Nigerians among The 900 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean were killed by British government policy
We were warned. We knew the dangers. We let 'migrants' drown
There’s something we need to be clear on. The death of 900 refugees – we have to use that blanket term because we don’t know the names of the dead, and I suspect we never will – in the Mediterranean over the weekend was not a “tragedy”. The word tragedy implies an accidental calamity. An unfortunate confluence of space and time.
There was nothing accidental about the deaths of The 900. They were killed as a direct – and deliberate – act of government policy. EU policy. And British government policy.
In October of last year I wrote about how ministers had adopted a new strategy for dealing with the wave of children, women and men fleeing the charnel houses of Syria and Libya.
In the House of Lords, Foreign Office minister Lady Anelay announced: "We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean". The reason ministers no longer supported planned search and rescue operations was, she said, because the government believed they created “an unintended ‘pull factor’, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths”.
To her credit, Lady Anelay was clear and unambiguous about the rationale behind the decision. People currently believed that if they attempted to reach sanctuary by sea, there was a chance they would be rescued. If the rescue cover was withdrawn, they would not be rescued. They would die. And once enough of them died, then word would finally get back to Syria and Libya that there was, in fact, no prospect of rescue. At which point people would stop trying to make that perilous sea journey. Drown a migrant to save a migrant.
Well, the first part of Lady Anelay’s policy is working. Children, women and men are currently drowning in their thousands. It’s not yet clear how many more will have to drown before word finally filters down the people smuggling chain. Or if it ever will. But I trust Lady Anelay will keep Drown A Migrant To Save A Migrant under close review.
Sorry, that’s cheap. It’s not lady Anelay’s policy. She’s just a junior minister. At the end of the day it’s David Cameron’s policy. He’ll be out on the campaign trail today. I wonder if he’ll be given a running tally of the dead.
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Nick Clegg will be out on the campaign trail too. Since the election started he’s been keen to point out those “red line” policy areas where the Lib Dems have held their coalition colleagues to account.
But the policy of drowning migrants to save migrants doesn’t appear to have been one of them. In the New Statesman Tim Farron, the Lib Dems’ foreign and commonwealth spokesman, wrote how the “tragic deaths” over the weekend were “a wake up call”. “We can’t just brush aside allegations that smuggling gangs were exploiting search and rescue operations because they knew that people would be saved ... But we also can’t turn our backs on the people caught up in the midst of wars in Syria, in Libya, in human rights abuses in Eritrea”.
Very eloquent. But Tim Farron and his colleagues did turn their backs on those people. Which is why they are now all dead.
Someone else who’s been speaking out about “the tragedy” is Ed Miliband. Taking a break from having his photo taken with a Chester hen party, he tweeted: “Those dying in the Mediterranean are some of the poorest men, women and children in the world. We must act to stop these awful scenes. We are seeing tragic scenes for the second time in days. European leaders must work together to stop more of these drownings taking place”.
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