For of course the migrants who ended up in Calais trying to break into Britain had already broken all the EU’s laws to get there. They had not applied for asylum in their first country of entry, had not abided by the Dublin Treaty but pushed on through up to the north of France. In taking them in, the British government thought it was doing a good deed. In fact, it was rewarding the people who had broken the most rules and leap-frogged over all other more deserving migrants. This was a precedent that had been set for years, but it was an unwise precedent nonetheless. Everywhere it remained the same story. To be on the side of the incomers was to be on the side of the angels. To speak for the people of Europe was to be on the side of the devil. And all the time there existed that strange assumption that Europe was simply letting one more person into the room. Whether that person was genuinely about to be killed in the corridor became immaterial. If he was cold, poor, or just worse off there than the people inside the room, he too had the right to come in. Europe could no longer be bothered to turn anyone away. And so the door just remained open to anyone who wanted to walk through it.

18. What might have been

18

What might have been

With the right political and moral leadership this could all have worked out differently. Chancellor Merkel and her predecessors would not have been unsupported or unaided had they taken a different set of steps from the beginning.

They could have started by asking themselves the question Europe never did: should Europe be a place to which anybody in the world can move and call themselves at home? Should it be a haven for absolutely anybody in the world fleeing war? Is it the job of Europeans to provide a better standard of living in our continent to anybody in the world who wants it? To the second and third of these questions the European publics would have said ‘no’. About the first question they would have felt torn. That is why the supporters of mass migration – who would have said ‘yes’ to all three – found it convenient to elide the boundaries between those fleeing war and those fleeing something else. What, after all – such people asked – is the huge difference between being at risk from bombs and at risk from hunger?