'Rational' decision needed on refugees

As someone who has always deplored any policies which have not been thought through properly, I became concerned that this was a knee jerk political decision rather than a rational workable one.

My fears were heightened when the chief ministers of Guernsey and Jersey said they had been in touch with the Home Office with a view to our Channel Islands taking some Syrian refugees.

I started to investigate the subject further and found that the overwhelming majority of the populations of our islands were totally against taking any refugees. I assisted the 'we are the 82%' Jersey group who actively campaigned on the issue. The Jersey chief minister announced a few weeks ago that Jersey would not be taking any refugees because of legal issues they have been looking into. The policy would never have got through the States of Jersey, anyway.

To date, the Guernsey chief minister has still not announced that we will be following Jersey and not take refugees.

This is surprising because we have similar legal and constitutional issues to Jersey, although apparently there are other factors to take into account as well. However, it does not matter what these are, as the principle of taking refugees would never get through our States either.

This has always been a national UK government responsibility and there is no need to change that.

In the UK, local councils have been asked to take a 'proportionate share' or 'quota' of each year's proposed intake of Syrian refugees.

This idea has been put forward more to sell it as just being small numbers to each locality, rather than a sensible policy.

Indeed the numbers intended for Guernsey and Jersey were in line with national UK proportions for population areas of that size.

The problem is that historically immigration into the UK has been done on the basis of not splitting up incoming new groups of migrants, but broadly keeping them together in their own communities in different parts of the country. This policy has very much worked, with new entrants to the UK keeping their own sense of community but also being able to be part of the wider community. The policy of 'dispersal' of Syrian refugees risks isolating them from their own communities and is going to be fraught with difficulties. It will also cause greater resource issues for local councils because specialist services such as interpreters will still have to be found for even small numbers of refugees. It is far more sensible and cost effective to keep new refugees together and to combine the resources which need to be made available to them.

We would have exactly these problems in Guernsey.

There are now concerns that the policy on taking Syrian refugees may not be the best one for the refugees concerned, nor for the far greater number of refugees and displaced persons who will not be coming to the British Isles.

The issue of vetting potential refugee entrants to the UK is one where the UN has a major role, in conjunction with the UK Home Office.

This is a major difficulty with trying to have proper verification of all the facts, identity, health, criminality, war crimes, extremist background, among other factors. There is also the worry of some people not actually being 'vulnerable', but being economic entrants who have bribed their way into the UK. This is apart from the fact that numerous men of military age are avoiding their national service. In other words, they have abandoned their own wider families in Syria to let them do the defending of their land.

As the legitimate Syrian government and all the religious groups in Syria, including the Christian, have asked Western countries not to entice their citizens away when they want them to return to Syria to rebuild their country, just why is the UK government continuing with a policy which has not been asked for?

It is often said that Syrian refugees are fleeing persecution, but there are refugee camps where people are safe which have plenty of spaces. The UK government contributed to the £100m. cost of a purpose-built camp at Azraq in Jordan, which has 115,000 vacancies, so where is the logic in the UK government policy?

Ask any charity involved in Syria or in the surrounding areas and they will emphatically say that most pressing need is to help the refugees and displaced persons there. The amount of money which it will cost for 20,000 refugees to be in the UK would help a good two million people in the affected areas.

At some stage the UK government will realise that if you have an open door policy on refugees, it is counter-productive because it encourages people to give up on their own countries and leave for a better life. The UK government also needs instead to positively contribute to world order and stability, so that refugee situations do not get out of hand. In Iraq we left too soon, creating a vacuum of mayhem and the creation of Isis Daesh. In Syria, to our shame, we contributed to the catastrophe by funding the training of extremist Wahabbi Islamic fundamentalists to try to overthrow the secular government which was protecting Christians and all religions.

It is time for a new foreign policy, one embracing both compassion and tolerance, but one of strength, stability and security.

In the meantime, we in Guernsey, nor indeed should the UK generally, have to take refugees due to the mistakes of UK government foreign policy.

TONY WEBBER,

anthonywebber@cwgsy.net