SOME perspective is required in the debate around the UK Government’s attitude to migrants and asylum-seekers.

The Nationality and Borders Act which became law last year was denounced by Maggie Lennon, then CEO of the Bridges Programmes, the agency for economic integration for migrants in Scotland. In my interview with her she said: “This has to be the most evil piece of legislation I’ve ever read. It’s absolutely foul. And it won’t even achieve what it’s set up to achieve. There’s no understanding of why people flee their homelands or the true nature of people trafficking.”

Yet, the UK’s major news platforms continue to report the migrant crisis in the most reactionary and clumsy terms imaginable. Raw numbers of arriving migrants and refugees are presented with scant context and no historical perspective. Few questions are asked about the morality and ethics of holding human beings in what is effectively a prison ship moored off the south coast of England.

The message is unequivocal: “We consider you to be barely human and thus you will not be allowed to set foot on land occupied by humans.” If Suella Braverman had commissioned the construction of dog kennels to house these people, then Penny Mordaunt and the hard-right red-tops would have approved.

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Let’s get something clear: there’s no such status in international law as "illegal" asylum seekers. Everyone on the planet has the right to seek asylum where they choose. No preferences or restrictions are imposed on by what means they choose to arrive.

It’s an acknowledgement, rooted in universal norms of decency, that all human beings may one day be forced to flee our countries of origin owing to events that threaten us and our families. An entire generation of young men went to war on our behalf to defeat a regime which sought to enslave and dehumanise entire peoples.

Nor is there any rule of the universe which dictates that Britons might not one day encounter an extreme geo-political apocalypse. In the 19th century, one million Irish people were forced to flee their homeland after a famine exacerbated by the inhumane profiteering of absentee British gentry. Rarely mentioned when the BBC informs us that more than 100,000 migrants have come to the UK since 2018 is that the Government has aggravated this crisis in the same way its predecessors did in Ireland. The UK Government has decreed that asylum seekers are forbidden to apply for protection outside of the UK. The consequences of such callous bating of these people are obvious. It forces them to make journeys on small boats to claim asylum.

And then, in an attempt to divert any concern about such tactics, they ask us to reserve our outrage for the people-traffickers. The UK Government routinely sends elite squadrons of Special Forces to interfere in other countries’ struggles, yet barely lifts a finger to take direct military action against the people-smugglers.

One of the goals of the UK Government is to create a pernicious two-tier system which is informed by another cruelty. Those who do succeed in making it here to claim asylum and are subsequently given leave to stay will be given only three years at our pleasure.

They will be denied the basic decency of being able to re-unite with their families, and if anyone dares to show them basic compassion such as a job or legal advice or basic accommodation they risk prosecution. It’s designed to dehumanise these people, many of whom are fleeing another type of inhumanity.

Worse than this, it propagates the belief that these people are less than human among those people who may already be enduring the worst of Tory austerity. Again, the message is clear: don’t blame us for your poverty; blame these sub-human hordes who are coming here to make it worse.

And don’t give me any nonsense either about so-called "safe routes". “There are no safe routes,” Maggie Lennon said. “If you turn people back in boats it won’t stop them coming. How desperate do you have to be to put small children in a boat in the middle of the night? This isn’t about getting a job in Tesco or getting onto Britain’s benefits system.”

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Once, we would have considered this an appalling way to treat others, let alone those who are imperilled by wars and torture in geopolitical upheavals which bear the fingerprints of Britain’s old empire-building. It also flaunts international law, including the universal law of the sea which obliges all countries to come to the aid of those whose lives have been disrupted by circumstances beyond their control. In Scotland, we lament the incompetence and fake virtue of our current collection of professional politicians. Yet, important areas remain where they are bound by fundamental, common decencies lacking at the top of the Westminster Government. We should be proud of this.

And while matters pertaining to migrants and refugees are wholly reserved to Westminster, Scotland has shown how, with hard work laced with a degree of ingenuity, this country can still pursue options for decency.

In the course of the last five years, the Bridges Programme has already helped more than 50 refugee doctors into the NHS in Scotland with the assistance of General Medical Council and the British Medical Association. It took several years of painstaking and detailed work to first spot the gaps missed by the devolution settlement and then to exploit them to meet a need in Scotland and to signal something that is moral amidst the wickedness of the UK’s policies on migration and refugees. There are also myths to be addressed about the responsibilities of Britain’s European neighbours. These convey the narrative that they aren’t pulling their weight. In 2019, Germany accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees while Britain, as we now know, took in 20,000, part of that 100,000 the BBC last week revealed without adding context or perspective.

Germany, you see, had already reaped a rich dividend from deploying a much more humane approach to migrants. In the 1950s Germany established a guest-worker programme for Turkish people. It was immediately successful and helped integrate the Turkish community into the emerging, modern Germany.

There is now a multi-generational Turkish community in Germany employed in highly-skilled, properly-paid jobs. As a result, German society and the economy has been improved. More importantly, German children were brought up to embrace these attitudes.

In Britain meanwhile, the deputy chair of the Conservative Party told asylum-seekers to “f*** off back to France”. Downing Street didn’t find anything remiss in these comments.

Two centuries after they were dehumanising Irish people following the Great Famine, they’re still reverting to their old instincts.