Dirk Campbell January 2016

On Saturday January 9th Sacha and I went to the refugee camp in Dunkirk. We took warm clothes, blankets, gumboots and tents. They are mostly Iraqi Kurds, families living in unbelievable squalor – deep mud, freezing temperatures, flimsy tents, no heating or hot water. A few wood burning braziers. Not much choice for them: flight or death at the hands of Daesh. They have been ignored ever since they arrived; they want to come to Britain but Britain, it seems, doesn’t want to know.

More than 50% of the population of Syria – around 4 million people – has been displaced by the conflict there. 95% of them are in neighbouring countries; with 270,000 asylum applications in Europe. Four million Iraqis have been displaced as of June 2015 with over 180,000 seeking refuge in Europe.* Figures are not available on refugee numbers fleeing from Turkish Kurdistan into Europe but NGOs say up to three million Kurds have been internally displaced, so a reasonable calculation would be 150,000. That’s around 600,000 people trying to resettle in Europe in the last few years from Kurdistan alone. Include all the other conflict zones in the middle East, Africa and Asia and we are into the millions.

On BBC Radio 4’s World at One, September 4th 2015, Lord Ashdown said: ‘The numbers we now have of refugees fleeing battle zones is going to be diminished into almost nothing when you see the movement of populations caused by global warming.’ This was never envisaged by Rob Hopkins in his model of peaceful, autonomous, decentralised communities. He thought peak oil was going to be the big issue, not global warming, and certainly not psychopathic Islamist groups and the global refugee problem. A country inundated by large numbers of desperate people fleeing for their lives can’t easily function on the basis proposed by Hopkins. Strong, centralised, compassionate government is needed.

To sit in comfort while people in other parts of the world are suffering and dying has always made many of us in the affluent West uneasy, but now those people are not just in other parts of the world, they are coming here. And we have hardly seen the start of it. There are two options: keep them out, or let them in. To keep some of them out and let some of them in would be unworkable. What happens to the ones you don’t let in? Where will they go? The moral answer is, of course, to let them in. And that means a radical revision of our world. How can we accommodate so many? The population of Britain is 70 million. You may think that’s a lot of people for a small island, but Java is about half the size of Britain and has over twice as many people, so it’s not impossible. (Admittedly they have a much warmer climate than we do, but they also have lots of floods. And ours may be getting much warmer soon.)

In Lewes we are currently facing the prospect of large areas of the town being bulldozed and redeveloped in order to help achieve the district council’s housing quota and to help fill the district council’s coffers. To this end Lewes District Council signed a contract with with North Street developer Santon (before their planning application was even in) which would cost LDC £600,000 to break. But that brownfield site, with its disused warehouses, could be converted into accommodation for hundreds of refugees. There’s also the old Wenban Smith building and the adjacent car park. There’s the bus garage, St Annes and the Canon O’Donnell building. Many of the council’s 49 sites could be made available. And our supermarkets could be required to feed them instead of throwing away 30% of perfectly edible food as they currently do.

Transition is about resilience, and the least resilient thing we can do is turn a blind eye to the refugee problem and hope it won’t affect us. That’s to say nothing of the moral issue – our duty of care towards suffering and desperate people. Transition groups should partner with local councils to present the case for accommodating refugees. That means expanding the parameters of the possible. These people are going to come whether we like it or not. At some point, sooner rather than later, the government is going to have to act decisively – either keep them out and watch them die, or let them in and look after them. Existing local initiatives already pioneered will provide workable precedents. Lewes could lead the way.

You can take it for granted that some right-wing politicians and pub bores will describe refugees as scroungers. Refugees in my experience are not scroungers. They are well-educated, skilled and resourceful. They have the misfortune to come from war-torn, badly administered countries with corrupt governments supplied with munitions by western countries (including Britain) to suppress their own dissidents. Other reactionaries will talk up the terrorist threat in relation to the immigration challenge. Aren’t Islamic terrorists going to come into our country along with all the refugees and blow us up? Memo to the right wing: there are already millions of Muslims in this country, some of whom are radicalised. If they want to blow us up they will. Accepting refugees is going to make no difference to that.

Contrary to what governments and media delight in telling us, terrorism is one of the least pressing problems of our day. There have always been groups of people with grievances, real or imagined. The IRA, the Red Army Faction, Bader Meinhof, Charles Manson. The Bolsheviks. Economic disparity, social injustice and personal psychology inevitably throw up these groups. Add in perverted religious and nationalistic beliefs and you have the perfect recipe for terrorism. Religion and nationalism are rooted in the tribalism hard-wired into the human brain by evolution. Try to remove them with science and reason, and they will always grow back. (Personal psychology is a different subject.) But to focus on terrorism while ignoring climate change is like trying to eliminate clothes moths when your house is about to collapse from rot. It is clearly the lesser problem, though it may appear more immediate and manageable.

Even in Paris, which suffered two terrorist outrages in 10 months, you are far more likely to die from overeating, atmospheric pollution or crossing the road than from a terrorist attack. And, as extreme weather events increase in frequency and food supplies dwindle, you will be more likely to die from climate change. Yet governments seize on terrorism. Why? If you want the real reason, as the saying goes, follow the money. The terrorist threat creates jobs and exports, selling munitions to corrupt governments who want to kill and displace their dissidents. And I would add, follow the psychology. The terrorist threat is easy to understand and makes people put faith in the government, which makes them easier to control. The climate change threat is hard to understand and nobody really believes the government can do anything about it anyway.

NOTE Anyone wishing to visit Dunkirk or Calais who would like information on the refugee camps email dc@dirkcampbell.co.uk

* Sources: Amnesty, IDMC