Streets Paved With Gold.

 This poignant and telling little film says all that needs to be said about our world today. Our media and our politicians scratch their heads while our mindless mobs scream hate and bile. But the reality is that whether it is small boats in the English Channel, illegal asylum seekers, Israeli death squads in Gaza, genocide, hotels hosting immigrants, Palestine Action demonstrations, wars on terror, Afghanistan, Syria, sub-tropical Africa, flag waving "patriots", hate filled social media posts.........and all the other afflictions that make up our daily diet, the reality is that no-one, no party, no nation, no person, no religion has the easy answer - nor will they have.

Rabble rousing "patriots" with their flags of St George will cry, "It was never like this in my day - the world is going to hell, send these people back where they belong". But they are wrong. When a land is wracked with war, strife, famine or worse there have always been great movements of people seeking safety, a better life, a roof over their head. Read your history books for the truth of that. The only thing that contained it was the sheer difficulty of travelling great distances; the problem was largely kept away from us in comfortable England - we are on the extreme edge of Europe and surrounded by sea; in short, a long way from anywhere!

But today, we are a different world. Travel is easier - for everyone, not just for refugees and asylum seekers; I can buy my plane ticket to Syria and the Syrian refugee can buy his passage using a criminal gang to get him across Europe and over the Channel - but the result is the same; we can both go to places that were unthinkable in my childhood. What was once an unknowable place to visit for a holiday or a new life is now within the reach of billions. And, to add to that, our new world is now so global and interconnected that "problems" - be they national or international - cannot be simply hidden away or neatly solved by a single government policy or a more draconian law until they go away. When I was a child even France, twenty miles across the Channel, seemed another world, unknown to me - far, distant, alien, unknowable and unreachable. Now, small, starving children in the devastation of Gaza can see on a mobile phone screen the riches of nations like ours - our wealthy western secret is out in the public domain for all the world to see and then to access. The world is open to all - and the poor, the frightened, the starving, the oppressed, the displaced, and all, will want what they see - the riches and safety and the opportunities of Europe or America or other wealthy nations, "Why" they will increasingly ask and then demand "Why, can I not have a share in this". In mediaeval times Dick Whittington journeyed to London to seek his fortune believing its streets were paved with gold - and now young Afghan men, Syrian families and Somalian teenagers are the new Dick Whittingtons, all seeking streets paved with gold and lands of milk and honey. English "patriots" might not like it but that is reality. And the question becomes not "How can we stop them" because we can't; but rather "How must we respond, how must we manage this situation so that everyone benefits and finds his street paved with gold, his land of milk and honey."

Any politician or Reform Party rabble rouser, any tabloid newspaper editor or social media warrior, any jingoistic flag waving numpty who tells you that the problem is easy to solve; that they will introduce this policy or that law, they will send the immigrants back, they will sink their boats in mid-Channel and the problem will go away is lying. French writer Victor Hugo famously said over a century ago "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come". He was not wrong; the flame has been lit, the idea has been born that in our unequal world of haves and have nots there are good, safe, rich places to live, lands of milk and honey and with that idea in mind those in pain, distress, fear, hunger or poverty will come, follow their dream, their idea - and as Hugo suggests, they cannot and will not be resisted. The only way that the boats will stop arriving on our beaches is when the starving are fed, the oppressed relieved, and the world made fairer. In other words when we, in the wealthy parts of the world, actually do something to address the morally repugnant inequalities of this world that we in the west have allowed to be created. No walls, fences, laws or policies will stop the basic human instinct to survive, to seek a better life - and when the children depicted in this video amid the destruction of Gaza, or in the heat and barren landscape of sub-tropical Africa grow they will say, we want a life like we see in London, in New York, in Milan, in Paris, in Berlin. And they will come, until we ensure that their homelands and their lives are such that they no longer look with envy at our streets paved with gold and our lands of milk and honey. That is the reality and until we and our politicians accept, understand and respond to this they will continue to come, and in ever increasing numbers.