Helping Nepal while ignoring the murder on our doorstep

The response to the Nepalese earthquake shows the extent to which immigrants are hated in this country. The government and the people of this country have responded magnificently to the crisis in Nepal. This however has highlighted that more people agree with the likes of Katie Hopkins that the migrants in the Mediterranean are sub-human than we may realise.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a huge human tragedy happening in Nepal and the UK should use every means it has to help the efforts there.

This picture from Giles Howard shows how deeply the Nepalese earthquake has hit our society in Britain

What is disturbing however is the unwillingness of the government and the people to recognise the terror going on in the Mediterranean. The situation in Nepal will allow the mainstream media to ignore the migrant crisis once more.

People like Katie Hopkins call those fleeing devastating war, poverty and persecution “cockroaches” – the same person who has such a privileged lifestyle that she could afford to turn down a six-figure-salary job from Alan Sugar.

Nobody works harder than the migrants trying to cross the small sea to Europe.

To raise £1,000 to in third-world countries while also keeping yourself and your family alive must be nigh on impossible. To then have the guts and determination to make a journey that will give you only half a chance of survival is Superman in nature.

Yet these people face only hatred when they get here, being tarred with the same brush by scaremongers such as the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage. The former claims that 500,000 ISIS terrorists are on their way over to Britain and Farage delivered this speech of anti-migrant rhetoric after multiple tragedies in the last month have led to hundreds of deaths.

The government’s stance is even more barbaric when all we are ever told by David Cameron is that we must work hard to elevate our standard of living, that the only way to overcome our economic woes is to work, and then work some more.

But only if you are privileged enough to live in Europe. It is a rhetoric repeated almost all over the continent.

Men, women and children from the poorest parts of this planet are not coming to Europe to steal your job. They are fleeing conditions that, for us, are completely unimaginable. We should be welcoming them with open arms, not allowing them to die in their thousands.

There is no “pull factor”. It is a myth, a lie, that has been shown up by the rise in attempted crossings since the Italian rescue operation Mare Nostrum was cancelled at the end of 2014. These people are not scum of the Earth. They are people suffering from a backlog of errors from European countries that spans centuries.

Nepal, to an extent, has been relatively untouched by the West and has a long, ancestral culture attached to the Himalayas that still exists today. In contrast, the culture, resources and people of Africa have been ravaged for generations by the West. Colonialism has not disappeared. The developed world funds wars over resources all over the continent.

Maybe it is easier to affect the situation in Nepal. It is easy to pay a fiver online to the Red Cross or Oxfam and we’re happy to do it.

But take a miniscule raise in tax to boost foreign aid? To help foreigners? You’re having a laugh.

That opens up a whole can of worms, but we are less than a week from a general election. We have never had a better opportunity to tell politicians that this is important.

Migrant-bashing has become so endemic in our society that we have literally stopped seeing them as human beings. The negligence shown by the EU toward these people is barbaric. Do not let the events in Nepal allow you to be distracted from the murder on our doorstop.