Patrick Christys: There's too much virtue signalling over Afghanistan

Boris Johnson has committed to take 20,000 Afghan refugees over the course of the next five years, including the 5,000 that are being brought over as we speak.

There are two ways to look at this – either we won’t end up taking anything like 20,000 because - ultimately - the Taliban control the routes leading to the airport and... within weeks... it seems... they’ll have shut them off completely. Anybody who doesn’t make it out now may well never make it out at all.

But there is another possibility.

We could actually end up taking loads more than 20,000. Let’s say we take 20,000 people, many of them will have wives, husbands, children, parents and presumably they will all be allowed to come over as well over time.

So you might as well quadruple that 20,000 number. But all that remains to be seen.

But the question is... what do we do with them all? Where do they go? I think that unless you are personally willing to take an Afghan refugee into your own home, you don’t really have the right to condescend or criticise anyone who has genuine concerns about the scale of our Afghan importation.

Some people think we have an inherent moral duty to provide safe passage, housing, financial support, education, health care, etc…to the people of Afghanistan.

Some people think that permanently displacing tens of thousands of people by bringing them over here puts our already overstretched public services under unbearable strain.

There is the sad fact that thousands of British military personnel who were sent out to fight against the Taliban can’t get assisted housing, they’re currently homeless. If we can find room for Afghan refugees, can we not find room for those people as well?

Many people think it poses a security risk. People make the argument that we don’t always know who these people are, it’s been widely reported that the Taliban freed thousands of prisoners, some of their most hardened fighters, and it goes without saying that these people could pose a huge risk to our national security.

But then you see reports today that...despite the fact the political spin machine is in full flow telling us the Taliban are a new, reformed group of actually quite pleasant jihadis... it turns out - shock horror - that they’re still the same murderous bunch of radical Sharia-loving lunatics that we all know and hate.

They’re now going door-to-door hunting anyone who used to work with the coalition troops, including a chef who worked at the UK embassy, and of course the interpreters, whose safety Dominic Raab thought was less important than him getting a cracking suntan on a beach in Crete.

I can see both sides of it. But here’s my take.

There is a lot of virtue signalling going on at the moment and unless you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is and take an Afghan refugee into your own home, then stop pretending that you’re a better, more moral person than anyone else.