The other day I went to a dinner raising money for an African charity. I am torn between hating these events for their sub-Band Aid kitsch, and admiring the people who devote themselves to trying to help others. My wife and I came away significantly poorer, but clutching a case of venerable Bordeaux which some kind soul had donated to the auction.
Significant pressure was applied for diners to sponsor a child's education. Would we pay a modest monthly sum to put a wide eyed child through school?
I wrote on here the other day about the strange pathology of the Left - the desire at all costs to be nicer than the Right. There's nothing inherently wrong with that (although it doesn't always form the best basis for dealing with the truly horrible), but it does have a tendency to inhibit the desire to examine all the facts rather than just the ones which provide personal validation.
Take the migrants currently trying to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. The ones Ed Miliband thinks are coming because the Tories failed to help sort things out in Libya. The ones Katy Hopkins described as "cockroaches". They are rightly objects of pity, and we should try and help them. What form should that help take?
There was outrage a few months ago when the Italians announced that search and rescue operations in the Med were going to be scaled down because, apparently, the knowledge that Europeans would be actively out looking for them just encouraged migrants to risk the dangerous crossing.
Cue outrage in the liberal press. How dare we abandon these refugees to the vagaries of storm, dehydration and brutal traffickers? People fleeing from persecution deserved better.
Well hold hard. Africa is such a mess that the numbers of people legitimately seeking asylum in Britain and elsewhere must vastly outnumber our capacity to accommodate them. Our asylum policy acknowledges this. It says you can't claim asylum until get to the UK. But the reality is that most people are too poor to apply for a visa or afford the travel costs. In other words our policy deliberately filters out the overwhelming majority of potential asylum seekers by limiting application to those affluent enough or strong enough - or lucky enough - to withstand the immense hardships inherent in working your way across a hostile continent.
This isn't a moral policy. It's a pragmatic policy. Very much like the policy decision to scale back search and rescue in the Mediterranean. If you asked Libyans, "Hands up who wants to come and live in Europe?" a very significant proportion of the population, perhaps even a majority, would want to come. Any policy short of welcoming them with open arms is, judged by the standards of the self-righteous, immoral.
Asked to choose between the just and the practical, the Left will always choose the former. Usually without examining the implications of the latter.
But a policy which leaves Africans to drown is not of a different order of evil from one which leaves them to starvation, persecution, rape, murder or torture at home. The outrage is thoughtless and synthetic.
The best way of deterring North Africa's migrants is to focus on the reasons they want to leave in the first place. Only a fool would say that none of Africa's problems arise from the legacy of colonialism; but the overwhelming majority of them are cultural and political. Lack of democracy, lack of education, corruption, the culture of the strong man and religious intolerance are surely the prime movers.
All the West's efforts should be focused on helping Africans sort this stuff out for themselves. It's arguable that well-intentioned mediation merely prolongs the agony. It puts off the day when Africans stand up and say, "We don't want to live like this any more".
When will that happen? Probably not soon. And helping Africans to leave probably won't make it happen any sooner. The philosopher Alan Wolfe wrote, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard". I suspect that in many African countries the people have not yet been born who will fill those graveyards.
We are now sponsoring a Kenyan child's education. It's probably wrong. I have left liberalism sufficiently far behind to feel slightly bad about having done it; but I'm close enough to the desire to do the right thing that it was impossible to turn away. And a lot cheaper than a case of Claret.
