Britain has a moral duty to accept refugees from its war according to the Bishop  of Manchester.

Writing on the Guardian’s comment is free website , the Right Reverend David Walker condemns the political rhetoric that characterises them as wilful criminals rather than helpless victims and instead says that thr moral cost of our continual overseas interventions has to include accepting a fair share of the victims of the wars to which we have contributed as legitimate refugees in our own land.

The asylum seekers washing up, sometimes all too literally, on Europe’s shores, are not driven to put their lives, and their families’ lives, on the line because they’ve heard that the UK has a generous benefits system, he says adding that they take tremendous risk to travel to Europe.

His comments come in a fortnight that has seen over 1300 deaths in the Mediterranean as refugees have fled from their African homelands towards the shores of the European Union.

Following an an emergency summit in Brussels last week, European leaders decided for the first time to draw up military plans to hit people-smuggling networks in Libya and destroy the vessels used to send the migrants on their perilous voyages.

It was staged under intense pressure to respond more humanely to the soaring death toll, but only 5,000 resettlement places across Europe have been offered to refugees with the rest sent back under a new rapid-return programme.

He writes 

I want my country to be governed by those who are prepared to look at the faces of the desperate, be it the desperation of the asylum seeker or of the food bank client, and to look at them with compassion.


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