Gary Lineker and me?

I must admit that this was not a statement that I thought I would ever make, but I agree with Gary Lineker.

Belatedly, and not enough by far, but the UK – you know, that country flowing with compassion and empathy for the dispossessed – has started to bring young refugees from the camps across the Channel that are imminently to be closed, forcibly.

And, as could be predicted, instead of applauding a small but important act of universal compassion, the Daily Mail, amongst others, decided to stir the pot of suspicion and hate with the exposé of ‘fake youth’.

Never mind that these are human beings, stuck between disaster behind them and an unknown but not entirely welcoming future. Never mind that the numbers are so small as to be totally insignificant. The most important thing is that maybe there might be one or two who lied about their age to escape ‘The Jungle’.

I know that, all across this country, there are individuals and groups who do more than can ever be expected to aid and support people in crisis, refugees from worlds we would never want to experience.

And yet, the great and the good of the sanctimonious isolationists are happy to keep the bigotry and racist tendencies bubbling away. Are they so ashamed of a small, very small, gesture of good will towards those in need, that it must be purged from the good heart of this country by biased assertions and accusations.

Let us not forget that, thanks to our government’s willingness to involve itself in other countries, either through commercial exploitation or military intervention, that the resulting ripples are now reaching our shores.

We are happy to cling to our place of importance in this world, an international force, and all the advantages that brings. So we must also be prepared to reap the whirlwind when, as history has proved so many times before, it all goes dramatically wrong.

We never seem to learn from history, but we have to, at the very least, accept our responsibility for it.

We are, so we are repeatedly told, a rich country. We can also be an overtly compassionate one.

Gary Lineker and me. Who would have thought?