The Spectator on Britain’s treatment of refugees

The British government has said it will allow in some of Syria’s most vulnerable refugees. The Home Office hasn’t specified how many will be admitted but says it will probably be in the hundreds. The Syrian civil war has created 2.4 million refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced people, and looking through the archive, you get the sense that some of The Spectator’s former writers might have thought Britain could have offered more this time.

The government’s attitude towards Jewish refugees in 1944 was ‘niggardly, bureaucratic, evasive and insincere’, according to the diplomat Harold Nicolson. We’ve historically been ‘proud to succour the oppressed and to defend the weak. We were glad to feel that those who could escape from the claws of foreign despots might find in this country, not asylum merely, but an opportunity to make a profitable and respected living.’ There were an estimated 140,000 refugees in Britain in 1944, and Nicolson estimated we would be left with 40,000 after the war, figures he said that suggested that ‘from our vast granary of tolerance and kindness we should accord to them a bushel of generosity; that we should give them full rights of British citizenship; and that we, who have been granted such favours, who have earned such wide renown should share some at least of our fortune with the unfortunate.