The leader of the Anglican Church Archbishop Justin Welby, a man given to increasingly bizarre pronouncements, told us in his Christmas sermon that we should show compassion towards refugees crossing the English Channel from France to Britain. I completely agree, if I understand compassion properly as ‘sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.’
Setting off in the dead on night on an unstable raft with your remaining possessions and what is left of your family with a reasonable chance of drowning is both unimaginably stupid and unimaginably desperate. Only the hardest of hearted could not have been deeply moved by the image of a drowned Syrian boy washed up on a British beach several years ago or been horrified by the record numbed of deaths recently when 27 migrants are known to have drowned.
Compassion is easy, costs us little and is usually poorly defined when it comes to specific situations. Even Britain’s most efficient executioner Albert Pierrepoint reportedly showed compassion towards his ‘clients’; he spoke to them politely and reassuringly in the record number of seconds it took him to move a man (and some women) from the condemned cell to the gallows from where they were dropped ‘compassionately’ to an instantaneous death. My question for the archbishop is how do we display our compassion towards refugee migrants?
It is hard to understand how we could be any more compassionate. However, I can well imagine its converse. For example, seagoing migrants arriving within sight of Australia are towed back to whence they came. I do know from my own frequent visits to Singapore that illegal migrants in Singapore are regularly rounded up, imprisoned and then deported.
Illegal refugees to Britain, on the other hand, are rescued by our lifeboats, given blankets and hotel accommodation and then, unlike people in Covid quarantine, every possible opportunity to escape without trace. We have a woeful record of repatriating illegal migrants up to and including some hardened criminals and those whose lives may be endangered if they were returned to their countries of origin. This seems remarkably compassionate to me.
The repeated self-abnegation encouraged by the likes of Welby is typical of the liberal left-wing chattering classes. Their livelihoods and pensions are secure and they do not have to live in close proximity to people whose culture is very different and, willing to work for remarkably low wages, drive down wages for everyone else. Britain is portrayed as the villain in cross channel migration. But we are not responsible for the arrival of migrants in France who could and should have been stopped several borders back. We do not load the migrants into boats and put them in peril on the sea. Furthermore, we do not tow them back or repatriate them once they are picked up.
If we are culpable in the crossing of illegal migrants over the English Channel it is in our compassion. We do next to nothing to discourage the steady flow except feeble efforts to offer to pay the French to do their job of preventing the migrants from boarding their boats. The French complain that we have not paid them but that may be because, demonstrably, they have failed to do their job. It is very hard to envisage what we would be paying for except the maintenance of the French coastguard boats which shepherd migrant boats into British coastal waters.
So, Archbishop Welby, can you not see that it is Britain’s compassion that is the lure that entices refugees, already being looked after in France, to make that final and in some cases fatal crossing to our shores? We welcome genuine asylum seekers and there are tried and tested international conventions on how these should be processed. But some crystal clarity, backed up by action, is needed to show that we will not be a haven for illegal migrants. At the very least they must understand that they will be interned and will face a realistic and well exemplified likelihood of repatriation at least to France. This would most likely be an effective, even compassionate, way of stopping the nightly departures over the dark and dangerous water of the English Channel. That and a new Home Secretary.
Ex-broadcaster & now “New Statesman” editor Andrew Marr says that “millions and millions” from Africa & the Middle East will migrate north and west because of “climate change”. The Woke now say that following slavery and coloniality [sic], the science and industrial invention of the Guilty Evil White Man has caused the pollution that is the sole cause of global warming. So we must commit racial suicide (already begun) to leave the temperate north empty for the Global Poor of Colour as a reparation. It is what the Archbishop of York’s Black Jesus born in a pub outhouse would have wanted, innit?
Howls of agony greet the suggestion that (what is left of) the Royal Navy will (supposedly) help to patrol the flow of “asylum” seekers into the Asylum of Saints (aka This Septic Isle, this Other Aden, &c). When will “The Guardian” suggest, as my previous local atheist left-wing Vicar thought, that our military and merchant marine, plus those giant cruise liners, should be used to bring here ALL those millions of sick, halt, lame, displaced, poor, persecuted, gay or trans, unemployable, or just generally unhappy, but unable to reach Calais or pay the people-traffickers, who would prefer to live in What-Was-England?
