Long time no debate
I think we have to decide whether we're a rich country which can afford to house a small number of people in genuine need or a poor country which deserves sympathy for being too pathetic to look after its own, and at the moment we seem to be blaming the former for the latter to avoid having to acknowledge who is really responsible. Rich people with multiple houses sit around pretending that there is moral equivalence in their exaggerated displays of outrage over insignificant nonsense while the people who (inexplicably) voted for them sit around dreading the arrival of their next unaffordable bill. I can't have sympathy for a Britain which throws money around on vanity projects and acts like a big deal on the world stage while its people are literally starving. It's mismanagement, and it makes me angry that the media successfully manages to convince people that their fellow victims are their rivals every single time. They're two sides of the same coin: the working class family exploited by electricity companies and drowning in debt is in the exact same boat as the desperate refugee who sold everything they owned to travel to a country which sells itself as being both wealthy and humanitarian. They're both being let down by the same people, yet the media sells the story that they're in competition and pits them against one another so that nothing ever changes.
To borrow Dave1988's example, why are people in this country angry about asylum seekers living in imagined luxury in temporary accommodation (I am reasonably sure that the people in question would prefer to build lives rather than to live in indefinite limbo in a hotel like lockdown victims while people wave hateful placards outside their windows) for what would cost any sane government peanuts, while individual MPs spend enough public money to rent out an entire hotel for a month on throwaway furniture items for their offices? Why are people angry at needy people getting three meals a day? Convicted UK prisoners get three meals a day too, but the people we specifically threw in jail (via a very expensive court process) for causing harm to others don't whip people into anywhere near as much of a frenzy as scary foreigners. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't personally like all of the people at my local food bank but I'm definitely ok with them all getting three meals a day if they need that. Why can't people stop for a second and direct all of this fury where it might actually have an effect, at the people literally allocating all of the money? I don't get it, but it's clearly happening right in front of my eyes so I can't deny the power of the media.
(Of course, actually processing the asylum claims in a timely manner instead of leaving people in limbo for months/years at a time, to get those people into all of the vacant jobs and social roles that nobody else wants to do would help to solve both problems. All of the money spent on maintaining these backlogs and holding patterns could then be invested on struggling folks who need more help, but actually getting things done doesn't seem to be the British way. It's all about hyper-analysing problems where the answer is already blindingly obvious and dragging them out for months/years so that nothing ever resolves. And of course that's because they don't want it to resolve. A convenient scapegoat is necessary to distract people from the government's useless dithering.)
As I see it, the problem is that we can't solve the problem of other countries going to war with one another or enforcing discriminatory laws because nobody has any reason to listen to us (I certainly wouldn't listen to us). So helping the people most affected by those problems is something of a moral obligation rather than a choice. Morality is a fuzzy thing, but it is something that I personally think is a better use of my tax money than some of the other nonsense that the government fritter it away on. In some cases our country is literally to blame for the underlying situation, too, which I think increases the weight of that moral obligation to help. It doesn't feel fair to take responsibility for the actions of our rich countrymen's ancestors but it's a fact that they caused a lot of systemic damage and it's not fair for anyone involved no matter how you slice it. Sometimes things aren't fair. And sometimes it's our turn to take one on the chin. Meanwhile, the problems within our own country are largely of our own making so while we do have to deal with those too, we have much more power to prevent them from happening if we can figure out how to simply look after our people better in the first place.
Of course the underlying issues elsewhere need fixing. Of course people should fight for their rights, just as we should (and don't) here. But having seen how hard it is to get anyone here to care about anything other than maintaining a thoroughly broken status quo, I can't blame people who aren't fighters by nature from wanting to flee when the alternative isn't likely to work out for them. It would be different if everyone got to choose their country voluntarily at the start. But they didn't; I'm descended from immigrants yet I enjoy a great deal of privilege in my daily life which I have done nothing to deserve, simply because I got lucky at birth and started out in a country where the government has a harder time in making undesirable people disappear. Until the government stands up and admits that we're an impoverished country that can't afford to take care of its own, I want to believe that reasonable compassion can be extended to all - not just the people that the media considers worthy of our time.
R
