Liz Saville Roberts, who leads the Welsh separatist party Plaid Cymru in Britain’s House of Commons, has called for her small country to become a “nation of sanctuary” for the world’s refugees.
“We live on an island of Britain,” the London-born ex-teacher told a BBC Question Time audience.
“In terms of managing immigration this is way easier than for many other nations,” she added — although despite the seeming logic of this statement the United Kingdom does in fact have the joint-highest illegal alien population in all of Europe.
“[Immigration] has become desperately political. Now, forgive me, now, to be referring to Wales again, but this is equally true for other areas in the United Kingdom… 96 per cent of people in Wales were born in the United Kingdom, and yet we hear this same argument there, but we’re dependent so much on people to come in for clinical staff, for food processing, for catering — we’re going to be in trouble if we don’t have these people still coming in,” she claimed, appearing to suggest in the same breath that immigration to Wales is both too limited to be of any concern, and also absolutely vital to the health service and for a steady supply of cheap waiters and factory workers.
“Now, I am proud to see that my party would like to see Wales as a nation of sanctuary for refugees,” she added, passing over the fact that the economic migration to Wales which she initially mentioned has little bearing on the question of refugees, which in Continental European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden remain overwhelmingly jobless.
“But I think there is a time now, rather than [immigration] being a political football — and this is a political par excellence of our time, and it is ugly — that we start talking about immigration in terms of these are other human beings, and how we manage with that in the world, rather than using it as an excuse for closing down our doors, becoming more inward-looking, and more turning in ourselves, because I fear for the future if we continue with this narrative,” she concluded.
Despite the Plaid politician’s rhetoric, however, the reality is that Britain’s doors have not been closed or even closing for generations, with net immigration currently running at or near record annual highs and the country’s demographic make-up transforming rapidly.
Quite how Wales, with a population of just over 3 million, could possibly retain any semblance of identity or even survive economically if turned into a “sanctuary” for tens of millions of global refugees, remains unclear.