The leftist Johnson Administration has no political will to stop the Muslim invasion. What underhand deal has been brokered with France/EU to take these illegal immigrants (fit young men who’ll bring over their wives and families)? Britain will become an Islamic State, with Sharia law, unless our patriotic veterans act to protect our borders.
I have no compassion for migrants. Especially those who trek across wealthy, stable and democratic Europe to get to a very specific refuge.
Why would you? You are here already. The question is: why do they bother?
Say the obvious:
Across the West, immigrant inflow is adding to rates of violence and other crime, and is increasing the loads on systems responsible for surveillance, justice and incarceration of criminals, education and healthcare, and those systems required to channel “government” money to nett consumers.
All this while the West is exploring when the expedient of printing money by central banks, as aided by government Treasury depts, will cause widespread collapse of essential economic functions-
-and avoiding thinking through what will happen when the new “green” energy systems cannot reliably supply the volumes of electricity and liquid and gaseous fuels required for the operation of the extraction, agricultural, manufacturing, and supply and distribution industry sectors.
You are probably right on the first point – the recent record set by London for most teenage murders in a year is a case in point. Everyone can see the predominant demographic.
If Justin Welby were a Christian, he could legitimately tell us to love our enemies.
But there’s a difference between loving our enemies and pretending that our enemies are our friends.
The gradual invasion of the UK across the English Channel is not the work of our friends, and it ought to be lovingly resisted with as much force as is required to put an stop to it.
I think many people ignore, or are happily oblivious to the fantastically profitable ‘Compassion Industry’ that has had an unedifying and painful birthing in the West these last few decades. Whether Leftist politicians exploiting wretched people who need a permanent statist intervention, landfill merchandisers who sell them the products the rest of us moved on from a long time ago, or vacuous celebrities with an album or movie to promote, the desperate situation in much of the rest of the world has been a godsend to many people, who weren’t very good at anything genuinely productive. These people are behind the movement to raise ‘compassion’ to the most admirable human characteristic. Unfortunate, as most people don’t want charity and compassion but a level playing field, something the West wasn’t prepared to concede, as feeling good about yourself is easier than experiencing competition.
What Archbishop Welby chooses to ignore is that these illegal migrants are predominantly Muslim who don’t believe gender equality or tolerate homosexuality. He is far too busy jumping on trendy bandwagons such as the green agenda and support for the BLM racists. The church is dying under his watch
You are right, but we must be tolerant of the intolerant, eh folks?
DG, I see you are offering parody of the woke and/or the defeatist behaviour of the nominally non-woke.
But what is now required is not tolerance of the enemies of Western Civ. Rather those who quite fancy keeping our show going for a bit longer must act thusly:-
With utter, never-ceasing ruthlessness in degrading the enemy’s will and capacity to fight.
That’s what was required to defeat Germany twice and Japan once.
But the enemies of Western Civ have convinced the ordinary white person that fighting for the Good is Evil.
Clever eh.
It certainly is clever. See “the long march through the institutions”. And yes, the previous comment may not fully reflect my opinion on this subject. The recent anti-Semitic incident on Oxford St, in which Nazi salutes were used, is a case in point. The perpetrators are clearly not those racist white working class types we hear of, and probably not Millwall supporters either!
Yes, the huge inflows into England of the wrong kinds of people are fast destroying what once was Good and Safe.
But let us remember that the rot started at home. Esp after 1945, large and increasing numbers of the English have simply ceased to accept that the combination of hard work, self-sufficiency, and contribution to community/nation, in the face of difficult circumstances, is a necessary condition for human flourishing.
And this is the case, among whites, all over the Anglosphere.
With this, the appeal of the Big Statists, with their message that “Freedom, Feeling Good, and Consumption, at no cost to you, is your birthright” has become the dominant creed.
To say the obvious, Government has replaced God as the accepted source of the Good Life.
According to the left, England and the west in general are evil, monstrous racist hellholes, while the third world is full of ancient wisdom and beauty. In that case, anyone who tries to emigrate to the west should be sent back forthwith, for his own good.
Skeptic makes a sharp, valid, useful and wise point.
If we were as compassionate as Archbishop Welby wants us to be, the Church of England will cease to exist.
The “Church” of “England” is sadly already on its last legs, and trying to refill the pews with Christians from Afghanistan and elswere as an alternative to reconverting the English to their traditional faith, is not good enough.
