Backs turned on the refugees.

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     As Winston Churchill once told us, this was our proudest moment.  It was when hundreds of little boats went to rescue the British army stranded on the French coast, dodging the Nazi gunships to bring them back to defend their homeland.
     We are again in a critical moment of Europe history, but this time it has not been our proudest moment.   There are threequarters of a million refugees from the Syrian dictatorship, the Afghan Taliban terror troops and other areas. On the Greek island of Lesbos the nearest accessible port of entry, 40,000 arrived in the last week of October and have continued to stumble out of the boats in their thousands every day since.
       What has happened to them?  We know, because dedicated reporters and photographers are there to tell us.  Sometimes they cannot hide their shock at the indifference shown to the refugees crowded on to whatever bit of land they can reach, asking for, and not getting, food and shelter.   There are thousands of children involved, a big proportion having lost their parents.
        The Germans have rightly asked for a sharing of the numbers of refugees among other European countries.  David Cameron offered to take 20,000 over the next five years, but it was not clear where these were going to lay their heads while waiting.
          Giles Duley, an experienced photographer for the UN Refugee Commission, said:  "I have never been so overwhelmed as by the human drama unfolding on the beaches of Lesbos.  In its sheer scale, it is hard to comprehend;  the lack of response impossible to explain or excuse."
        As he knows, there can be no excuse.  So, as a nation, have we changed?   Are we now wanting to close our doors and forget about this massive human disaster?   Are we going to let them starve and die of cold this winter?   Are we going to have to acknowledge that Germany has now become the leader in humanitarian effort and we are stony-hearted islanders isolated and wanting to remain so?  
        In fact, people are volunteering with rescue food and clothes to take to the rough refugee camps in Calais and are offering to take them into their homes, putting together various rescue plans.   What we are lacking are leaders capable of  harvesting this goodwill into a nationally organised effort to bring over refugees now, not later, with homes and shelters available for them.   The refugee crisis is starting to come bottom of the schedule on the media, in Parliament and in everyday conversation.
        The goodwill and the individual efforts will go on, in spite of this. But it seems that this is not one of Britain's proudest moments but one of its most shaming.