David Cameron says “taking more and more refugees” is not the answer to the global migration crisis.
Amid calls for the UK to allow more people in, to help ease the record numbers of migrants entering Europe and to provide asylum for desperate people attempting to cross the border, the Prime Minister insists upon keeping the UK’s doors closed.
Preferring to focus on the situation in the Middle East, Cameron commented:
We are taking action across the board… the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world . . . I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees.
His words come on the day that harrowing photos of a young Syrian boy, washed up dead on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum, have been published. The child was from a group of 12 Syrian refugees who drowned attempting to reach Greece.
The Labour leadership candidates are taking a different stance. In a much-praised speech this week, Yvette Cooper urged the UK to take in 10,000 more refugees, warning that a failure to do so would be, “cowardly, immoral and not the British way”.
Andy Burnham too has called for Britain to take more people in (or, in his words, “share the burden”): “This is a humanitarian crisis, not just a tedious inconvenience for British holidaymakers, as our government might have us believe.”
> Now read this week’s leader on the migration crisis, “The wretched of the earth”, calling for the UK to accept more asylum seekers
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