Moral Obligations

However jolly rah-rah Her Majesty's Government may be in creating refugees, it often suffers some small inhibition when it comes to dealing with them. Fortunately, no such handicap seems to be afflicting the present administration. A year after the body of a junior cockroach was washed up on a beach, it has emerged that the Government spent more than £100,000 on legal fees and "internal costs" to prevent four Syrians being reunited with their families. Perhaps Mad Tessie's boot-boys in G4S needed urgent protection from the physical threat. Although poverty tends to be a self-solving problem provided it lasts long enough and does not obtrude itself upon party donors, the Home Secretary has acted to resolve the situation: she has extruded a spokesbeing to blame the Government's inaction on those local authorities which the Government has spent the past six years depriving of funds. It seems likely that such dynamic and responsible actions will help almost as much as the hand-wringing by luminaries of the Church of England, which famously reacted to poverty in Britain some years ago by calling in the City of London police to hose the poor off the steps of St Paul's.