The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 33
NEWS
Matthew Syed
We must use our hearts and our
heads to solve migrant problem
Britain should crack down on the black economy to stem the flow but do more for those given asylum
And should we not acknowledge that
those crossing the Channel are not
fleeing war-torn homelands but a safe
nation? Should we not distinguish
between refugees and economic
migrants? Many testify that they are
motivated by the English language or
family in the UK, but other “pull” factors
are implicated. Easy access to
employment on the black market is a
loophole that the government has
proved unwilling or unable to shut
down.
Wise heads nod sagely at this point
and say that all migration policy is
doomed because it targets the symptoms
and not the root causes, but this is
specious, too. It amounts to a call for
massive increases in aid spending and
intervention to pacify distant conflicts.
Root causes? Many wars are built upon
sectarian animosities stretching back
thousands of years, which westerners
scarcely understand. Look at
Afghanistan today and the fruits of two
decades of intervention costing trillions.
My point — and it is not a
sophisticated one — is that neither
compassion nor callousness meets the
complexity of this challenge. Nor does
the government’s search for silver
bullets. Priti Patel is squealing at the
French for not playing ball without
seeming to realise that Emmanuel
Macron controls their territory and isn’t
displeased to see migrants leaving their
borders, a pass-the-parcel game of
human misery that is sitting like a
timebomb under Europe.
So let us look at a “systems
approach”. Michael Muthukrishna, a
professor at the London School of
Economics, suggests that if asylum
claimants were held offshore or at aremote location within the UK and boats
were detained with rapid processing,
crossings would plummet. Matt Dathan
of The Times argued last week that this
would be costly because of the numbers,
but this fails to account for how such a
centre would stem the flow. Consider, by
way of analogy, that nations with the
rule of law don’t need to punish citizens
as much as nations that lack it. Credible
threat is sufficient.
We should swiftly deport anyone
whose claim was rejected to their point
of origin. Claimants who refused to say
from where they came would be
detained while negotiations with foreign
nations took place. This would
encourage claimants to bring travel
documents or contact family members
to vouch for them, while deterring
economic migrants, undercutting the
business model of the traffickers.
Crucially, we should offer more support
to those granted asylum, helping them
to integrate themselves and find
employment. And we should crack
down on the black economy, something
that undermines legitimate business and
winks at exploitation.
These policies would, I think, find a
more tolerable balance between heart
and head, sympathy and realism. We are
not an uncompassionate nation, but
people can see that weak border policies
are being exploited. Governments have
to work together across frontiers, too,
and resist the kind of juvenile posturing
we are seeing from the UK and France.
In other words, this is a problem that
requires enlightened leadership and
political courage. It is a tragedy that
these qualities are in such pitifully short
supply.
@MatthewSyedThere is a
callousness,
too, in the
purported
remedies of
liberals
P
erhaps I should start on
September 2, 2015, with the
image of Alan Kurdi, a three-
year-old boy wearing a red T-
shirt and blue shorts, face
down on a beach near the
Turkish resort of Bodrum. His
arms were by his side, tiny
hands facing up towards a blue sky, nose
resting gently on the wet sand. When I
first gazed at that photograph, I was
transfixed, and when I looked away, my
cheeks were wet.
I remember going upstairs to the
bedroom of my daughter Evie, almost
exactly the same age at the time, and
noted that she was lying on her small
bed, face down, as she always did at that
age, breathing gently; almost an exact
replica of that beautiful boy. I reached
out to her hand and held it for a long
time, gripped by the unassailable
conviction that I would do almost
anything to help her escape danger or
poverty.
My mind wandered to the Balkan
migration crisis of the early 1990s and
the reports of Bosnian Muslim girls being
raped in front of their fathers, one
aspect of the ethnic cleansing that led to
the displacement of more than two
million people, perhaps the worst
human crisis in Europe since the Second
World War. Who would not wish to
escape such hellish tribulation?
My contempt towards those who post
sneering comments in the aftermath of
such tragedies is difficult to adequately
convey. I looked at Twitter after the
death of that Syrian child, his mother
and his brother and noted comments
like “serves them right” and “Great! Will
send a message to the others”. Some
politicians offered more slippery but noless transparent nastiness. This is, to my
mind, close to evil. The demonisation of
“the other” turns one’s stomach.
If nothing else, should we not reflect
on the vast contingency that allowed us
to be born in this country? We did not
deserve this good fortune any more than
migrants deserve their ill. If you look
across the array of times and habitats in
which humans have existed, even the
relatively poor in the UK today have
material wealth and legal stability of a
kind that has eluded 99.9% of our fellow
Homo sapiens. As the hymn puts it: “It is
a thing most wonderful, almost too
wonderful to be!”
