Refugees deserve better than the Dubs scheme and Theresa May was right to end it

The argument over the recently-abandoned Dubs scheme for refugees encapsulates what is wrong with the debate about what is, perhaps, the worst humanitarian crisis of recent years. The actor David Morrissey was on the Peston show this morning saying he was “devastated” when Theresa May decided to stop plans to take a limited number child refugees from Europe and instead focus on settling 20,000 straight from the Middle East. Except, of course, her policy wasn’t framed in that way on Peston’s show. It never is, anywhere. We have heard the same point, made by well-intentioned people like Morrissey, for weeks. But no one mentions what the Prime Minister proposes instead. To anyone serious about tackling one of the gravest problems of our times, this matters.

As Oxford’s Paul Collier argues in the cover article of this week’s magazine, the West is letting down refugees by an inability to think properly about their fate – and about what kind of help would work best. As Prof Collier says, there’s lots of heart – but it’s “headless heart”. About