Naivety is a charming and endearing thing when it is present in a small child. You expect children to be naive and engage in ‘magical thinking’, after all their brains have not fully developed yet. However, naivety in an adult is another thing entirely, it is something dangerous.
Naive adults I’m afraid make bad decisions. Naive people make decisions on the grounds of what they’d like things to be rather than what they are in reality, such individuals also tend to base their decisions on emotion rather than fact.
One such naive individual is Lord Alf Dubs the former Labour MP for Battersea who was given a life peerage in 1994 by the Queen on the advice of the Tory government of John Major. Lord Dubs is one of those individuals who came to Britain from what was then Czechoslovakia as a refugee from the Nazis on the Kindertransport in 1939. Like many others who came over on the Kindertransport, Lord Dubs worked hard and contributed greatly to the life of the nation not just as an MP but as a member of the Broadcasting Standards Commission and as a trustee of the Open University. Unlike others who came over on the Kindertransport Lord Dubs was lucky, his parents were able to join him and they did not, as happened to many other Kindertransport parents, perish in one of the Nazi death camps.
Unfortunately, despite his otherwise positive contribution to the nation, Lord Dubs has one area in which is naivety shows through and that is the refugee issue. Now its natural that being a refugee himself he would feel some affinity for those seeking refuge, this is very easy to understand. Sadly Lord Dubs does not temper his enthusiasm for the refugee issue with much in the way of common sense. He still keeps on banging the ‘child refugee’ drum despite the fact that many of these ‘child refugees’ are not really refugees at all and in many cases not even children.
The naivety of Lord Dubs is a significant boon to the various wealthy ‘open borders ‘ groups that operate in Britain such as Citizens UK and in particular one of their front groups ‘Safe Passage UK’ which gives legal help to these often fake ‘refugees’ in order to get them to the UK. These groups mercilessly exploit the personal history of Lord Dubs and also exploit his naivety. They do so in order to push their Open Borders ideas and narrative.
Lord Dubs fronted up a campaign to allow in thousands of ‘child refugees’ and Citizens UK, Safe Passage UK and the various fellow travelers with Citizens UK and Safe Passage from the Left, religious groups and from wealthy or at least comfortable middle class virtue signalers. All of these pushed the ‘refugees welcome’ line, a line that was in large part created in the UK by Citizens UK. Lord Dubs was used by these groups to push an amendment to immigration control legislation to allow in ‘child refugees’ from the migrant camps in northern France. His naive and senseless refugee enthusiasm saw the enactment of what became known as ‘The Dubs Amendment’ and the import by the May and Cameron Governments of these ‘child refugees’ started.
But when these ‘refugee children’ started to arrive in the UK it was plain to see that they were not the vulnerable toddlers that Citizens UK, Safe Passage and Lord Dubs had led us all to believe. The media showed not children but adult Muslim men, some with beards and crows feet on their faces. There was quite rightly an outcry from both the press and the public about being hoodwinked into thinking that we were taking children whereas the reality was that these ‘children’ were adult Muslim males of military age, probably the last group of people that any civilised country should take in. The outcry led some in Citizens UK, including George Gabriel one of their senior members of staff, to try to claim that these men were not the children themselves but instead interpreters, something the Home Office itself denied. Because of the outcry the press was forbidden from publishing pictures of further intakes of ‘refugee children’. There were increasingly voluble calls for the Dubs Amendment to be dumped, I have been one of those who have been vocal about the need to dump the Dubs Amendment as it is a dangerous loophole in the UK’s migration controls.
Fast forward to today and Lord Dubs, who abandoned Judaism in favour of Humanism, is still worryingly naive and still banging on about the ‘poor refugee children’. With what many of us know about the inhabitants of the migrant camps of Northern France you would have to be particularly foolish and stupid to think that that there are hundreds of deserving toddlers living there. It is quite possible that one or more of the ‘refugee’ support and advocacy groups may be putting on a bit of a dog and pony show for Lord Dubs and giving him the impression that in these camps there are children that need rescuing. The reality is that it’s nearly all adult men from the sort of places such as Afghanistan, North Africa and Pakistan that create walking time bombs of hatred that are living in these migrant camps. One of these migrants, an Iraqi who had arrived in the UK illegally, actually ‘went off’ on a tube train at Parsons Green in London. Thankfully on this occasion there were few injuries as only the primary part of the bomb rather than its main charge detonated.
Recently, the Government of Boris Johnson managed to use its now sizable majority to finally dump the provisions in the Brexit bill, provisions called for by Lord Dubs and others. The government did so because the government needs maximum flexibility when negotiating the UK’s exit from the European Union. The government cannot afford to fight the EU with one hand tied behind its back with the cords of ‘family reunion’ for these ‘refugees’.
