Prerogative

I think if I asked most people these days about the divine right of kings, they would tell me that the idea that the accident of someone's birth should determine whether they are allowed to rule us is an archaic nonsense. We have a royal family a bit like we don't knock down the Houses of Parliament and build a better one: because it's a nice tradition. In a modern democratic society, the idea of an enhanced set of rights and privileges being conferred on a person just because of their birth is anathema. Yet in the UK, we all benefit from the privilege of birth and we never question it. We are all allowed to live free from the threat of torture*, free from the threat of war, with comprehensive social care** and free health care**. We are allowed the expectation of one of the highest standards of living in the world**, all due to the accident of where we were born. Of course many people consider their place of birth to define who they are in some special way; we place a lot of stock in our roots. I've never really been able to understand why. On a good day, I can understand loyalty to one's family, but loyalty to a particular place? If the events that occurred to you in that place shaped who you are as a person, do you feel loyalty to the other circumstances that were key in those events? I would guess not, because they will mostly be intangible, or fleeting. Location is often the only abstract element of these events we can phsyically return to. Given that memory is so important to human identity, it is no surprise that the most solid reminder of any memory - it's originating location - becomes significant by association. It will be interesting to see whether, as the associative tags of memory are increasingly outsourced to entirely portable digital media, location retains its primacy of association. 

Of course many of our feelings about a certain location are defined by what it is not; a location is often defined in opposition to another location. In the UK, one of the greatest markers of national identity is not being another nationality: for the Scots and the Welsh, it's about not being English, for the English, it's about not being French (or German, or pretty much any other nationality really). I'm not going to get into how the Northern Irish see themselves, because i wouldn't know where to start. Increasingly though, whilst we may bicker amongst ourselves, we will define ourselves by the fact that we are all not in the environmentally ruined parts of the world. This green and pleasant land will remain relatively green if not so pleasant over the next 100 years, making it ever more attractive to those who live in the increasingly yellow or red parts of the world. Whilst we may still want to escape from the hideous weather that global warming is likely to bring to our country for a holiday, millions of others will be looking to get in to the still fertile areas of Northern Europe for a life. 

This summer, the war of words has raged across the continent about how to deal with tens of thousands of people attempting to find a better life in Europe, about whether they are refugees or economic migrants. Current consensus is that some are the former, others the latter, but you could easily argue that they are all the latter. Like anyone who does anything, peoples' motives for migrating large distances are usually complex and varied. The idea that people will migrate away from a war zone to the nearest place of safety is probably inaccurate if that place of safety is unstable, unwelcomng or poverty stricken. If people have already left their home, they have no reason to chose one destination over another other than economics. By that rationale, as soon as someone leaves their birthplace, whatever their motive for leaving, they become an economic migrant. Only someone too tired or broken is simply going to go just as far as the first place they cannot hear the sound of gunfire. If you no longer had a home, wouldn't you try to get somewhere where you might have a chance of making a decent new one? 

All of the solutions to the refugee/migrant crisis that have been suggested so far have fallen into three basic categories: welcome them with open arms; keep them out with security guards and barbed wire or try to stop them migrating in the first place. This last is the UK's stated position, and I feel that in theory at least, it has merit, indeed I think I have previously suggested just such a course of action on these very servers. Of course my suggestions were more to do with the removal of people's reason to leave than buying them more tents, so their desert refugee camp feels more luxurious. Either way, the current crisis illustrates the didfculty inherent in this strategy: our short attention span when it comes to geopolitics means that we are not willing to make the real effort required to affect change in a region, whilst allowing us to quickly forget that it was our half-arsed meddling that caused many of these problems in the first place. We are not committed enough to be interventionalist but not isolationist enough to stop us from meddling a bit. However, regardless of our level of direct current or historical intervention in any particular war torn desert, the society of plenty that we currently enjoy, that the migrants and refugees from these countries so crave, has come at the cost of a better quality of life in these very same countries. Whether it is pricing them out of the market for the food that they produce, extracting all of their natural resources regardless of cost or changing their climate irreversibly with all the driving and flying that we see as our God given right. The system that has made our country a desirable place to live is not entirely a global zero sum gain, but it is also not entirely without cost; it most definitely contributes directly to making other parts of the world less desirable places to live. We can argue endlessly about the extent of that impact (unless you're one of the knuckle-draggers who still thinks manmade climate change doesn't exist, in which case I do not have time to waste on you, go bang some rocks together), but that there is an impact is undeniable; the fact that our high standard of living causes a lower standard of living for others is a fact. So when another part of the world becomes uninhabitable due to our unwillingness to suffer any form of inconvenience, and the people living there leave to try and find somewhere habitable to live, presumably we will label them disdainfully as economic migrants and put up more barbed wire fences to keep them out. 

Not that the anti immigration lobby are wrong: we don't have space on this little island for everyone, but how we decide who gets to live here is the real challenge. We can't base it on their potential future contribution to the country as we have no idea what that will be (qualifications are no useful guide - what's the point in letting in 500 chemistry PHDs when we're desperately short of lorry drivers?). If we base it on their past contribution, there are probably hundreds of people in the 'Jungle' in Calais right now who have more claim to residency than many people currently resident here (I am thinking mainly about the ones who think that siphoning large amounts of money offshore is somehow beneficial for the rest of us). There are no easy ways to decide who gets to live here. The process is largely abitrary, but I suppose we better get used to it: this summer was not an anomaly, it was a vision of the future. As the consequences of our comforts are felt ever more keenly on the periphery of the equator, we will see increasing numbers of people seeking those comforts for themselves. We will have to get used to the discomfort of witnessing at borders the desperation that the fluke of our birth means we will never have to endure. 

*largely

**for now