Labour leadership contender says it is immoral and cowardly for Britain to turn its back on those fleeing war and turmoil

Yvette Cooper has urged the UK political class to take greater responsibility for thousands of refugees crossing into Eastern Europe, Greece and Italy, saying Britain had to be true to its values and history by taking up to 10,000 people fleeing the political turmoil in the Middle East.

“Britain has to respond to a humanitarian crisis on a scale we have not seen on our continent since the second world war,” the shadow home secretary said, breaking the apparent political taboo on the UK’s response to the European-wide migration crisis.

Cooper said Theresa May, the home secretary, should end the paralysis and convene an urgent special conference with local councils to discuss how many refugees each town and city could take.

Her plan would require extra central government funding. The cash-strapped Local Government Association refused to comment on her plan, saying it was part of the Labour leadership contest, but Cooper said she will open talks with Labour councils herself if necessary to show May there is a willingness among local authorities to help – if funding is provided.

Yvette Cooper’s refugees quota would require 10-fold rise in UK intake Read more

She suggested that if each town housed 10 refugee families, Britain could take in as many as 10,000 people in one month, not just from Syria, but also from Iraq and Libya. The UK government has so far taken only 200 refugees from Syria, although it has promised to a take a few hundred more as well as fund refugee settlements on the Syrian border.

Cooper’s call, which is likely to be politically unpopular, was echoed by the other Labour leadership candidates in a Channel 4 hustings, but none put a specific number on those Britain should welcome. Cooper said British people would respond if the government disentangled the issue of immigration from asylum, and pointed out that Germany was taking more refugees in a month than Britain accepts in a year.

Speaking at the Centre for European Reform on Tuesday, Cooper said Britain was “stuck in political cowardice that assumes British voters’ unease about immigration means they will not forgive anyone who calls for sanctuary – even though our nation has given shelter to the persecuted for centuries, and sometimes moral leadership is needed”.

In contrast to the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, who said many fleeing the Middle East were not refugees, she said: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing from a new totalitarianism and Europe has to help – just as we did in generations past. We cannot carry on like this. It’s immoral, it’s cowardly and it’s not the British way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Merkel calls for other European Union nations to do more to share the burden of this year’s influx of migrants. Link to video

She acknowledged that Britain faced a generation-long battle to stem totalitarianism in the Middle East, and that some of the migrants were not asylum seekers, but that did not mean the country could not act. “We should be strong enough and resilient enough to rise to the challenge, not turn our backs. We cannot allow the politics of fear and blame to paralyse us, and let this humanitarian crisis go on. It’s time to act. How can we be proud of our history of helping those who fled conflict if our generation turns its back?

“If every city took 10 refugee families, if every London borough took 10 families, if every county council took 10 families, if Scotland, Wales and every English region played their part, then in a month we’d have nearly 10,000 more places for vulnerable refugees fleeing danger, seeking safety.”

Cooper called on May to convene the national conference to identify numbers that cities could take before the 14 September emergency European council meeting on migration. But she opposed the EU imposing quotas on each country, saying that a bottom-up approach to numbers would be a better way of creating political consensus. She said either the EU or the UN could identify the applicants for asylum.

Cooper said the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was right to suggest that the crisis raised serious questions about the Schengen agreement, designed for a different age. She also said Merkel was right to waive the so-called Dublin procedures under which displaced people must claim asylum in the first EU state that they arrive in.

She also called on the EU to do more bring profiteers and cowards to justice. “It means securing international agreement to impound and destroy the boats and vehicles of those plying this vile trade, just as our forebears did with rogue slave traders following the abolition of the slave trade. And if needs be, it means offering our courts and our jails to house those convicted.”

She pointed out that the UK “has refused to take any refugees from the Mediterranean, refused to take more than a couple of hundred vulnerable Syrian refugees directly from the camps, and even returned Syrian refugees to other European countries who are already taking far more refugees, simply because they passed through those countries first”.







