Let us remember how we got here. My 2015 submission to The Conservative Women website:
On Friday, September 11th, I listened to Lyse Doucet of the British Broadcasting Company's Radio Four Today program interviewing - and I use the word loosely as she merely held out the microphone and remained silent much of the time - an Afghani on the Moldovan border.
This able-bodied young man, with perfect English, explained that he and his friends were entering the European Union as economic migrants and that it was unfair to invite Syrians and not Afghanis, and anyway, we “owed him” and his people for 25 years of intervention.
Lyse Doucet observed how it was impossible to distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers. This was interesting as it went to the core of any managed immigration policy. Indeed, BBC broadcasters had been claiming for weeks precisely the opposite and that expressing any anxiety about the German Government encouraging mass border incursions was racist.
A person is either 1) an economic migrant, legal or illegal; 2) a legal migrant (visa in hand), or 3) an asylum seeker, hoping after due process to be accepted as a refugee with a “well-founded fear of persecution” and, after that, afforded an appropriate period of “leave to remain”.
Without border management, such important distinctions and the border itself become incidental.
It was interesting what Lyse Doucet did not point out: that the Russians themselves might have ten years of occupation to answer for or that the Taliban were often foreign fighters who had brought their own mayhem.
But wait, did she point out that the Taliban were funded by Saudi and US money, not necessarily European? No.
Did she mention that the Taliban were overthrown for allegedly hosting Al-Qaeda? No.
Did she say there was a genuine attempt to arrive at some form of self-government and elections in Afghanistan? No.
Did she mention that many British troops had lost their lives liberating the country from Taliban rule? No.
Did she even ask how the individual she was interviewing had funded a 2830 mile journey from Afghanistan to the Moldovan border? No.
For Lyse to engage with him, she would have required shared concepts such as the rule of law, due process, immigration control, national identity, national security, national self-interest, managed borders, respect for other countries' cultures and, for example, the idea that diverse cultures will include cultural incompatible and unacceptable features.
She would need some critical knowledge of the European Union’s Dublin II Regulations that determined the continent’s refugee policies or some sense of the distinction between democracies, dictatorships, and theocracies, and modern Western welfarist, urban and industrialised societies, as opposed to semi-feudal and tribal, rural, narco-agricultural countries.
She would need to grasp that Scots, English, Irish and Welsh cultures have more in common with each other and little in common with Afghani Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen, Balochor and Nuristani cultures. That different views on women, tribal blood oaths and other matters might not quickly transfer to Teesside, Cornwell, Newtownards, Dumfries or Abergynolwyn.
She might need an awareness of the five schools of Islamic jurisprudence and the different Western or Eastern Christian churches, a sympathetic grasp of how Anglophone Christian societies had resolved the bloody aftermath of the reformation with concepts such as freedom of speech, universal suffrage, freedom of religion and civil society.
She would need to draw her listeners' attention to the serious security threats arising from allowing massive groups of people, only recently at war with British, American and other European armed forces, to enter these countries.
Many of these migrants, by their own utterances, seemingly harbouring a sense of grievance against the countries they were now being allowed to enter with no due process, few documented papers and no resources to marshal them through a series of sovereign territories.
Of course, Lyse Doucet is no fool and, as an experienced journalist, knows all this. We should be grateful she got the interview and even found someone who spoke such excellent English. (And how come an Afghani migrant fleeing his homeland should speak such perfect "English").
But to ask, say, one or two of these questions, Lyse Doucet would have to step outside the narrative, a narrative used to dismantle British confidence, nationhood and identity; a narrative that says our society is to blame, that all our economic gains were made at the expense of enslaved Africans, empire colonials and innocent peace-loving Muslims the world over.
If she or any of the BBC journalists had stepped outside the narrative, they would have found an interesting story: A story of how the German government had commissioned report after demographic report from 2000 onwards, on how, by 2009, they realised they had a perilous 500,000-a-year shortfall in population growth; and in particular, that the working-age population would fall from 45 million to 29 million by 2060, whilst the broader population would also fall by 10 million to 71 million.
Lyse might have reported that the Germans had debated openly how they could assimilate such large immigrant numbers, what they could learn from their Turkish immigrant experience, and where they could find them. And how it became clear there were not enough skilled migrants inside the EU. That last year, they had a shortfall of six hundred thousand skilled workers and 90,000 apprentices.
