying when something wasn’t quite perfect: “A man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice ...”].
The second was “Remember, in life there’s always someone worse off than tha’ self …”
I guess we’d do well to remind ourselves of the latter from time to time.
