This is not something I write very often, but I agree with David Miliband. In his capacity as president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, his stern words about the refugee crisis and the UK’s pitiful response were admirably clear and concise, and full of moral urgency: precisely the kind of intervention, in fact, that it would be nice to hear from a few more front-rank British politicians.

The UK’s stance on the refugee crisis shames us all | Polly Toynbee Read more

Perhaps Miliband’s most cutting point was his argument against those commentators and politicians who still insist that the current emergency is down to “migrants”. That word, he says, “suggests these people are voluntarily fleeing, whereas in fact, if you’ve been barrel-bombed out of your home three times, life and limb demand that you flee. It’s not about being politically incorrect in using the term migrant. It’s simply incorrect.”

It really is, but the British discourse on migration and asylum has long been awash with conflations of the two, usually for the most self-serving of purposes – and over the last 20 or so years the politics of all this has become hopelessly contorted. The terms “refugee” and “asylum seeker” may denote different things (crudely put, an asylum seeker only becomes a refugee when some or other official agency decides as such), but it’s telling that the R word, with all its moral connotations, has all but disappeared from our national vocabulary. Moreover, from the 1990s onwards, the endless coupling of “asylum seeker” with the word “bogus” embedded the idea that anyone seeking sanctuary was more often than not a fraud. From there, it was a short step to people fleeing war and oppression not being seen as a discrete group at all, and the shoving of refugees into the dehumanising (and borderline meaningless) category of “migrants”.

Now, with that word rarely far from the hysterical front pages of the Mail and Express – witness the latter’s headline: “Chaos as ‘biblical’ migrant crisis spreads across Europe” – the job is complete. Even in the face of a self-evident humanitarian catastrophe, we cannot have a sane national conversation, let alone do anything meaningful to help. (With a nice anti-EU opportunity there for the taking, Nigel Farage is back, in full “shock and awful” mode; the government seems to have no coherent line at all. Meanwhile, the reality is increasingly terrible: among many such accounts, the most sobering I read this week was a Unicef report about the 3,000 people from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq now “transiting” through Macedonia every day. A third are women and children; 12% of the women are pregnant.)

Going through the British political archives, what got us to this grim impasse becomes clear. In both the 1992 and 1997 elections, John Major was decent enough to insist that asylum should not feature in Tory campaigning, but by 2001 the gloves were off. Early that year, Michael Heseltine – whom history still honours as a “progressive” Conservative – wrote a watershed Mail piece claiming that a “very large number” of supposed refugees were “cheats deliberately making bogus claims and false allegations to get into this country”. British nationals, he said, were being done out of housing and healthcare by “dubious asylum seekers”, and the issue of “phoney asylum seekers was likely to grow as the impression spread that this country was a soft touch”.

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Such talk obviously spooked the Labour party: by the following year, the then home secretary David Blunkett was claiming that schools were in danger of being “swamped” by the children of asylum seekers, and Tony Blair pledged to halve the numbers of such people coming to the UK, which happened, though it inevitably had more to do with wider world events than government policy. In 2003 the news was full of the government’s idea to send all asylum seekers to reception centres overseas: Albania was suggested.

Increasingly, one got the sense that acting “tough” on this issue was a means of somehow distracting attention from the issues of job insecurity, housing shortages and public service provision that so spectacularly exploded when the Blair government decided against transitional controls on migration from the EU accession countries of eastern Europe. By the advent of the Gordon Brown period, in fact, this was Labour’s default setting: scandalising liberal opinion on issues of asylum so as to convince its core vote it was on the case (witness one minister’s claim in 2008 that refugee charities were “playing the system”), while doing virtually nothing about many of the immigration-related issues that sat at the heart of their political problems. Although it is good to hear a creature of the Labour mainstream such as Yvette Cooper suggesting that the UK should accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees, this is the malign side of her party’s record: inflammatory, sometimes mendacious rhetoric, which was always going to undermine any future response to a refugee emergency.

Cooper says that doing next to nothing about the crisis would “not be the British way”, but clearly we should not romanticise our past. Even the British record on giving refuge to Jews fleeing Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe is much more complex than some sentimental accounts suggest; similarly, in the late 1970s, though the UK eventually accepted more than 10,000 of the Vietnamese refugees known as boat people, behind the scenes Margaret Thatcher was reluctant to take in any at all, fearing public disorder.

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Modern history, in fact, offers almost no examples of Britain rising to a refugee crisis without qualification, though the story of how 28,000 expelled Ugandan Asians were given a home here arguably comes closest. The punitive Immigration Act (passed in 1971) arguably made the politics easier, as did the fact that they held British passports. At least one of the pronouncements by the then prime minister Ted Heath offered a clear sense of what is missing from the current conversation. “We hold that it is in the interest of the British people that the reputation of Britain for good faith and humanity should be preserved,” he said.

In the wake of his stupid words about the “swarm” of people arriving in Calais, can anyone imagine David Cameron saying – and doing – anything halfway comparable? Evidently not: in response to Cooper’s call, he has so far managed only vapid words about trying to “bring peace and stability” to Syria and beyond, and somehow making sure “there are worthwhile jobs and stronger economies there”. If there was any shred left of the progressive, “modernising” politician who wanted to avenge the idea of the “nasty party” and take on the uglier aspects of Labour’s record, this was arguably his moment. The case for an act of principled leadership was glaring. But on the barren political ground left by his predecessors, he flunked it.