If a government minister declares a major incident, you imagine something life-changing and devastating has happened. A bomb has gone off or a train has derailed, a coach has crashed or people have been shot. But Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, has declared a rather curious phenomenon a major incident, and it is a massive overreaction.
Migrants – more accurately, refugees – have been trying to get to the UK from France for years. Some have risked their lives under lorries, others have risked their lives walking through the Channel tunnel, and perhaps a more recent phenomenon is people risking their lives crossing the Channel in flimsy dinghy boats. When people are risking their lives – and their children’s lives – then they have a serious reason for needing to be somewhere.
And the number of people trying to cross the channel in small boats has increased towards the end of last year. According to the figures, 80% of people who tried to reach the UK in this way did so in the last three months of the year. This is notable, and perhaps due to changes coming in an impending Brexit or to the situation in France getting worse for migrants and refugees in recent months.
But what is also notable is that the figures, when you break them down, are tiny. Miniscule. In fact, fewer than four people per day tried to cross the Channel in boats from France, on average, in December.
This is Sajid Javid’s major incident. Four people a day.
The numbers look like this:
- 539 people tried to come to the UK in small boats in the whole of 2018
- 434 of these did so in the last three months of 2018
- Around 115 people left the French coast in December 2018, trying to reach the UK by boat (3.83 per day)
- Around 115 people were prevented from leaving the French coast in December 2018 by the French authorities
- 885,000 migrants arrived in Europe via Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in 2015.
2015 was perhaps the height of the migrant crisis as Europe perceived it, so 885,000 may be on the high end compared to 2018 (where full figures are not yet available). But to worry about 115 people getting a dinghy to the UK when 885,000 did so to get to Greece puts the ‘major incident’ in perspective.
We are a country of 66.02 million, and we can absorb plenty more people who need our help. We don’t need to worry about a few hundred crossing the Channel, other than to be seriously concerned about their welfare when they are in the path of major ferry routes from Dover to Calais, and they are in fragile boats that are probably not safe for the journey. That is my concern, when I think about those crossing, not some kind of protective “they mustn’t come here!” response formed from racism and xenophobia.
Sajid Javid had been on an African safari, which he cut short to come home and panic about refugees in boats. Declaring these beleaguered souls to be a crisis rather than people who clearly need our help, he ordered Border Force vessels out on the seas watching out for the dinghies. Not to help them, of course, but to add to the panic and document the “crisis”. This is the same Javid whose own dad arrived in the UK with £1 in his pocket, but now does not want anybody on this land (or water) who is not – somehow – worthy. I don’t know what makes someone worthy, but they tend to be white and not speak with an accent.
On Christmas day – perhaps a time when desperate people thought there would be fewer defences on the seas, 40 people tried to get here by boat. Even if there were this many every day, it would still be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall number of people who we in the West are forcing to flee their own countries because we keep bombing them and leaving them uninhabitable. And when we do this, we have to take responsibility for the refugees we create.
There is another story, of course, and that is that Theresa May’s Brexit vote is fast approaching. If Javid can create a climate of fear and danger around refugees seeking our help, then this can contribute to a situation where MPs feel more obliged to vote in favour of her highly unpopular Brexit plan. Javid’s ‘major incident’ draws attention from May’s calamitous attempts to unite her party and her parliament, and it appeases the racists who want the strongest, hardest Brexit they can conjure up.
We have the capacity in this country to host more refugees, we just don’t seem to have the capacity for empathy that we need to do this.
We are not running out of space.
I welcome people who need our help, as well as those who simply want to live here, because the pure chance of me having been born on this bit of land should not give me a right to a better life than someone whose pure chance was having been born somewhere else. So Sajid Javid has a long way to go before he can convince me that these people coming here is something to resent, rather than something to celebrate.
Photo: Alisdare Hickson