Some stories have a moral at the end. One particular story involves the Human Rights Act and the moral of the story is that Britain respects your human rights even if you violate other people’s.
Picture the scene — you wish to flee from the country you live in. A simple drive down the road can result in kidnap, torture and death. Your country’s economy relies on the illegal harvest of a crop that is one of only a very few that will grow. Finally, your government adheres to a perverted and strict legal system that punishes the sin of creating a visual depiction of a human being in the most severe way.
So you’re desperate — you would be. And you hijack a plane and fly it to the West.
When you arrive in the country of choice you discover that their inflexible legal system actually rewards illegal acts and allows you to remain in their country as a refugee. You tell your friends and the media helps by spreading this great news around the world.
But the real crime, what really sticks in the throat is not the abuse of people in a far away land — there’s no solution to that save sending ships to the coast of China, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iran, etc and inviting people to come and live in our country; at the moment our asylum system rewards people who manage to sneak through our borders — no, the real crime is that we accept refugees not because we want to help them but because once they’re under our noses we feel too guilty to send them back.
So let’s get some back-bone.
Either we:
a) Attack horrific regimes and make them safe places to live (often not practicable, but don’t tell Blair);
b) Impose diplomatic pressure on horrific regimes in the hope of making them a safe place to live;
c) Provide free and genuine transport to all would-be asylum seekers so that they can enjoy our hospitality and list countries that routinely violate human rights so that application are unnecessary for residents of those countries; or
d) Let them stay in their horrific regimes, remain members of the EU which blocks free trade with the poorest nations, provide safe harbour to those who break the law (and only them), and support despotic regimes that are ‘on our side’.
Of course none of these options (except the last) is available to the voters as all major parties support option ‘d’. And who could win an election on the basis of ‘c’ anyway?
I don’t know what the answer is but I do know that the Human Rights Act (as Labour were warned) is a free ticket to insane-ville and provides tangible rewards for questionable or illegal behaviour.
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