I find I am having trouble recognising my country. Today is the seventy-sixth anniversary of the outbreak of WWII. On that day Great Britain put its very existence on the line in order to challenge the inherent evil which had gripped Nazi Germany. Later we were attacked by Japan. In the end we came through victorious, though at enormous cost. But we paid willingly because we knew we were right. Now, a lifetime later, we are wrong. The picture of the Turkish soldier gently cradling the body of a dead three year old child is heart rending. It is shocking. And it is shaming because we have said no to him and his family. If we had said yes there might have been a system that took care of them better than the murderous traffickers into whose despicable clutches our foreign policy has driven them.
We have a moral responsibility for the mayhem now unfolding and well we know it. For Downing Street to talk in terms of cash aid to countries in meltdown is all very good, but no use to a three year old tossed into an angry sea. Whatever oily excuses the smooth talking Cameron puts forward and however angry the underclass bearing the weight of his cuts becomes, he has no excuse for his shameful policy which even shocks the Germans. It is his duty to take a lead, back sensible quotas of fair sharing across the EU, and open our gates to the desperate.
It may very well be that the ultra right Thatcherite tendency which howls from the backbenches of his party frightens him more than the world opprobrium beginning to surround his person. The Tories may wallow in the notion that they are the nasty party. We must not let them turn our homeland into a nasty country.