Post-Brexit Britain has been finding itself increasingly isolated on the world stage. This might explain why it seizes any opportunity to seem relevant.
This was the case when the British media hailed the fact that Britain was the destination of President Biden’s first foreign trip. And it is the case now with them hailing Prime Minister Boris Johnson not only for being the first NATO leader Biden contacted to discuss the Afghan debacle, but also for upbraiding Biden for not pledging more forthrightly to resettle Afghans who assisted the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
Downing Street reported that the US and UK ‘agreed on the need for the global community to come together to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan,’ with the prime minister committing to ‘increased humanitarian aid to the region and resettlement of refugees.’
(The Independent, August 17, 2021)
But some in the media are so committed to making Britain relevant again that portraying Johnson as Biden’s conscience was not enough. They are pressing him to do more to make Britain seem like the only country concerned about the plight of the Afghans – as this headline from today’s edition of Sky News demonstrates:
Afghanistan: [Home Secretary] Priti Patel defends scheme to resettle 20,000 refugees in the UK as critics say it’s not enough
Of course, all of that is vintage British grandstanding. And nobody knows this better than the British media. After all, just months ago they were upbraiding the British government for failing to honor a similar pledge to resettle democracy protesters from Hong Kong:
The UK risks providing Hongkongers fleeing persecution in their homeland with safety and security in name only, a community leader has warned, as thousands try to flee the crackdown on civil liberties by Chinese authorities.
Julian Chan, the director of the Hongkongers in Britain group, said many people arriving in the UK were being denied equal access to housing, education and jobs, and that Westminster was not doing enough to support them.
(The Guardian, August 8, 2021)
More to the point, though, those Hongkongers only had to look at the way Britain failed windrushes to see what was in store for them. Windrush refers to the thousands Britain effectively drafted from Caribbean Commonwealth countries to help rebuild London after WWII.
The obvious pledge was that they would get not just good-paying jobs but British citizenship too. What they got instead amounted to years of indentured servitude.
I wrote about Britain’s failed attempt to redress this moral wrong in “Windrush: May’s Britain More Heartless than Than Trump’s America…?” April 27, 2018. Yet, over two years later, Britain is still struggling to redress what is in fact a 70-year old pledge.
Here is how no less a news organization than the aforementioned Sky News upbraided the government on this point just weeks ago, on July 27:
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The Home Office ‘appears to be failing’ the Windrush generation again with its flawed compensation scheme, a committee of MPs has warned.
According to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), it is too complex, too slow to pay out compensation and understaffed, with just six people employed initially to work through a predicted 15,000 claims. …
The Windrush scandal emerged in 2018 when it was found that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights, despite having the right to live in Britain. …
Just four of 132 claims made on behalf of the estate of someone who had died have received payment, the committee said.
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Yet British media are hailing the British government for pledging to do for Afghans what they just upbraided it for failing to do for Windrushes and Hongkongers, despite years of bureaucratic planning and media prodding. Unfriggin’believable!