Christians helped to introduce compassion into a cruel world, but the reference in a “Guardian” leader recently to Matthew 25.35 on inviting in strangers comes from a passage which is not advocating universal indiscriminate altruism, but warning entire nations that do not treat the followers of Jesus kindly will be sent to eternal punishment. A fresh reading of the Gospels will give a rather different picture of the personality and teachings of Jesus than has become the norm in the Anglican pulpit.
>The “Church” of “England” is sadly already on its last legs,
To be a bishop in the Church of England, belief in God is optional… though rsther in bad taste.
The episcopal “joke” is that half the bishops are atheists, and the other half are homosexuals, except for those that are both.
As usual, Andrew’s “argument” amounts to little more than the claim that the *wrong* sort of people – us – are just *too stupid* to see the beauty of the king’s new clothes. Andrew, like most leftists, is a lefty simply because it is considered loss of social caste in his circles to be anything else.
The use of Western medical and general health technologies, civil engineering, and agricultural practices has created a massive population explosion in black Africa, Muslim and other places which hitherto have shown no/limited capacities to feed and organise themselves, to educate themselves, or to keep their non-violent members safe from their high proportions of violent-dominant members.
The result of large-scale immigration from these places is that Europe will be inevitably be mainly populated by violent, uneducable, non-productive people with no/limited capabilities to organise their communities, or to protect their non-violent members.
Yes, this point has been made by objective observers for more than a century now, but obvious points bear repeating.
As a hostile invading army lands at battalion strength every day a treasonous government surrenders our sovereignty and wealth to them under degraded Christian principles of humanity and compassion. To do so they ignore the fact that any exercise of such principles should be made in the first instance to the native population and extended to others only by their consent.
A future government which is one which has come to its senses and which puts native Britons first is going to have a hell of a job rounding them all up and deporting them.
The election of any such government is impossible because a party advocating any such policy at election time is already illegal.
Yes, it is entirely correct and urgently necessary to question the woke compassion industry and the fake/false/woke ideology on which it stands.
As many realists have pointed out, over these many millennia of attempted civilisation, there are limits to what the nett productive agents and facilities of host sectors/societies can supply to the various nett consuming groups.
When these parasitic groups also produce high proportions of violent members, many of whom harbour deep grievance against the productive tranches of the host society, then it is time for these productive groups and their institutions to act forcefully to protect the essential components of these beneficent sectors.
See the case this week of the teenager of Indian descent who sought to murder the Queen. And this case is a very tiny tip of an enormous iceberg of anti-white, esp anti-Anglo, fake/false/woke ideology that is fueling violence and criminality against whites in the Anglosphere, almost all of which is covered up, for reasons obvious.
Few Indians, and hardly any woke whites, comprehend that absent the British occupation of India, that almost all of that sub-continent would now be Muslim with all the terrible consequences for human flourishing.
And then imagine black Africa without the period of European occupation and continuing inputs of medicine, healthcare, civil engineering, and agricultural technologies from the West.
Race realism is not racism, not at all.
We all know the minus points against Arthur Kemp but his book “War Against Whites” is full of important information.
How many Angels can you get on a pin – how many Afro-Asians can you get inside Canterbury Cathedral, though of course Weedy Welby’s second-in-“command” told us that Jesus was “Black” and was also God who was born in a pub outhouse. Does anyone take these sanctimonious wimps seriously? Certainly not the growing Islamic replacement religion.
I see the US “Zionist” David Horowitz has just published a book fairly similar to “Antisemite” Arthur Kemp’s on the adverse social impacts of BLM and anti-white hoaxes, “I Can’t Breathe” – “Chauvin is doing time for a crime he did not commit”.
@ Percy Grimes, re “Black Africa”.
According to Edward Paice’s “Youthquake” it will account for nearly half and virtuall all that increase of the entire global population by 2100, and any attenpt to mitigate its impacts will have “racist undertones”. Western Europe which (Brexiteers note) includes “England” is already committing racial suicide to make room for its future occupation, as predicted by Asfa-Wossen Asserate, Stephen Smith, &c. To describe the implications adversely in terms of IQ or behaviour is probably a hate crime, so I will not put SR at risk of the political policeman’s knock, for whose elimination Churchill said we fought the war.