My suspicion is climate change is a key reason why the political right are going so all-out in dehumanising refugees and creating such a strong sense of ‘the other’ attacking people in dinghies is seen as acceptable amongst the tabloid demographic. Get the scapegoating in nice and early so when the shit really hits the fan, which it will, those fleeing can just be bombed or shot, or at least turned away without much public outcry. I guess it may even have been a factor for the billionaires and press barons who paid for the Brexit project, i.e. preemptively isolate the UK far away from a likely more responsible and humanitarian EU response. They get their low wage low tax walled haven for the super rich that only floods in the areas that they don’t buy themselves. Maybe a cynical perspective, possibly even a little paranoid, but the people behind both Brexit and this Conservative government have proven beyond any shadow of doubt to be so corrupt and untrustworthy on so many levels now little would surprise me.
Maybe a bit paranoid, and certainly cynical, though there's nothing wrong with that. Your conspiracy theories about the tories and their backers are de rigeur, and long predate the Brexit vote. Hell, you might even be right, but I do feel that your feelings are motivated by a lifelong political stance, and a vitriolic hatred of the conservative party as much as by properly informed research. However, that's fine, it really would be awful if we all felt the same way, and opposition to power is vital.
However, I simply don't get your stance on the EU. Your view of it seems to be entrenched in some kind of naive, idealised utopianism whereby it becomes a symbol for the values of peace, progressivism, tolerance and collectivism, without either any apparent grasp of its origins in the neoliberal theories of the 1930s, its governance and institutions, or the belief that anyone who doesn't support the EU and opposes Britain's membership, could possibly share those same values, a vast intellectual failing common to your side of the great Brexit divide.
The EU has placed a fence along its entire Eastern border, patrolled by its much expanded Frontex border force. Its patrol boats stand off whilst Greek navy boats forcibly turn refugee boats around in the Aegean (it is to there that Patel travelled to observe how it was done). It itself turns boats around by proxy by paying Libya to do it on its behalf. Libyan navy patrol boats are allegedly not averse to using live ammunition to encourage the refugees not to ignore them. It pays vast sums of money to the Turkish government to prevent refugees from leaving that country, confining them to apparently unsanitary encampments, and providing Turkey's unsavoury president with unwarranted powers to further bribe the EU.
Germany sends far more asylum seekers back than the UK does. The French authorities harass them as they pass through that country. And so it goes on.
The passage of people across the Channel in rubber dinghies is incredibly dangerous, and it is quite astonishing that not more have died - that they haven't is certainly due to the efforts of the UK border forces and the RNLI. It feeds criminal networks which are run by unprincipled thugs who are not averse to abandoning families to certain death in the middle of the Sahara, it eats up vast resources, and it renders the UK's borders open to potential crime.
I don't support what the government is doing, but they've got to get a grip on this thing.