Theresa May is ahead of Trump in undermining the refugee system

But this is not enough for Trump. He is clearly going to substitute a US-only vetting system, further undermining trust in the UNHCR system.

Theresa May is already way past him. When David Cameron pledged Britain to take 20,000 [spread over 5 years] of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees May insisted that the country would not take part in a UNHCR-run scheme. Instead, Britain set up a separate programme in which refugees nominated by the agency are vetted by Home Office officials.

May wants to go much further. In her party conference speech in October 2015, amid the world’s worst refugee crisis since the second world war, she outlined a new asylum strategy under which only temporary protection would be given to all but the world’s most vulnerable refugees. She said she was keen to see the international legal definition of a refugee made much stricter.

The prime minister may well have been embarrassed by the clumsy “dual-national” interpretation of Trump’s temporary bans that led to the prospect of Farah and Zahawi being told they were no longer welcome in the US.

 « click for more info
Theresa May with Donald Trump at their joint press conference at the White House last week,
before the US president's travel ban took effect. ( Photo cresit: Xinhua / Barcroft Images)

Trump’s underlying policy on refugees is to undermine the accepted international system of refugee protection that has been in place since 1951. Theresa May is already ahead of him on that road.

Bust of Churchill Returns from 8 Years Exile

Queen Liz has invited Der Trump for a courtesy call at Buckingham Palace…. remembering the roaring 1930s

○ Britain has a tradition of controversial state visits – Trump will fit in well | The Guardian |

Illustrious predecessors in the atypical category: Mobutu Sese Seko – Robert Mugabe – Nicolae Ceaușescu (death by firing squad)

Interesting, someone else besides Winston Churchill writing about history and the narrow escape of fascism by the Allied victory over the German Axis … the planning of a new world order.

○ The Other War: FDR’s Battle Against Churchill and the British Empire

    "The historical evidence shows that Roosevelt entered into the military alliance with Britain with only one purpose in mind: the defeat of an enemy. The historical evidence also shows that Franklin Roosevelt was committed to dismantling the British Empire--and all other empires--and to replacing them with sovereign nation-states, modelled on the American constitutional republic, in which each citizen would be given, through access to modern scientific education and Western culture, the opportunity to create a better life for himself and his posterity.

    It is this view of man, in the tradition of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, that places a value in each sovereign human individual, that the oligarch Churchill bitterly opposed, and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt espoused.

    In 1946, as the history of the period was already being rewritten, FDR's son, Elliot, published a short book, titled "As He Saw It". With pungency and force, using first-hand acccounts, Elliot told the truth about his father's bitter fights with Churchill, leading the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to state in a contemporary review that the book's central thesis was that Roosevelt saw Great Britain and its imperial system as a far greater adversary to the United States than Russia.

    Some historians have charged the younger Roosevelt with inaccuracies in reporting. However, Elliot's reports have been subsequently supported by reams of declassified documents, as well as first-hand accounts from the day. What emerges is the story of a pitched battle between two powerful actors on the stage of history--often fought in the open--over two diametrically opposed visions for the postwar world."

Churchill stressed the symbiotic relationship between Britain and her colonies, particularly the so-called white dominions.

    “They belong to the empire, and … the empire belongs to them.”

Of course the bust of Winston Churchill has been returned to the Oval Office in the White House after 8 years in exile.

0 0 votes
Article Rating