Karl Masks
Birds Angel Delight
I wrote my MP about Braverman's disgusting comments. I'm going to post his reply. It is long and predictable. But it's the thought words of an actual Tory, for your edification and amusement.
I got your email about the recent exchange between the Home Secretary and Ms Salter about migrants, and thought I ought to write back to reassure you that there was no attempt to silence her (I’d like to see anyone try – they’d be very unlikely to succeed I think!). the Home Office asked a pro-migration campaign group to take down a heavily-edited film of the exchange, because they felt it was unfairly one-sided, but that’s all, and I’m happy to say there are plenty of unedited versions circulating too, with comments and reporting from reputable news outlets (for example this one from Sky News Holocaust survivor says home secretary's words on migrants are similar to those of Nazi Germany) so people can see what really happened.
More broadly, I hope we’d both agree the problem of organised criminals sending people across the channel in dinghies is a serious and (sadly) often-deadly problem that we’ve got to stop. The people-smugglers tell the migrants to shred their papers and refuse to comment on which countries they have crossed before they arrive here (although, by definition, they will have crossed multiple safe European countries, including France, before they arrive here) to make returning them harder, and to slow the application and appeal process down for as long as possible in the hope of being able to disappear into British society and stay indefinitely. As you will appreciate, that isn’t fair on any migrants who are applying through the proper channels, and having no valid ID also makes them extremely vulnerable to organised criminals who can threaten to expose them to the authorities unless they assist in criminal acts, modern slavery or the sex trade instead. It isn’t as if there aren’t much safer and wholly-legal alternatives to the degrading and exploitative people-smugglers either.
For anyone with time to plan their move there’s the new points-based immigration system, which now allows the best and the brightest from around the world to become fully British citizens: the results are that our legal migrants come from a far wider and more internationally-varied range of countries than before, when there were far more Europeans. And for people who have to flee at short notice, Britain is already one of the world’s leading refugee resettlement states: since 2015 we have offered homes to over 100,000 people from Hong Kong, 20,000 from Syria, 13,000 from Afghanistan and (so far) 50,000 from Ukraine. I should also add that there’s a review of the Modern Slavery Act underway, which will include a section on Independent Child Trafficking Advocates (ICTAs) specifically for helping to reunite trafficked children with their families wherever it’s safely possible. But all these legal routes haven’t reduced the activities of the people smugglers one jot, because the international criminals make huge amounts of money from shipping and exploiting their clients. The only way to stop this awful trade is to make it clear that no-one who uses their services (rather than the legal alternatives I’ve outlined above) will be allowed to stay, so the new Nationality and Borders Act says that anyone who arrives illegally can’t apply for asylum in the UK.
Of course, we will still get plenty of refugees applying to come to the UK (for example from the countries I’ve outlined above), but only through legal routes, so the people-smugglers will be out of business and the misery, degradation and death which they cause will end. Finally, I worry that the various pro-migration commentators and campaigners aren't offering much in the way of practically-workable alternative approaches to controlling our borders instead. The danger is that – no matter how genuine their concerns may be – this important omission leaves them exposed to counter-accusations that they are really trying to prevent any kind of effective restrictions on migration at all, no matter who the migrants may be or how many they are, and that they are turning a blind eye to criminality, exploitation and death in the process.