Seventy Glorious Years

At a time when the national lifeboat charity is being criticised for not letting more migrants drown, what could be more British than a celebration of our long and unpretentiously decent heritage of providing an occasional and perpetually away-snatchable haven for the victims of official enemies? In the best retro-rah tradition, various potential deportables have recreated the signing of the United Nations convention on refugees, to which even Her Majesty's Government has occasionally condescended to consider itself bound for at least some of the past seven decades. Participants included the daughter of two South African opponents to the apartheid régime enthusiastically endorsed by Britain's natural party of government, and a victim of the British-authored anti-gay laws in Uganda, which continued to be rigorously enforced even after the deposition of Idi Amin, late of the King's African Rifles; nevertheless, a notable omission from the proceedings appears to have been any sort of rah-rah for Britain's entrepreneurial pluck and gumption in motivating the convention's beneficiaries, from Afghanistan through Iraq to Libya, the Chagos Archipelago and any number of climate-change expendables. It was tactfully suggested that the master race might care to consider abiding by at least one of the international conventions to which it is a signatory; but cries of "Lebanon is full up" or "Jobs for indigenous Malians" appear to have been conspicuous by their British restraint.