Over the past weeks the story of this crisis has dominated both mainstream media and social media, with a wide range of views as to the action we as a nation should take to help stop this humanitarian crisis. Some talk of complete closure of borders, an idea that is economic suicide and is in fact impossible under the free movement of people. On the other hand we have the people who think we should open our doors to whoever claims to be a refugee, an equally incompetent and implausible idea.
No matter what your view as to how many people we should take or how many Europe as a whole should take, one thing is clear in my eyes we simply must stop the boats from coming. These boats are the main cause of death and suffering when people make the journey across the Mediterranean. We need to understand that thousands of people have been waiting in refugee camps for months and months and we are accepting people who are kicking the door down rather than those who are waiting with patience.
Lets look at the facts; from the people who have made it to Europe 75% of them are men, not just people of male gender but fully grown adults. This leaves only 25% of those who have landed in Europe to be women or children, does this not make us begin to question letting all of these people in? Allowing these boats to continue in the manner they currently do is funding people traffickers and gangs. That along with the constant stream of deaths that are at a direct result of these trips surely makes stopping the boats the only way to stop suffering.
First we need to look at who we are taking, with the flow of people not only being from Syria but from middle east nations where Nato forces have been present over the past 10 years. We should first of all take any interpretors who have worked with Nato forces during the conflicts, or in fact any person known to be cooperative with our forces, out of the war zone along with their families. Then we look to the camps, the people who have been waiting there for months and months and are not forcing themselves into the continent. Earlier this year ISIS said that they will use the crisis in Syria to flood Europe with 500,000 of their own soldiers, pictures of ISIS militants in Europe posing as refugees are already appearing all over the internet, compassion and sorrow simply can't be an alternative to security. The people who have come over from the Islamic State are not refugees and simply wish to destroy the west and western society and the current EU policy has absolutely no way of stopping these people from coming. Taking from the camps and stopping the boats will allow us to stop the deaths and stop this terrible crisis. Even if we start building new camps and put people on the ground to regulate them , performing the necessary checks and completing application papers to register these people, who are in most cases seeking asylum, it would be a more sustainable solution than just letting people come.
How do we fund these extra camps that I talk about and how do we fund bringing people over who are genuine refugees... Simple, we use the foreign aid budget. This is a budget that is very controversial, especially with the rise of homelessness in the UK. Surely any nation that can fund its own space programs doesn't need £293 million in aid from the UK and combined with the fact that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the modern world, nearly £300 million seems a extortionate amount to be giving out especially with the crisis at hand.
What to do in the long term? Although this crisis has only been in the media for a matter of months it has been happening for much longer than that and will most certainly continue to happen for a long time after the media gets bored. Late in 2013 ,Nigel Farage told the press that we must start taking refugees from the camps in Syria and surrounding countries. We didn't, and now we have the biggest humanitarian crisis in my life time. We have avoided this problem for so long that now it is more complex than ever, if we had started taking 10,000 refugees a year when this whole thing began it would hardly touch our current immigration figures and wouldn't make a huge difference to peoples' every day lives in this country. We would accept people over a long period of time and allow us to add to the infrastructure and cope with the rise in population but no, we ignored the problem and have ended up with a situation that is ten times worse.
Do we bomb Syria??
No...
Destabilising a government with a terrorist organisation just a stones throw away is never the answer, no matter how disgusting and cruel the leader is. To stop ISIS we need to work with Assad, as much as people don't want to. We need to negotiate with him, not bomb his country and destabilise his government as this will just lead to more pain and suffering just like in Libya. Now the prospect of bombing Syria is even more risky due to the confirmed Russian troops on the ground there. Lets be honest, with Vladimir Putin as president, one misguided attack or false bit of intelligence that results in the death of a Russian solider at the hands of the West and it could quite easily turn into World War three...
