Peter Hitchens had an article in the Mail on Sunday (We won't save refugees by destroying our own country, 6/9/15), which confuses an emergency with a PC-driven demand that people not be allowed to maintain their own cultures and their own societies. The EU (see Tom McGurk’s article in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post about the ECJ blocking the Scots from imposing minimum prices on alcohol in the name of free trade – the Scots should ignore the ruling, if it is finalized), globalization, TTIP, etc., etc. ad nauseam, have been stealthily (the key word) undermining the prerogatives of governments since the 1940s. I favour free trade and always have. If we don’t trade we don’t eat. States, however, must still make the rules, not MNCs. The time has come to say “stop”, particularly with regard to financial services. The movement of gazillons between countries every second is having a hugely damaging and destabilizing effect on the world’s financial system, the world economy and the lives of people.
Removing all authority from governments would be OK if those who have inherited it, the financial system, MNCs, etc., were answerable to the voters but they’re not. We have a ludicrous situation where governments have responsibilities but less and less power. We are also seeing the profession of politics develop into a business like any other, which exists solely for its own purposes. Politicians nowadays run for office (as they have not yet been abolished although they fulfil no real function) to enjoy the benefits of office. Some political parties have come to understand this quicker and more completely than others. They have developed a language of hypocrisy and a ruthless determination to enjoy the fruits of office while pretending to do otherwise that, were Shakespeare still around (and if he actually wrote his plays!), would lead to him writing another Hamlet or Macbeth.
The crisis with the refugees and the migrants, however, is different. What Hitchens fails to understand is that if millions of people leave their homes and head somewhere else there is nothing that can be done about it. Trying to stop the refugees/migrants is like trying to hold back the tide. They are coming and that’s it. We have to absorb them in the short term. My guess is that most of them will be so grateful that they will settle down and become good citizens of whatever country they end up in. I have no worries about this tide of people. Obviously, if they start coming in their millions that will change our way of life and our standard of living (the protests are more about the effect on standard of living than culture) but the West has brought this flood – if flood it becomes – on itself. If we want to stop this tide before it becomes a flood we (the West) will have to stop engaging in non-stop criminal violence [war] against other parts of the world. Most people would not opt to walk from Syria to Munich if they weren’t desperate.
I’m glad this tide of humanity has begun to reach western and central Europe. Perhaps now, something will be done about its cause.
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