'Yet There's no Place for Us'
The Englishman has no special love of foreigners, still less for refugees, whom he regards as guilty of poverty, a vice he never for- gives—but he clings to the right of asylum; he will not permit it to be touched with impunity any more than the right of public meeting and the freedom of the press.
So wrote the Russian political exile, Alexander Herzen, towards the end of the nineteenth cen tury. Miss Francesca Wilson has set out to show the truth of this, in a brief historical survey of refugees in Britain which begins with the Flem- ings and Huguenots, skims through some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political exiles, looks at the Jews in Britain from medieval times to the pre-war influx, and ends with an epilogue on the wartime and post-war situation, particu- larly the Poles and the Hungarians.
The literature of exile is copious, as Miss Wil- son's bibliography shows. Every national group but the Flemings seems to have been astonishingly articulate, not always fond of the country to which they fled (why, should they have been- Herzen rightly noticed our xenophobia), but grateful for the open door, however grudgingly it remained open. The English take a curious pride in the thought of Marx and Lenin brewing revolu- tion in the British Museum Reading Room, and of Hugo, not conspicuously pro-British, reigning in lonely eminence in the Channel Islands. And what the Huguenots and Jews have done for British industry and commerce (to say nothing of culture and science) is a commonplace: there would be fewer jokes about Golders Green and Leeds as New Jerusalems if that were not so.
But since the beginning of this century the posi- tion has changed. The Aliens Acts of 1905 and 1920 began to make less sure our boast of the open door; and though thousands still came— Belgians in 1914, German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s, the remnants of defeated armies in the 1940s, the Hungarians in I956—no one can say it is easy for a refugee to find his way here now. Special circumstances of a dramatic and emotional sort, such as the Hungarian rising, are needed before the barriers are removed in an equally dramatic way. But Miss Wilson rightly points out that 'for most refugees the best solution is to become settled among the local population' in the country where they are. Britain, now, needs not so much to show an open door as an open cheque book, to provide money for resettlement
in situ, to adopt and disperse refugee camps under the 1958 Camp Clearance Programme. This is not the impersonal gesture of cold, faceless charity; it is the only practical way of giving two million-odd people a chance to become people.
ANTIIONY THWATI
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