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British protesters rap EU policy on migrants

Sunday, 26 April 2015 3:50 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 26 April 2015 3:50 PM ]

In Britain, protesters take to the streets of the capital city to slam the response of the U-K government and the European Union to the deaths of thousands of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the European Commission’s office in London on Saturday to condemn the EU’s policies towards non-European migrants, which are blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean last week.

The demonstrators chanted, “Blood on your hands,” and called on the EU to restart the Mare Nostrum search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, which helped 150,000 migrants safely arrive in Europe in 2013, RT, reported.

The Migrant Lives Matter protest in the British capital was organized by the Movement Against Xenophobia and supported by groups including Stop the War Coalition and Stand Up To Racism.

The deadliest migrant tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea “exposed the appalling human cost of the ‘Fortress Europe’ immigration policy imposed by [the] European Union and the British government,” the organizers of the rally said in a statement.

Activists also reportedly blamed figures like the Sun newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins and the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader, Nigel Farage for a rise in anti-immigration sentiment in Britain.

Now Jim Brann with the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ in London tells Press TV’s UK Desk that the British position on migrants in general “is to say that this problem is nothing to do with us; that’s the first thing of course; it isn’t our fault.”

“The second thing the British government says is that it would be better to let them die in order to teach the others a lesson.”

Brann further noted that “you have to point out that where the migrants come from… many of them are precisely the countries that Britain has bombed or invaded in the last 12 years; that is one way the British government policy affects migrants.”

Nearly 25,000 people applied for asylum in the UK last year. Many travelled through mainland Europe, before ending up at a makeshift camp at Calais, the main terminal for border crossings into the UK.

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