Reform’s ‘deadly drive’ on small boats targets determined human lives
ROS WYNNE-JONES: Refugees are real people facing life-and-death choices. Political calls from Reform’s Robert Jenrick for “lethal force” ignore the horrific realities driving families across the Channel
Kurdish Syrian family: Wadir Sale, his wife Amal, son Abdul and son Wassim, in their makeshift camp in Calais(Image: PHILIP COBURN)
Dear Robert Jenrick,
I’ll never forget meeting Wissam in Calais, on a trip to Northern France with Lord Alf Dubs. A little disabled boy with the sweetest smile, his Syrian parents were trying to keep him alive in a rubbish dump so he could get to Britain for medical treatment.
We could see how ill he was, and how filthy his living conditions, so we tried to get him to safety via a legal route. There weren’t any – not even for a Lord and a national newspaper, never mind for a pair of bewildered Syrians with a young family living in hell.
They came by boat in the end, a hellish journey that contributed to Wissam’s death at the age of seven. His parents were torn between their son’s certain death on the rubbish dump, or his likely death following the boat journey. Are they the kind of people you’d deal with, using “lethal force”?
You see, people like you and me don’t have to face these kind of dilemmas, Robert. I wonder what you would have done? Your party, Reform UK, made a game about this kind of thing, didn’t you – a ‘small boats’ video game? It helps, doesn’t it, when these people are just pixels on a screen.
I wonder what you would do if you were one of Karim’s parents in Afghanistan? Karim was 22 when I met him. His parents were being hunted by the Taliban for being academics and had made the heartbreaking decision to try to send him to safety. He made five attempts to cross the Channel in a dinghy.
“After a few hours,” he told me, “the dinghy is going down. Everyone is screaming….The people sitting at the edge – they don’t have anything to hold onto now the dinghy is deflating. With my own eyes, I see three young guys my age fall from the boat and drown… No-one counted how many people were on the boat. We didn’t know each other’s names.”
Is Karim, a quiet poet, one of the people you would target with lethal force? And, I wonder, what would you say to my friend Abdul, who lost his entire family and village in a massacre by the Janjaweed in Darfur when he was seven years old?
We wrote a book together called The Journey, about the years he spent seeking safety. He was 15 when the lorry he was clinging onto inside the wheel arch, stopped off the M4 in Swindon, and his second life, working with horses, began.
I’m sorry Robert, but I don’t think you would last one night in Calais, in a freezing tent, with armed police hunting you down, destroying your tent, and burning your clothes. It’s a lot tougher than chasing people around the tube.
But I’d be interested to know if you would choose to send your children to safety when the Taliban came knocking on your door? And what you’d do living on that rubbish dump with a disabled child – stay or go to sea? And where you’d go if your village had been burned to the ground?
I’m not stupid. I know this is the only way it works for you – dehumanising people. Treating them like rats, or vermin. Calling them migrants, not people. And I think we know, by now, where this leads.
I know it’s autumn, so it’s ‘Small Boats’ season. By which I mean it’s ‘right-wing politicians trying to get attention’ season, as you fight like rats in a sack amongst yourselves.
And I can see your problem. Zia Yusuf keeps raising the stakes, so you have to go one bet higher. And now, we’ve reached the logical conclusion – gunning down small boats.
But, if you are really ready to threaten people whose shoes you have never walked in, you should at least know who you would be unleashing lethal force against.
