Tim Farron MP: Dignity or dirt: The refugee paradox

Tim Farron MP’s op-ed on the New Plan for Immigration featured on politics.co.uk on 26th March. See the full article here.

Priti Patel, in setting out her New Plan for Immigration this week, said that our European neighbours need to do more to deal with asylum seekers and that, with them, we have a ‘collective responsibility’.  If we look at European countries taking asylum seekers as a league table, we come middle to bottom. The UK had 35,355 asylum applications in 2020, compared to Germany’s 120,320 and France’s 96,000. The UK takes 7% of the EU+ UK asylum applications and has the 17th largest intake of asylum seekers per head of any country in the region. To me, that doesn’t look much like we are contributing a great deal to this ‘collective responsibility’.

We should stop telling other countries what they need to do and look at our own moral duty. The fact is that we aren’t one of those countries in the world that hosts millions of refugees, such as Turkey or Lebanon. Nor are we one of those European Countries, such as Greece or Italy, that because of their geography, is on the frontline of refugees seeking sanctuary. By comparison, the numbers of asylum seekers reaching our shores is much lower, yet as far as I can see we are discharging as much of our moral responsibility as we can back onto Europe. This will help us to lose our status in the world as being a beacon of freedom and humanity very rapidly.

Let us be proud of the refugees who find their own way here, who qualify for protection and who find a home and safety in this country. Let us be proud of those refugees who we bring to the UK on the resettlement programmes which provide a safe and legal route to the UK.

Listening to Patel this week, we would be led to believe that only those arriving on resettlement programmes – on safe and legal routes – should be celebrated, welcomed and supported to thrive in the UK. This is what disturbs me the most.

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