Refugees

Yvette Cooper was the surprise star of PMQs today after she made the Prime Minister squirm with a stinging question about Theresa May's election U-turn: ‘The Prime Minister yesterday said she was calling a general election because Parliament was blocking Brexit. But three quarters of MPs and two thirds of the Lords voted for Article 50 – so that’s not true, is it. A month ago she told her official spokesman to rule out an early general election, and that wasn’t true either, was it. She wants us to believe she is a woman of her word. Isn’t the truth that we cannot believe a single word she says?’ While her words appeared to do the trick in the Chamber, Mr S can't help but wonder: is Cooper herself a woman of her word?

When a humanitarian tragedy disappears from our newspapers, there are two possibilities: that the crisis is over and life for survivors is gradually returning to normal — or that the human toll has become so routine as to no longer be considered newsworthy. Sadly, the deaths of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to seek a new life in Europe fall into the latter category. Eighteen months after the photographs of little Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach generated a huge swell of public emotion, entire families are still dying on a regular basis. In the first ten weeks of this year, some 525 people were lost crossing the Mediterranean. Europe is still no closer to ending this outrage.

It is more than possible that before any Brexit deal is discussed, let alone concluded, the EU will have effectively collapsed. And the key factor could be the demise of Algeria’s leader of 17 years. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is 79 and has needed a wheelchair since having a stroke in 2013. ‘His mind is even more infirm than his body,’ one observer tells me. Bouteflika returned home recently after a week’s stay at a private clinic in France. His prognosis isn’t good. Officially, Bouteflika underwent standard ‘periodic medical tests’ in Grenoble. But no one believes this. Among people who know Algeria well, there is little doubt that he is severely incapacitated and does not have much time left.

Say what you want about Owen Jones - and I might well agree with you - but he is admirably big-picture. He dares to link current affairs to the largest moral questions. In a piece about refugees on Friday he supplied a sketch of his form of humanist idealism. Empathy, he explains, is a natural human faculty. We naturally desire the good of all our fellow humans - unless some nasty form of politics interferes with this and teaches us to view some group as less than fully human. This is what colonialism did, and what Nazism did, and what Balkan nationalism did, and what Islamic fanaticism is still doing. And it is what the right-wing press is doing, when it promotes a heartless attitude towards refugees.

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against accepting even a few hundred migrants, as per the European Union’s insistence. That poll result must have been gravid with nostalgia for Magyars over the age of about 35. They will remember that sort of election result being de rigueur, rather than astonishing. Indeed, in 1985 the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party succeeded in capturing 98.8 per cent of the popular vote — and even this was a bit of a disappointment, because in 1980 it had pulled in 99.3 per cent. On both occasions the ruling party was aided, of course, by the lack of an alternative on the ballot paper.