The number of refugees that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron will recommend the country takes has jumped from an extra 4,000 to 10,000 over the weekend, with indications from the British government that they will now spend the UK’s international aid budget helping the migrants settle.
The move is in response to the growing calls from the political left, demanding that Britain opens her borders to countless numbers of migrants, as Germany has done, and as warned against by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The latest announcements will also rile campaigners who believe that Britain’s aid budget should be reduced, including those who demanded that the funds be rerouted to UK domestic spending last year when floods ravaged areas of the United Kingdom.
The figure of 10,000 was originally mooted by Labour leadership candidate Yvette Cooper, and Mr Cameron now appears to be marching to her tune. The same pressure is being lumped upon the Australian government, while the world’s wealthiest Muslim countries refuse to take a single Syrian refugee, citing fears of terrorism as a reason not to.
But despite there being evidence to back up the Arab nations’ fears, including the recent case in Norway, Mr Cameron and other Western leaders are caving to media pressure – including that of the BBC, who this morning aired a 10 minute segment on refugees in Sweden, without once mentioning the spate of grenade attacks, killings, rapes, and failure to integrate on behalf of the country’s new citizens.
The BBC’s correspondents also failed to ask of the migrants why they headed towards countries like Sweden, around 3000 miles from Syria, when there are a number of countries unaffected by war in between.
“In the shorter term, we are going to take more refugees – but not in a way that encourages them on to boats. In the longer term, I think we need a fundamental rethink of the way we spend our aid budget,” said Chancellor George Osborne yesterday on the BBC’s Daily Politics programme.
Last January, when vast areas of the United Kingdom where under water from flooding, UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage said: “I also think the government’s reaction to this has been pretty poor. They haven’t offered a penny for the farmers, for the people here. My message is: ‘Please government, for once put the people first. It would take a tiddly per cent of the overseas aid budget to say to people, however horrible this is, you won’t suffer financially.”
His calls went unheeded.
The news comes as one poll said 43 per cent of Britons said that Britain should help more refugees, while a third of people disagreed, indicating no clear consensus on the issue. The numbers have also flipped almost overnight, following the media pushing of the picture of a dead 3-year-old child on a beach in Turkey. It later transpired that the family had lived in Turkey for around a year, and that the father was trying to move the family illegally to Europe, as his sister pointed out, so that he could get his teeth fixed.
The Independent newspaper has been leading a campaign for people to take pictures of themselves holding up a piece of paper saying “#refugeeswelcome”.
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