The West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the country’s subsequent fall to the Taliban, has brought the number of refugees the UK should take back to the forefront of the political conversation. It is eerily familiar: many of the same ideas were being advanced by many of the same people in 2015 at the height of the Syria crisis.
Earlier this year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali did an interview with UnHerd in which she predicted exactly this, and warned about not making the same mistakes again:
When we are confronted with a crisis, like the one in Syria, or the next conflict, we are going to have a camera moment of virtue signalling about compassion, and then creating even more problems for the immigrants and for the natives. That’s just going to lead to a great deal of hostility for immigrants, political volatility, problems with social cohesion, and problems for women. What we really need is to have a rational conversation about immigration and Islamic integration, that whole deal, but we just keep pushing this issue farther and farther down the line.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, UnHerd
Her view was that, in retrospect, the more moderate approach of David Cameron should be seen as morally superior and better leadership than the policies of Angela Merkel and countries like Sweden, which took in much higher numbers of refugees:
Cameron was the most responsive of the European leaders at the time. What he was trying to say is we have to be compassionate and open and help others out. But at the same time, he was also responsive in doing what he was elected to do, which is be the leader of the British people. In trying to balance all of these things, if we had built on where he had started then we could have avoided that 2015 issue.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, UnHerd
Will the media, opposition and Government remember the lessons of 2015 in the forthcoming Afghanistan refugee crisis?
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Subscribe“What we really need is to have a rational conversation about immigration and Islamic integration,”
This is impossible, so will not happen. The problem is not that the topic could not be well analyzed, huge numbers of data assembled and crunched, and show every kind of outcome which has been experienced by the West in its taking of more recent migrants – it is how bad the numbers would end up being for most, and how excellent they are for a lesser number of others, which would stop such rational conversation.
The post-modernism, Marxist, Critical Thinking, Liberal/Left entryist who have wormed their way into every MSM, Entertainment, Education, Tech/Social Media, Political Party power structure now run things – and they are out to destroy the traditional Western System and values. They want the country to decline, and having rational studies on current trends would show virtually all of them are negative to Western Nations – and that cannot be known by the sheep voters.*
*(P.S. I am a conspiracy Loon, but that does not mean I am wrong)
You may or may not be right. But you let yourself down and lose all credibility when you talk about “sheep”.
“Cameron was the most responsive of the European leaders at the time.”
My recollection is that Cameron promised to reduce net migration to the UK to under 100 000 per year, but, instead, allowed it to increase to 300 000 from 200 000. This, to me, said 2 things:
He lied about having control over immigration to begin withThat he likely “lost” the UK referendum to the leave vote as a result of breaking this promise
There’s no faulting Cameron’s responsiveness. He understood that we wanted to hear that there would be less immigration, and he duly told us that there would be less immigration.
He lied through his teeth of course. But who cares? Now, he is rich and out of the line of fire. And that says it all about today’s UK politicians. It was exactly the same with Blair and will be the same with Boris.
I wonder if it is true that we really get the politicians that we deserve. Actually I don’t think it’s true – I think we deserve a great deal better than the opportunists, liars, and general inadequates from whom we have to choose now.
Why is there no international pressure for Russia or China to take on these refugees? Surely, they have more land than they know what to do with?
Because they would both say Eff Off – and that would be that.
We have no pressure to bring to bear on them; – if anything, the reverse.
Learn from 2015, you must be ‘avin a laugh. That’s ancient history, what we need to do is “Move forward”, just like the starship Enteprise, because we can’t find reverse. Klingons on the starboard ( sorry I mean Afghans) wing, starboard wing, starboard wing,. What we gonna do Jim ?
In Sweden, at any rate, 2015 is being remembered by the government. https://www.thelocal.se/20210819/swedish-prime-minister-stefan-lofven-were-never-going-back-to-2015/
paywall 🙁
oops, sorry about that. At any rate, Prime Minster Stefan Löfven was quoted in the paper Dagens Nyheter. “Let’s be very clear about one thing: we’re never going back to 2015,” he told Dagens Nyheter on Thursday. “Sweden will not end up there again.”