So, whilst Britain told its Commonwealth nurses and doctors they would have to comply with EU regulations, the German government had different ideas.
Most East European countries rely on economic migration and the remittances their former citizens send back from Britain and Germany for their financial viability. Indeed, on the promise of such free movement, they had agreed to sell their utilities to German companies and banks in the first place.
German policymakers knew they would never get Hungary or, for that matter, Spain, England or little prostrate Greece to agree to unlimited external inward movement of non-EU migrants: The law, or rather "Dublin II", is the law, after all.
Before the European elections, the leading German parties set aside a proposal for an Australian points system to filter new migrants (now being rebadged by Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, as a Green card system for obvious reasons). The German press reported on the need for between 275,000 and 500,000 migrants yearly for two decades.
Pegida, the Dresden-based far-right populist anti-Islamisation party, grows in response, as do Neo-Nazi petrol bombings of east German migrant hostels; all this is on the public record.
When the UN announced it had run out of funds for camps inside Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, the UNHCR hoped that countries who were donating only a third of what they had promised would make up the difference. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and the German Government saw a synergy, an opportunity for the country of Teutonic discipline, law and order and due process.
Merkel's "considered" offer to take 600,000 refugees in response to the boat people trafficking tragedy (a tragedy that was crying out for a port external to the EU for processing applications, and increased funding for the border camps around Syria) had the obvious result: a worsening asylum problem and the conversion of a crisis into an unpredicted biblical movement of people. The Germans did not offer aeroplanes or provide ships; they just said to come!
No one asked; everyone accepted that this was altruistic, compassionate Germany; and Britain - who 1) had given four times as much financial support to the Syrian Refugee camps than Germany, 2) whose total support to the crisis was nearly a billion; and 3) whose UK population growth is upwards and population density in England nearly twice that of Germany - was singled out by the EU and the Germans, and the Labour Party, and every celebrity on social media for "not doing its fair share".
Hungary, fearful of border breaches and potential jihadist infiltration, spoke out in defence of its Christian-settled society and was denounced as "Far right," ungrateful, and a neo-communist dictatorship. As mass chaotic migration got underway and babies washed up on beaches, the Dublin II laws were set aside to "meet the crisis," the irony being if the rules had been implemented, there might have been no mass crisis in the first place.
The narrative was deployed: "Our" neo-liberal, Judaeo-Christian, Neo-Con, far-right wickedness has siphoned off all "their" commodities, we invaded their countries, and we "started it" (at the battle of Tours in 732).
Our greed, our warlike aggression, our legal expansionism, our racism, and global free market capitalism, our global warming, our fracking, our western democracy, our guns and missiles, our man-spreading, our selfishness, our lack of compassion, and... and... You get the picture.
And so, Lyse Doucet, on the anniversary of 9/11, saw our Afghani friend as merely reflecting back to us what he has been told and taught either at a British university or watching BBC news or listening to Jeremy Corbyn, or watching CNN, or listening to the BBC World Service radio. He is just recounting the narrative.
And you know He's right; we owe him and between 60 and 100 million others, and it is time for payback. How do I know this? Because the BBC keeps telling me - and we should pay our licence fee, shut up and listen.
Meanwhile, the frail, weak, the elderly and injured, the orphans and traumatised refugees in the refugee camps watch on. They see on Television the face of one of their torturers or rapists demonstrating in the centre of Budapest.
And when in the future, the violence and rioting spread across the continent and can no longer be explained away by the "Far right," "police heavy-handedness", and the oikophobic hysteria has died down, this genuinely catastrophic reckless gamble will finally come home to roost.
We will suddenly realise, at best, that we extracted the people who were supposed to fight ISIL and the same people supposed to rebuild Syria; we should remember who said what to whom and when.
Who jumped on the bandwagon to try and win the Labour Leadership, which celebrities offered up their gated mansions, which EU-funded charities enthusiastically supported a policy that would lead to more drowning, which grandstanding politicians attacked the prudent as "racist" or "disgraceful", which BBC broadcaster asked a decent Hungarian spokesman's whether he was going to "shoot the migrants" on live BBC television (it was Robert Peston), and which narcissist broadcasting company editors deployed the narrative that risked not only the whole of our and Europe's security but also what inter-ethnic harmony that existed in our still broadly tolerant society.