Our responsibility for refugees should not be forgotten

Even after Brexit, the UK cannot insulate itself from the obligations to help deal with Europe's refugee crisis

A baby among refugees on a boat carrying 185 people off the coast of Libya. Photo: Lizzie Dearden

Europe’s refugee crisis may have been forgotten as winter has closed in, but it has not ended. People are still dying as they try to cross the Mediterranean, and those in France trying to reach Britain are still suffering.

Although the cold has made it harder and even more dangerous to attempt the crossing from north Africa, the numbers attempting it appear not to have fallen greatly.

More than 100 refugees drowned when a boat sank, as we report today. On Friday 550 refugees were rescued by the Italian coastguard, when two died in the crush on the boats and four more were drowned.

This should suggest that those attempting the crossing are mostly not economic migrants, but desperate people fleeing conflict or persecution. Most of them know the risks and yet are still prepared to run them.

The Prime Minister is right, therefore, to continue the policy of her predecessor in emphasising the importance of dealing with the problem at source. The problem is that the British and other European governments have been impotent in resolving the conflict in Syria, and so the British government’s policy has been heavily weighted towards providing help to refugees in camps in neighbouring countries: Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq.

This is undoubtedly worthwhile, but it is impossible to escape the suspicion that it is partly an attempt to distract attention from Britain’s absence of compassion towards refugees once they have made it to Europe. Theresa May has continued to insist, as Mr Cameron did, that it is better to help refugees in their own region. Slow progress has been made towards fulfilling the previous Prime Minister’s promise of settling 20,000 Syrian refugees in Britain by 2020. So far only about 3,000 have been resettled.

Meanwhile other European countries have accepted their responsibilities. The Italian authorities do most of the work of preventing more people from drowning in the Mediterranean, and Germany has taken more than its fair share of the refugees who have survived.

Not only are people dying in large numbers in unsafe boats in the unusually cold Mediterranean, but refugees trying to reach Britain are suffering in France. The Calais camp may have been broken up, but many people are still trying to get here, many of them hoping to reach friends and family here, some of them children. They are in accommodation centres elsewhere in France, or sleeping rough. Our joint responsibility for them, shared with the French government, has not ended with the clearance of the so-called Jungle at Calais.

One of the largely unspoken motives behind the British vote to leave the European Union may have been an attempt to insulate this country from the pressures of the refugee crisis affecting most of Europe. The Independent did not share this view. Not only is the UK relatively insulated anyway, by geography and by national control of asylum policy, but we ought to assume more of the responsibility for dealing with the crisis, because ultimately our interests cannot be separated from those of our continental partners.

Even when Britain has left the EU, we will be a member of the European family of nations, and we ought to assume our share of the responsibilities that go with that.