When my daughter was small, she used to play in the bath with Lucy and Larry and their lifeboat – toys we bought from the Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) shop on Southend Pier. I’ve always had a good deal of respect for the RNLI, which last year celebrated two hundred years of saving life at sea.
Yet now the RNLI is being forced to defend itself against the accusation of facilitating the small boats racket by providing what is in effect a ‘taxi service’ for illegal immigrants – sorry, ‘asylum seekers’ – who enter British waters in overcrowded and dangerous vessels. The below-the-line comments on news websites make hair-raising reading. The ‘I’ll never donate to them again’ crowd are the moderates; some call for the Institution to be closed down and their volunteers jailed, while the small boats should be scuttled and their occupants presumably left to drown. Nice.
The RNLI operates well over 200 lifeboat stations around our coasts. Most of its crews – from Stornoway to Falmouth, from Scarborough to Mumbles – never see a migrant. It points out that small boats in the Channel account for only about 1% of callouts in a year. When a lifeboat station receives notification from coastguards that a vessel is in distress, it can’t pick and choose whether to respond depending on what proportion of that day’s crew read The Guardian.
Let’s be clear. The continuing inflow of deliberately undocumented and potentially criminal migrants into the country is outrageous, as is the huge amount of money we are spending on supporting people who will probably never be net contributors to the economy, nor integrate in any meaningful sense. Instead of putting migrants in hotels and allowing them to hang around purposelessly on street corners, they should be held in humane but secure camp facilities until their legal position is sorted out. The bulk of them should then probably be deported, unless an overwhelming case is made for admission to the UK.
The failure of successive governments to implement some such regime – the imposition of which would be uncontroversial in many countries, and would replicate what we did to nationals of Axis countries during World War Two – is leading to mass hostility towards migrants of any sort, and a general coarsening of national life as attitudes become more extreme. It would be a great pity if the RNLI became collateral damage.
The RNLI represents a great voluntary tradition in British life. It was founded by private initiative and is paid for almost entirely by donations and legacies. It is staffed by ordinary men and women, prepared to put up with considerable inconvenience and no little danger, in their spare time. For free. While you and I watch telly on a winter’s evening.
If the donations dry up, or volunteer lifeboat crews think the obloquy from armchair critics is no longer worth the candle, we will all be the losers. It won’t just be migrants who drown, but people in yachts that get into trouble, or inexperienced swimmers overcome by strong currents, or silly children on lilos. No doubt the state would eventually have to step in – in its usual blundering and expensive manner – and another little bit of civil society will be lost, to be replaced by more bureaucrats and elf-n-safety jobsworths.
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