Emotion getting in the way of evidence when it comes to boat crossings - Yorkshire Post Letters

It seems that half of the letters received by UK papers recently care about the ‘boats’ without mention of the extraordinarily traumatised passengers on board.

Evidence is apparently unnecessary; emotions are sufficient to ‘prove’ that the vast majority of the incomers are young single men who, rather than being accepted as the more likely bread-winners (rather than the wives and sisters back in the global south) are suspected of being career criminals or future terrorists.

And the 'pie in the sky’ solution, at a cost of £1.8m per person (Government figures), is to offload ‘them’ as if ‘they’ are human cargo. Rwanda is not a safe country. The US has reported that Rwandan forces have attacked a refugee camp in neighbouring Congo.

Human Rights Watch reports that journalists and political opponents ‘disappear’. Street kids and the unemployed are rounded up.

Is there no better use of all that money? There is such a lack of dentists here (partly because of Brexit) that people are pulling their own teeth. Our most quickly growing statistic is potholes while 40,000 young people have been waiting more than two years for treatment for mental illness.

The anger trumpeted by your correspondents is directed at the symptom and not the causes behind these movements; poverty, climate change and hope. The global north (the UK etc.) have 1/5 of the world's population but 4/5 of the world's wealth. Recently schools in Bangladesh, India and Vietnam have been closed because of record temperatures (44 feeling like 52 because of humidity). African refugees flee civil wars, droughts and floods. What would you do in those circumstances?

An encyclopaedia of statistics proves that we cannot hide from the imbalance between north and south. ‘They’ will keep coming. Zurich Insurance, not known to be bleeding-heart liberals, states that there could be up to 1.2 billion refugees by 2050.

The sensible and only possible way of managing the situation is to move forward on reducing the causes and effects of the climate crisis and raising the level of support that wealthy nations donate to the global south.

And the only way to make a solid attempt at this is to work within the teams (UN, EU). Denmark has already shown the way by donating £11.5m (yes a small initial sum) specifically as compensation for the climate chaos and southern poverty caused, in the main, by the history (industrialisation, colonialism) and living standards of the rich nations.

Your head-in-the-sand correspondents are screaming ‘woke rubbish’ and will then suggest that we must ‘protect’ ourselves by shouting criticism of the French and the EU.

Interesting that EU research shows that cities there with larger migrant populations are economically more successful than those without. Anyone keen to build a wall along the Mediterranean and South Coast of the UK?

It really is time for realism and creative thinking and action on a scale of which we are not yet fully aware. Or do we sit and fume hoping that ‘they’ will go away?

Given some of the selfishness, thoughtlessness and naked hatred expressed in your columns recently, no wonder some of our young people here are suffering from mental and spiritual disturbance.

We have some UK Trumps waiting to lead us to God knows where. If we listen to them we will all hang separately rather than, possibly, hanging together.