If the Tories are clowns, what does that make Labour?
But to lift these countries close enough to Western levels of public administration, GDP per capita and economic opportunity to stop the pull factor, international aid would have to be trillions of dollars.
The Labour Party calls Boris Johnson a clown (something with which I agree). However, we should not ignore the Labour Party's own fundamental unseriousness, as evidenced by the migrant crisis.
Thangam Debbonaire's 'solution' to Channel Crossings is indicative of somebody who doesn't do much hard thinking.
She suggests that the problem is cuts to our international aid budget and insufficient alternative routes to migration. Let's think about this. Many of those making the Channel crossing are in fact drawn from the middle classes of their countries of origin. After all, how else would they pay the people smugglers and their passage? The genuinely poor from such countries subsist on a couple of dollars a day and are far short of the thousands of dollars they need for such a trip.
It is true that the counties they come from provide citizens with what we would consider wretched lives. But to lift these countries close enough to Western levels of public administration, GDP per capita and economic opportunity to stop the pull factor, international aid would have to be trillions of dollars.
This is neither possible, even if the entire West pooled its resources, nor a solution to the short term problem.
As for more routes for migration, the combined populations of Afghanistan, the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa is about two billion. Even if only twenty per cent would like to migrate to the developed world (and it would probably be more, given an easy system and truly open borders), that would be 400,000,000 migrants.
Europe combined couldn't swallow such a large number, let alone Britain by itself.
And it would be the UK by itself, because unserious thinkers from the left have failed to notice that the EU is building border walls faster than Trump could ever have dreamed, and has just shut down the EU asylum system for six months.
Ms Debbonaire's solutions are every bit as unserious as Mr Johnson's. However, she says them with great portentousness, and they are the preferred policies (Channel crisis or not) of the Islington Dinner Party Circuit, so she gets away with it.
