The Guardian has made more petty attempts
at moral equivalence today by running a ‘story’ in which they get overly
excited about the fact that between 2004 and 2008, 45 Americans tried to claim
political asylum in the UK in order to avoid ‘persecution’ in the US.
The article complains that ‘They hail from
the land of the free, the home of the brave, a place where it is said anyone
can prosper regardless of colour, creed or religion. But dozens of Americans
have tried in recent years to gain asylum in the UK’. These 45 applicants
attempted to claim they have a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ if returned
to the US. A further 15 applications came from Canada. All 60 applications were
turned down by the Home Office.
I guess we’ll never know if the 45 who applied survived the final years of Bush’s reign of terror. But we do know that of 132,640 asylum applications to the UK between 2004-2008, US citizens make up 0.03% Furthermore, all of these asylum claims were turned down. So of 132,640 applications, the Home Office decided that exactly 0% of them would face persecution if they were returned to the US. That’s what the Guardian deemed worthy of a story.
And the Daily Mail gets called sensationalist.
The Guardian runs a quote from Liza
Schuster of City University, saying: "I don't know the details of those
cases, but assume the US citizens are deserting before being sent to somewhere
like Afghanistan.” Evidence for this provided by the Guardian? ‘On
various online forums, people claiming to be American refugees have outlined
their cases. One Texan hoping to be allowed sanctuary in Scotland claimed he
had been "persecuted as a political dissident against US government
war-mongering."’
So we don’t know the facts, but let’s be sure
to assume it has something to do with US foreign policy.
If, then, we are allowed to deal in
speculation, I will do some of my own. I’m not sure where the other 132,580
claims came from, but I would wager that more than ‘dozens’ came from Muslim-majority
countries run by despotic lunatics. I’d also wager that many are accepted into
the UK because these countries genuinely are unsafe for those who speak out
against the authorities.
Still, maybe that angle isn’t as interesting to the Guardian as shameless sniping against a
long departed president is.