Unfortunately age and the exposure of the ‘refugee children’ as being adults, and sometimes dangerous ones at that, has not removed the naivety of Lord Dubs. There are reports that Lord Dubs is going to help to bring in wrecking amendments to the Brexit bill when it comes before the House of Lords. This is something that I would strongly urge Lord Dubs not to do. There are several reasons why I believe that trying to bring back the Dubs Amendment in another guise would be a very bad idea.
The first reason is that the Dubs Amendment was never truly popular outside of the bubbles of the metro-Left. Migration by the sorts of potentially dangerous people who are living in the migrant camps of Northern France is distinctly unpopular among the general population. No good at all will come of Lord Dubs using his position in the House of Lords to open up this migration loophole again. It will damage the image of the Upper House if its members are seen to be wanting to be doing the bidding of the lunatic Open Borders lot. It will be a slap in the face for the many Britons who have to live with the sort of ambulant human dross that groups like Citizens UK, Safe Passage UK have brought and want to continue to bring to Britain. It will further embolden those who want to see radical reform of the Upper House instead of what some of us conservatives want to see which is repairs made to the damage that the Blair and Brown governments did to the Upper House.
The second reason why Lord Dubs should sit down and shut up about the ‘refugee’ issue in the Lords is that it is almost inevitable that some on the wilder shores of the Right will start to point to the Jewish heritage of Lord Dubs and use that as a means of campaigning. I’m Jewish but I’m not in favour of open borders, not for the USA, not for France, not for Israel and certainly not for the United Kingdom. There is also nothing at all to be gained by importing yet more people posing as ‘refugees’ who follow an ideology that contains the exhortation to ‘kill the Jews wherever you find them’ , into the United Kingdom. Although the importation of fake refugee children is a major problem for all Britons whatever their belief system or race, Lord Dubs ‘refugee’ campaigning will particularly rebound badly on British Jews and danger will come from both the extreme Right blaming all Jews for the actions of a few nutters like Lord Dubs and from the fake ‘refugees’ themselves.
The third main reason why Lord Dubs should stop banging on about ‘refugees’ is that the reinstatement of the Dubs Amendment is not the cost free policy that he claims that it would be. We have no moral duty to take in those who not only come from cultures that hate the West and represent a threat to Britain. Furthermore many of those claiming to be ‘refugees’ have crossed a number of safe countries in order to hang around in Northern France waiting for the chance to get across the English Channel to what they see as a land of milk, honey and unlimited welfare benefits.
Of course there is a cost to the virtue signalling of Lord Dubs and those in the ‘refugees welcome’ movement, but it is not a cost that will be paid by either Lord Dubs himself nor by the broader ‘refugees welcome’ campaign. The cost of Lord Dubs virtue signaling will be borne by ordinary working class Britons, often in places far away from the capital, who will have these ‘refugees’ dumped on them. It is ordinary Britons who will find themselves being pushed down the council housing waiting lists because of these ‘refugees’ and who will end up suffering the massive amounts of crime and terrorism that they are likely to bring.
Lord Dubs should put aside his naivety about ‘refugees’ and realise that what he’s calling for is and will continue to be extremely unpopular with the public at large. Whilst I am fully in favour of helping those displaced by war,it is more cost effective and safer for Britain that those fleeing war are helped in the region where the wars are going on and not by importing them to the United Kingdom.
There is it is said ‘no fool like an old fool’ and I’m afraid that Lord Dubs is that old fool when it comes to the ‘refugee’ issue. I’d like to think that even at Lord Dubs age there is still a chance that he can wake up and smell the coffee and realise that both he and his history is being used and exploited by vehemently anti-British and pro-Islam groups like Citizens UK and Safe Passage UK. Unfortunately I believe that the naivety of Lord Dubs is so useful to Citizens UK and groups like them in pushing their false ‘refugee children’ narrative that they will continue to keep Lord Dubs in the dark and feed him bullshit. These groups want to continue to exploit Lord Dubs and his naivety and let him use his position to regurgitate ‘refugees welcome’ bullshit both in the House of Lords and elsewhere.
I can only hope and pray that even if Lord Dubs does try to reinstate the Dubs Amendment that sensible heads in the House of Lords prevail and the decision by the Commons to dump this amendment would be respected. There are many hills worth dying on but the importation of fake refugee children is not one that the House of Lords should choose to be the one the Upper House dies on. It’s time for Lord Dubs to sit down and shut up about ‘refugees’ and instead realise that the first job of government is to protect the nation, something that the original Dubs Amendment really did not do anything to help.
