‘It’s embarrassing”, said Andy Elvin of the Adolescent and Children’s Trust, “for a developed nation not to have managed this more professionally. We’re not even talking about a massive number of children.” To be more specific, we are talking about 70 unaccompanied minors, arriving from the Calais camp in accordance with the Dubs amendment, which was passed in April.
The children arrived to find a panicked Home Office planning to house them in a detention centre and there waiting, the rightwing press, baying for blood after previous child arrivals with family members failed to look young enough. The Border Agency in Croydon had to erect an emergency facade to prevent tabloid photographers catching and shaming the children, for the crime of needing help.
It would have been bad enough if they had left the squalor of the camps to meet a faceless bureaucracy, but at least any bureaucracy worth the name would know, given six months’ notice, how to cope with the arrival of two classrooms’ worth of kids. Instead, the refugees have been met with a snarling shambles. Thank goodness for Citizens UK, with its banner of welcome. Without it, this would have been more than embarrassing; it would have been nationally humiliating: an image of incompetence and unfettered nastiness that would never have left us.
Meanwhile in Calais at the weekend, as the threat of the camps’ clearance loomed, the air was thick with teargas. Leaflets instructing the refugees to clear off generated outrage rather than obedience, as residents and agencies working in the camp had predicted.
The Le Touquet agreement, which put the UK’s effective border in France rather than England, and the principle underpinning it – that refugees must seek asylum in the first safe country they enter – have been unfit for purpose for some time. When people are displaced in very large numbers, they need to be distributed in a rational and humane way. It is not overly complicated to find a measure that establishes each EU nation’s resources and cross-references that against existing family connections, languages and skills among the refugees themselves, then allocates people to places in an orderly and dignified way. It might be fiddly, and naturally it would take political courage, but the task isn’t wild or unimaginable. Instead, we’ve been hiding behind one another’s skirts, hoping that Greece will take the hit by accident of geography, or Germany by dint of its prosperity.
The logic of France shouldering our obligations was always nebulous, and relied on an unstable combination of inertia and goodwill. But one thing has become plain since the goodwill evaporated: however bad an agreement is, the only possible amelioration is a better agreement. Stitching together isolated responses, for whose deficiencies we then blame each other, is worse than sub-optimal government. In practice, it is more like having no government.
This time last year, the refugee traffic was picking up again on the island of Lesbos after a choppy October: people died every day in the strait between Turkey and Greece, and the death toll in 2015 for this one route was 900. But Boris Cheshirkov, the UNHCR representative I interviewed at the time, wasn’t even talking about the needless tragedies when he said: “This shouldn’t be a crisis. This shouldn’t be an emergency.” He was referring to the reality of life on the island, with hundreds of thousands of people, some trapped in limbo and others who would be travelling onwards into yet more danger, with more barbed wire and hostile governments. We were a continent that had lost sight of its founding principles of dignity, tolerance and brotherhood, he concluded.
The most concrete EU response to the refugee crisis so far has been to push it all back on to Turkey, a country that has already hosted 2.7 million people escaping the war in Syria. That was its big idea, its stab at universal fellowship, the culmination of decades of noble rhetoric: throw some money at the problem to make sure it stays somewhere else. Pretend the conflict is smaller than it is, or larger than it is, or closer to conclusion than it is, or more never-ending than it is – anything to make it none of our business. How much money should we throw at it? Whatever it takes to preserve the integrity of our shared border, since the project – whose purpose we can’t remember – will otherwise certainly fail.
There was always a sense that some members – mainly us, but also the newer, eastern European nations – had never bought into the EU for its humanitarian vision but only as a trading bloc. Michel Rocard, prime minister of France under François Mitterand, memorably wrote an open letter to the UK two years ago, in which he stated, “You wanted trade, and you thought about nothing else”, adding bluntly: “Get out of Europe, before you wreck it.” I want to call him prescient, except that we did get out, and it looks like we might have wrecked it anyway.
Increasingly, I find this dichotomy between the grand language of universal rights and the base but profitable self-interest of free trade to be false. Whatever your formula is, however many millions of euros a deal will generate, whatever jobs it will create, sooner or later you will come down to the unit of a human being. As we have seen with Wallonia’s rejection of the EU-Canadian trade agreement, the rational may converge with the irrational – some might reject it because they are worried about corporate hegemony, others might be yearning for a time when you only ate a pig if its ancestors knew yours.
But the prescription will be the same: unless you find a kind of free trade that distributes its fruits in a way that people can stomach, they will vote against it. Short of giving up on democracy, this means formulating an idea – as mutually agreed as your trading bloc is wide – of what fair distribution looks like, which cannot be done without an idea of equality at its foundation. It is hard to imagine, having got that far, a Europe that had framed its citizens as equal and yet offered no dignity, succour or fellowship to the rest of world.
Perhaps it sounds abstruse to even discuss these interlinked crises of an institution we’ve just walked away from. But it couldn’t be more vital, as we discuss what kind of trade relationship we want with Europe, to remember that trade is just a subset of a deeper question: what kind of people do we want to be?