Migration

As Angela Merkel approaches her tenth anniversary in power, Germans are talking about a possible Kanzlerinnendämmerung — a ‘twilight of the chancellors’. Anger is growing at Merkel’s handling of the migration crisis. Germany, which has only recently reconciled itself to the idea that it is a ‘country of immigration’, must now integrate vast numbers of asylum seekers, beginning with the million who are expected to arrive this year. At the same time, the country has been hit by two huge corruption scandals, involving Volkswagen and the DFB, the German football federation. The odds are that Merkel will survive — it’s hard to see at the moment who can replace her.

I had intended to write something about the refugees, the migrants, for this week’s magazine – but we were well covered on that score. So I wrote about some lesbians instead. What I would have done was marvel at the Dianification of the issue. A potent process which somehow causes politicians to lose grip on common sense; Europe wide, one might add, apart from that singularly sane chap in Hungary. And yet it is not quite Dianification. It is nowhere near the whole country (if indeed it ever was with Diana; a moot point). An opinion poll, broadcast by a plainly incredulous and disgusted BBC, showed that the majority of people in the UK did not want to see more borders opened and more refugees/migrants admitted to the country.

The migration crisis is about more than Syria. A few weeks ago, Theresa May repeated one of the biggest mistakes in politics: thinking that third-world development will somehow mean fewer migrants. In a Daily Telegraph article, she argued that:- ‘We must help African countries to develop economic and social opportunities so that people want to stay.’ Give aid, not shelter, runs the argument – and she’s not the first to make it. ‘As the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico,’ Bill Clinton once assured Americans, ‘there will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.

I’m getting tired of the self-righteousness of Owen Jones. His response to the terrible spate of deaths of people fleeing Syria and Africa is to imply that if only everyone were as moral as him, the problem would be solved. He seems to think that the key cause of these people’s deaths is that many people in Britain call them by the wrong word. To call them 'migrants', he says, shows a total disregard for their humanity. 'Those of us who want more sympathetic treatment of people fleeing desperate situations have failed to win over public opinion, and the cost of that is death.'  The implication is that if his right-on attitude was shared by all of us, the deaths would be avoided. This strikes me as completely nuts.

The wind is maddening and constant, and gets stronger as the sun falls below the horizon. The streets are lined with plastic and rubbish, the beaches covered with greasy bodies and sunbeds, and ghastly music blasts away all day and night. Motor scooters without mufflers and cars choke the tiny roads that lead to the centre of town, where literally thousands of sunburned young people wearing expensive rags down tequilas with a thousand-mile look on their unshaven faces. Welcome to Mykonos, once a brothel of an island, now reverting to type after 30 years as a gay paradise. I am on a 125-foot schooner, the Aello, which was built in Hamburg, Germany, in 1921, by Max Oertz, and commissioned by Anthony Benakis, a great Greek benefactor.

There is a genuine madness in our current operation to ferry as many asylum seekers as possible from North Africa to, eventually, the UK. As I mentioned at the time we dispatched the Royal Navy to the southern Med, we will only encourage more and more people to set sail in upturned bath-tubs and patched-up lilos. Among them will be maniacal jihadis and assorted criminals, all expecting to be rescued by the countries which, in some cases, they wish to destroy. For the ordinary non-jihadi citizens it means a jumping of the queue over those who attempt to gain access to the imperialist west legally. For a fuller exposition of this problem I would direct you to Max Hastings’s article in the Daily Mail. Max also deals with the effect upon our depleted armed services.

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial, the magazine’s editorial line consistently pro-immigration. It’s the questioner who haunts me.