Charity begins at home, or does

Subject: Charity begins at home, or does it.

With the sinking of the heavily over loaded rubber dingy in the English Channel and a significant loss of life the question is asked can’t we make it easier for these asylum seekers to make the passage here safely.  We could of course grant them all automatic asylum on the basis of Human Rights as set out in the UN Charter since the object of the charter was to shine a light on a humanitarian problem and we claim we are humanitarians. But does our humanitarian only project itself towards people not yet arrived, what about the destitute living here do they lay claim to our concern.

The phenomenon of mass migration is yet another spin off of a communication age spawned by the internet, communication that inflamed the idea of a better life elsewhere and illustrated the ways and means of getting there. With the advent of People Smugglers who at extortionately high price’s to match their total absence of ethical values, provide the passage and the unseaworthy boats for the last leg across the Channel.

You can hardly blame people for seeking a better life. In time gone by this was largely assumed to be through hard work in ones own birth country and only then, with the money saved, could you emigrate elsewhere but with the idealism of the United Nations in its protection of the ‘individuals rights’, it created a new legal system of bypassing boundaries and encompassing the concept of national identity for a global identity. Nations which had prided themselves with having cultivated a population of secular rule takers, who’s characteristic was to apologise for things which are not its fault, a sort of default status and we are after all overly concerned about status, to the almost mute acceptance of authority and a top down class system which ensured we knew our place.

Enter global man or woman inflated by the small print of the human rights act, who see only their rights and rarely their responsibilities at least the responsibilities towards integrating and assimilating with the hosts. To the new arrives the society they leave behind actually travels with them in the form of their religious commitment which defines much of  their lives as they cluster together sustained by language and custom but sadly the new world they have arrived in is lost to them as they hurry into the mosque on Friday, acknowledging friends and family, it’s an extension of home in Pakistan, Iran, or Syria, a cohabitation under the protection of their  religious belief, they hardly miss a heartbeat from their life in Karachi, Tehran or Damascus.

The British were also famously clannish in the colonies with their clubs and snobbery especially  towards the locals and one might suggest that the sins of our fathers is now visited on us but of course the colonial sahib was not one of us, any more than the chap from Syria is one of us. To the pukka sahib his club would have looked askance at our application for membership much as we do the Syrians right to board a boat without proof of identity other than they belong to humanity.

The protection of a way of life, be it entry into the club scene in Mayfair or the huge walled estates in the Home Counties we, the ordinary ‘Brit’ are equally as persona non grata as was the colourful West Indian from Jamaica in the 1950’s when they stepped ashore as part of the Windrush project.

Britain, from that time onwards has mortified itself by self flagellation and denial, seeking to atone for its history, much as Germany did after the revelations of the Holocaust. We continually beat ourselves up in matters which we can hardly be blamed be it mistreated donkeys, to children with cleft pallets, our television screens are full of grotesque miscarriages of human injustice but sitting in the gunnels of a rubber boat heading for shore, the men and women probably care not a jot about our love of dogs or our attraction towards the humble hedgehog, since the rough justice of their life has long ago filed off the emotional sentiment which in this country we still pride ourselves by donating millions of pounds to charity to alleviate cruelty plus the many millions more which are donated to those very countries from which the new arrivals are fleeing but not it must be noted the towns of Burnley, Barnsley or Bradford, where indifference to the plight of these people runs deep.

If we wish to merge our centuries old culture with equally old cultures, East of Suez, we might at least welcome it, after all it would save millions in charity donations.