Unknown Doctor

A new voice penetrated the dark debate about asylum-seekers this week,  It was from an anonymous GP, writing in The Times on 28 October.  It was perceptive, sensitive. generous, imaginative - and liberal.   Please read on...

I have no way of knowing whether the asylum-seekers I meet in medical
practice are representative of asylum-seekers as a whole. Perhaps I have met only the cream, although I rather doubt it.  Suffice to say that I am
favourably impressed by their human qualities, which seem to me often
superior, sometimes by a long way, to those of much of the native
population.

Even when they have not been persecuted in the strictly political sense,
they have usually had lives of considerable hardship, which has deepened
their character and polished their manners.  Few of them appear to me to be
spoilt egotists.  Contrary to much prejudice, they do not want to sponge off
the state: most asylum-seekers seem to me avid for work.  I have met many desperate for a job, although forbidden one by the State, and none who, once working, wish to give up. Their aim in life is self-improvement, not
resignation to sloth in squalor. They want no part of Gordon Brown's vision
of a just society: namely, one in which everyone is at least partly
dependent upon a Treasury handout, overseen by you-know-who, for whom they will vote for all eternity.

Let me enumerate a few of the ways in which we are already cruel to asylum-seekers.

The first is the disgustingly disdainful and humiliating way
they are routinely treated by minor British officials, whose every question
is an accusation, and who often appear to have no knowledge of life outside
their suburbs. People who have seen their children killed in front of them
are treated the same as obvious liars: everyone is a liar until proved
otherwise. One cannot help but remember Primo Levi's nightmare in Auschwitz: that when the war was over, no one would believe what he said about what he had seen.

The way in which young, clever and willing people are turned within a matter
of a few weeks into helpless, shuffling dependants, the inhabitants of a
kind of Purgatory, by being forced on to our system of welfare, has to be
seen to be believed. We give them somewhere to live and a tiny amount of
cash on condition that they do nothing to help themselves. Many have told me that they regard it as a form of torture, and I do not think this is an
exaggeration. They want nothing more than to earn a living or start a
business: instead, they are told that they must vegetate, if necessary for
years. Their role is to be parasites, for everyone else in society to hate.

Another refinement of cruelty is to withdraw this welfare once they have
been refused residence, as well as continuing to forbid them to work, in the
hope that a life of sleeping in parks and searching for sustenance in
wastepaper bins will soon drive them to ask for repatriation to the land
from which they have fled.

For any sensible policy to work, we would also have to jettison all the
multicultural claptrap that employs armies of administrators in town halls
and elsewhere, who want to Balkanise our society into "communities"
competing for public funds, in order to give them, the administrators,
something to do.

What do you think?  Drop me a line