Crisis? What crisis?

Whatever happened to the phlegmatic British?  We are accustomed to having a bit of fun at the expense of excitable Latins who wave their arms around yelling ‘Eet is  a disaaaster!’

 

If the social media and blogs are any guide, the British are in a blind panic about the prospect of a  handful of Syrians arriving in the UK with the specific objective of poncing off our ‘welfare’.

 

So let’s get it in perspective.

 

Dave has promised to take 20,000 refugees over five years. That is 4,000 a year out of the half-million immigrants who arrive every year. One might describe that as ‘statistically insignificant’. Or as a piece of cynical PR.

 

This ‘crisis’ is nowhere near historical levels.

 

WW22 created 14 million. Six years after the war there were still 400,000 in camps; displaced persons, ‘DPs’ to us or more likely ‘bloody Poles’ although they were mostly Ukrainians, Latvian, Lithuanians and the like.

 

We coped pretty well even though UK was to all intents and purposes stony-broke (we still had food rationing in 1953). And there were 200,000 from Hungary in 1956, a fact that they have now conveniently forgotten. There were 1.4 million Vietnamese who were mostly settled in the US where they have usually done well.

 

Now we have the Syria problem where half the population are either refugees or displaced. Of the 4 million refugees, Turkey has about 1.6 million, tiny Lebanon has c.1.2 million, Jordan 425,000, Iraq 235,000, Egypt 238,000, and there are about 160,000 in other MENA countries. This rather spoils the justification of complaints from serial whingers who say Why are no Muslim countries taking them?’

 

Then there are those who question why the parents of the toddler drowned off the coast of Turkey didn’t stay in Turkey. Well, it’s because Turkey only deals with asylum applications from Europeans.

 

The real problem is that the EU is in disarray. It has shown that it is incapable of dealing with  real and serious issues, as it demonstrated beyond peradventure in the complete mess that it made of the Greek crisis – an economy so small that it never was a proper crisis, but manufactured in Brussels out of its customary arrogance and meddling.

 

The current ‘crisis’ will only be settled when the EU gets its act together.

 

Don’t hold your breath!