BBC needs to change its reports about African and Asian Migrations and Channel crossings
29 November 2021
Dear BBC,
I neither understand, nor approve your coverage of the “migration crisis” for which you ignore the causes - and therefore the solutions.
BBC coverage emphasizes the “pull” factor encouraging migrants to move to the UK, in a manner that simply misrepresents the nature of migrations. Do your reporters believe that people come to frozen Northern Europe for pleasure? They arrive in midwinter from warm countries where they would far rather live because their homelands are no longer livable. Many of these lands, we have destroyed: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya are the deserts we have created just in this century. So many other deserts Europeans created before.
One BBC reporter described people coming to Britain “because they can disappear into the ‘grey’ economy.”
I believe is not an accurate description of migrant motivations. Many people choose UK because they have family support-systems in UK – but that is the result of history, following 250 years of British imperial migrations, of conquest and exploitation.
Cartoons for Peace: People smugglers lie to refugees: “Quick! Quick! Europe is waiting for you!”
Why do they come?
30 years ago, my elderly mother used to ask: “Why do they come here?”
I used to reply: “It is not that they come here, Mother: we are the ones who went there, and then we brought them here. Whether it is Windrush immigrants from Jamaica whom we brought into Britain to provide manpower for rebuilding London after WWII; or the Bengalis we brought to run the textile factories in Bradford; or the Gujaratis we transported to East Africa to build and run the colonial railways …. WE went there, and we brought them here.”
How my mother could not understand this, was beyond me. Her mother was born in Imperial India. Her mother’s mother was born in Imperial India. Her grandfather was an officer in the British Indian Army –who died of smallpox in India. Her father, and later her brother, were colonels in the Indian Army until that adventure ended at Independence in August 1947. My mother’s family was an intimate part of the machine that created indelible and lasting relations between Southern Asia and the United Kingdom. My mother’s ancestors brought the elites to be educated in Britain, ensuring that the whole region became English-speaking and London-oriented. And Britain became fat from Empire.
Ian Hamilton of the Gordon Highlanders was ADC to Lord Roberts, Vice-Roy of India. ‘Fred’ Roberts was my grandmother’s godfather. How much more “Imperial” can you get?
Afghanistan and Iraq, Yemen and Somalia and most of Africa have been a part of the British Imperial experience. History cannot be washed away. We did not create history, but we inherit that history directly from our ancestors. This is what the BBC should be explaining, as your reporters discuss migrations.
It goes much further back of course: WE transported the Jamaicans from West Africa to Jamaica, before we later brought them to England. The crime of slavery is one for which we are paying today: but the real victims are the descendants of the enslaved persons whose Island Nations are now threatened with rising sea levels due to another British contribution to history: the ecological impact of the industrial revolution. The BBC should place greater emphasis on the impact of Climate Change on migrations, and the threat to other nations.
Another British historical legacy: Al Qaida
Al Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan follow the beliefs developed in Deoband, near New Delhi, which evolved as an anti-British and anti-Christian movement responding to brutal repression of Muslim regiments following the “Indian Mutiny” (the First Great Sepoy Rebellion).
Typical underfed (but adorable) Afghan kids in a typical Afghan street.
In case anyone has forgotten: the latest evacuation from Afghanistan is the result of the failed invasion organized in 2001 by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. I was totally against this Fourth Anglo-Afghan (American) War, which ended just as the previous three ended. It was a foolish adventure and a brutal failure; but the British and Americans are responsible for the fiasco, and responsible for the subsequent refugee migrations.
Syrians and Iraqis are refugees because George W. Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq in 2003. It was another foolish adventure, another brutal failure under-planned and mismanaged by Rumsfeld and Cheney and Jerry Bremer with mind-boggling incompetence and indifference. We live in a small world, we live in a democracy, and we the British people who elected Tony Blair share some responsibility for his appalling decisions.
Libya is at war because David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy decided to invade Libya and kill Gadafy, with the inevitable result of a civil war. I did not vote for Cameron and I did not vote for Sarkozy, but I have to accept that Britain and France are entirely responsible for Libyan refugees, for the decision to kill Gadafy and destroy the Libyan State.
BRITAIN DOES NOT HAVE A MIGRATION CRISIS, SO IT CREATED ONE
Wrote journalist Andrew Connelly in Foreign Policy Magazine last February
February 22, 2021, 5:23 PM
Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have unnecessarily warehoused and endangered thousands of asylum-seekers in an effort to pander to the right-wing press.
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian thriller Children of Men depicts a jingoistic government locking up migrants in crumbling internment camps along forlorn stretches of the English coast. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel appear to have watched the film—and consider it worthy of emulation.
Faced with a modest trickle of rickety boats washing up on British shores in the months before Brexit and since, Britain’s government has begun to stoke an ugly culture war by linking asylum with danger and chaos. For a country that seeks to rebrand itself post-Brexit as an outward-looking champion of the rules-based international order, and a prime minister who seeks to distance himself from the recently unseated U.S. president and his xenophobia, it is a parochial and authoritarian turn.
Crossing the English Channel is dangerous and most migrants cannot swim. Africans or Asians, they are incredibly tough and courageous young men, ready to work. Photo: infomigrants.net
SOLUTIONS?
1) Deal with the causes, stop tinkering with the symptoms.
As the founder of Care4Calais explained very clearly on BBC in late November, dealing with people smugglers and cross-Channel small boats is simply tinkering with symptoms. The source of these migrations is poverty in the countries we have destroyed. Boris Johnson has downgraded overseas aid, closing DfID and reducing the amount Britain gives to the poor. One third of Afghans face starvation this Winter, at the end of the Fourth Anglo-Afghan war. I am angry.
2) Send the refugees to the place they want to go
Boris Johnson blames France, or Poland or even Belarus for the refugees seeking to cross into UK. By promoting BREXIT, Boris pulled out of the EU and abandoned EU solutions. I propose that France should cancel the Treaty of Le Touquet: France should ship all refugees who want to join the UK, and land them in the ports of Liverpool, Bristol and London, the three cities that most enthusiastically shipped enslaved Africans to The Caribbean and made the biggest profits from slavery.
3) Accept that Britain actually needs new workers
Simply the story of the 90,000 missing HGV (heavy goods vehicles) drivers shows that the UK is short of workers. Restaurants and hotels are short of workers; although Covid also makes them short of customers. The Health Service and Elderly Care are two sectors that rely very largely on foreign labour. While the Boris Brexit gambit won him the premiership, it means he must solve the migrant problem. Wonderfully: accepting and training migrants might satisfy some of the demand for necessary workers.
4) Understand that Climate Change is one cause of migrations
We consider the Glasgow CLIMATE CHANGE: COP-26 conference a failure, not least because Britain refused to take a lead in paying the money that has been promised to the smallest countries to face the results of Climate Change: a man-made disaster created in large part by the British-led Industrial Revolution.
These are suggestions for the BBC to rethink its coverage,
Yours sincerely,
Robin Poulton
