Reader Writes - November 2020

Our government came in almost a year ago with an unarguable majority to get a lot of things done, most obviously and controversially Brexit. But featuring prominently among the issues that Brexit is expected to resolve is immigration; and our Home Secretary is floating a raft of policy ideas likely to make thoughtful and compassionate citizens (including most Christians) dismayed.

Here’s a Kington anecdote; I was in the community shop, well before the pandemic turned our lives upside down, when a youngster came in looking for cloths. Apart from his colour I immediately noticed the Orthodox cross on a chain round his neck. He was an Eritrean economic migrant with a typical and shattering story; easy to imagine his very concerned parents, the life savings, the risks and threats of people smugglers, the desert, Libya, torture and extortion, a dangerous over-crowded boat, rescue “by white people”. And God was with me he said with his quiet smile.

And here’s a recent headline concerning far away lives. Scientists have been shocked to discover the extent of sea-ice and glacier melt in the last 30 years; they expect sea-levels to rise unavoidably by 1m by the end of this century. If all goes well in other respects, children born today will live to see this. For every 1cm of sea-level rise a million people will be displaced. And that excludes the migration-causing effects of drought and wild fires and deforestation. Let’s be profoundly grateful that Extinction Rebellion, including youngsters from the Marches, is prepared to face discomfort and opprobrium to expose the recklessness of our “business as usual” priorities.

There is an uncomfortable underlying factor linking the many and various causes of migration; that is our own implication in most of them. As it turned out it was a huge mistake to invade Afghanistan and Iraq; but we did and should bear responsibility for the tragic consequences. Even the Arab Spring that disintegrated into civil war and repression was exacerbated in Syria by drought and migration to the cities. Bringing it all the way home again to the Co-op in Kington, we should face up to the link between our own consumption and climate breakdown. Surprisingly, it’s hard to buy chicken, for example, that hasn’t been fattened with soya imported from S America where deforestation continues due to consumption in the rich north. 

So what should the Church say to the Home Secretary when she wants to “off-shore” asylum seekers, or to the Prime Minister when he seeks to assert our putative sovereignty? A lawyer, seeking to justify himself, asked Jesus “and who is my neighbour?”. He got the timeless story of the good Samaritan. When a traveller was left beaten half to death on a lonely stretch of road going down to Jericho, the priest and Levite walked by on the other side; this is the “business as usual” response. They had meetings and the economy to worry about, and it wasn’t their responsibility. Then luckily a despised Samaritan (certainly a foreigner if not an asylum seeker) came along and rescued the victim at his own expense and inconvenience. In the global village, those in flood zones, those in drought stricken nations, those sacking their forests to supply us with meat, those in never-ending wars are all our neighbours. Jesus tells us, following the Samaritan, to “go and do likewise”.

Robert MacCurrach