More than £1.5m has been raised in the most successful fundraiser in the paper’s history. But charity alone can never be enoughWhen approached by fundraisers on Christmas Eve to donate money so they could “buy the poor some meat and drink”,Ebenezer Scrooge asked whether the prisons and workhouses no longer functioned. “Many cant move there, and many would rather die, or ” the philanthropists explained. “whether they would rather die,” said Scrooge. “They had better achieve it and decrease the surplus population.”For much of the last year, the official British attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers has resembled Scrooge’s towards the needy. The government pointed to the existing and clearly inadequate framework for dealing with refugees globally while abdicating moral responsibility for addressing the human crisis in our midst. It persuaded European Union partners to cease search and rescue missions for sinking vessels, or effectively leaving people to drown. In much of this they enjoyed considerable well-liked support. Following publication of the picture of the three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi,being carried dead from the Mediterranean, a quarter still believed we should take no or fewer” Syrian refugees; after the Paris attacks that figure was up to half. A columnist for the Sun compared asylum seekers to “cockroaches”; a Daily Mail cartoon portrayed them as rats.
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Source: theguardian.com