Today, inchoate emotions bubble up
as I look at the image of the pitiful
inflatable that had been carrying 27
people who drowned in the Channel last
week. My mind has always reeled at the
idea of asphyxiation by drowning. How
must it have been on that terrible night?
Did mums and dads hold beloved
children above the surface of the
freezing water even as they succumbed?
The heart bleeds to contemplate such
things, but contemplate them we must.
But let me also engage the head rather
than the heart. For is there not a
callousness, too, in the purported
remedies of liberals? I have read more
books on migration than I care to
remember and recoil from the fuzzy
thinking of those who claim to be
motivated by compassion. Open
borders? More generous benefits for
those who make it here? Is there no
understanding of the signal this would
send to millions to take greater risks and
the boon to traffickers, who would still
be operating? These are not solutions;
they are sticking plasters for the
conscience.O
n reading the reviews of Moira
Buffini’s Manor at the National
Theatre, most of us who work
in the theatre will have
experienced a double
reaction: a) compassion and
b) relief that it wasn’t us that
was being trashed. Because,
believe me, it could have been.
Even those best loved by the critics (I
shan’t name them; they know who they
are) will, from time to time, according to
the law of averages, have been mauled.
I, to whom critics have sometimes
been very generous, have frequently
been attacked. I discovered quite early
on that I am rather Marmitey. I seem to
provoke in certain critics a desire not
just to dismiss or disregard my work but
to question my abilities at the most
fundamental level. When I did all 157 of
Shakespeare’s sonnets at the Olivier
Theatre one afternoon in 1979, James
Fenton, then of The Sunday Times,
observed: “Within his range, which is
tiny, Mr Callow is a master; outside it, he
is merely ridiculous.” (In another review
he noted that “Mr Callow’s stomach is a
dreadful warning to us all”.)
Even roles that, immodestly, I like to
think of as among my successes, have
been micturated on from a great
altitude: my Mozart in the original
production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus
was dismissed by one very highly
regarded critic as unworthy to hold the
stage of the National, though it might, he
said, just pass muster at a country fair.
The Times, reviewing Four Weddings and
a Funeral, opined that the film failed
because it was impossible to believe that
anyone would mourn the passing of my
character Gareth, so heartlessly had I
played him.
Actors certainly get it in the neck, but
it is directors who are on the front line.
Directors are the can-carriers, the buck-
stoppers. A couple of years ago I
directed a show in the West End that is
too recent and too painful a memory for
me even to name: with sickening
monotony every single review was of the
slash-and-burn variety and blamed me.
Rightly so: I am a very hands-on director.
If it was no good, then it was my fault.
The same thing happened on the mostQuestions
were asked in
parliament
about the
squandering of
public funds
ambitious show I’ve ever directed, Les
Enfants du Paradis, which had a playing
time of four hours and fielded a
revolving stage — the biggest and most
complicated yet deployed on a British
stage, which worked perfectly only
once, and whose mechanical failures
lost us six of our eight previews.
We staggered towards the press night
without having been able to make the
wonderful design our own. Nonetheless
the first night was a joyous event. The
joy abruptly stopped the following
morning. It was a show deeply loved by
the many, many members of the public
who wrote to me about it. The press,
meanwhile, roundly denounced it as a
disgraceful travesty of the original: “A
night in hell,” shrieked The
Independent.
Questions were asked in parliament
about the squandering of public funds. I
had had a suspicion that something
unpleasant was coming our way when a
normally affable critic from one of the
broadsheets interviewed me before we
opened with unaccustomed
aggressiveness. “Ronald,” I said, “why
are you talking to me like this?” and he
said: “Yes, I know, sorry: they said,
‘Don’t let him get away with it.’” Well, I
didn’t. Any more than I got away with
The Pajama Game, which I directed in- A review in The Mail on Sunday
consisted of one word: “Diiiiiiiire”.
It’s deeply distressing when it
happens to you. A show is a complex
entity; get any one element seriously
wrong and the whole thing can falter.
Equally, many things may not quite
work, but if the heart is in place and
pumping away, it can be a triumph.
Manor is by a brilliant writer, staged
by a fine director and acted by an
excellent cast, all of whom deserve at the
very least your curious attention. They
may have some sympathy with a remark
of the great Peter Ustinov: one’s bad
reviews, he said, are bearable; what are
not are other people’s unjustified good
reviews.
Read more from Simon Callow at
simoncallow.comSimon
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