By Rab Bruce’s Spider

"Would you let a refugee family stay in your house?"

It’s a question usually asked by Right Wing journalists or politicians and what is a prominent person like Nicola Sturgeon supposed to say in response? If you’ve been calling for the UK Government to show a bit of compassion you can hardly turn round and say that providing shelter for refugees should be somebody else’s problem.

The thing is, the sort of person who asks that question is almost certainly the sort of person who wouldn’t cross the road to help someone in trouble. The last thing they’d do is allow any stranger, let alone a refugee, into their home. The question is a ploy to put pressure on vocal supporters of Government action to help out in a humanitarian crisis. That’s because Britain is happy to provide aid to poor foreigners as long as they stay well away from our shores. Once they get here they become a threat to our way of life and any politician who agrees that they would be prepared to provide shelter for refugees in their own home attracts unspoken but very definite suspicion. That’s because neo-liberalism has been the dominant economic theory for so long that too many people have grown up believing that being greedy and acting out of pure self-interest are the normal ways to behave. Anyone who acts charitably with no desire for reward is, in neo-liberal eyes, not normal. You can just imagine readers of The Daily Mail tut-tutting when they read about Nicola Sturgeon welcoming foreigners into her own home. Has she no standards?

But the question is not only derogatory, it’s also silly because, even if you do have enough spare rooms in your house to provide accommodation for a family of refugees, that’s a short term view of how these people should be helped. They need proper accommodation of their own, they need support and they need opportunities to find employment until such time as it may be safe for them to return home.

What they might return home to is anyone’s guess but it seems David Cameron and his buddies are determined to ensure that there is very little left standing in Syria because they seem to have decided that the best way to bring peace to the region is to drop more bombs on it. That’s worked pretty well so far, hasn’t it? the UK, along with other western countries, has been bombing Syria for the past eleven months and it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. Only warmongering Britain would think more bombs are the answer to this humanitarian disaster.

It’s a sad country we live in when our response to appeals for help is a grudging acceptance of a relatively small number of refugees and a statement of intent to bomb their country to encourage them to stay there. If those actions are indicative of these British Values we keep hearing about, it’s no wonder so many of us feel ashamed to be British.