Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

The difference in the response from the German chancellor and the British prime minister to the biggest refugee crisis Europe has faced since the second world war could not be more stark.

Angela Merkel's Germany has taken in more than 1 million asylum seekers this year. Her electrifying welcome announcement in August transformed the chancellor's cautious reputation for leading from behind, to one of a moral pioneer.

It is true that her open door response has provoked a backlash, particularly in Bavaria, through which most refugees and asylum seekers have entered Germany. But the backlash, while real enough in her own CDU party, appears to have been confined to a minority of the wider public.

A French-based IFOP poll of seven countries showed support for the principle of sheltering refugees from war and persecution has dropped in Germany from 79% in September to 75% in October. Fewer than half of Britons, French or Dutch say they feel the same way. While the demand for an upper limit on the number of refugees in Germany has damaged Merkel, it seems far from sweeping her from office.

David Cameron and his home secretary, Theresa May, on the other hand, have not only kept the door firmly shut but have made a virtue of it. While Germany accepted 108,000 asylum seekers between September and November, Cameron was boasting last week of resettling just 1,000 Syrian refugees over a longer period.

The PM has firmly argued that it is better to keep the 4 million Syrian refugees "in-region", underpinned by a generous cumulative £1bn aid programme and to end the incentive for those making the journey by "breaking the link between getting on a boat in the Mediterranean and getting the right to settle in Europe".

He adopted a tough-minded approach to this policy even to the point of refusing in October 2014 to provide any further support for a European search and rescue operation to prevent refugees drowning on the grounds that it would only encourage more people to attempt the dangerous sea crossing.

There have been two moments in the past year when it appeared that Cameron might adopt a less hard-hearted approach. The first came when the mounting death toll in the Mediterranean interrupted the parochialism of Britain's election campaign and even Nigel Farage understood that the British public wanted to pluck those in the leaky boats from the sea.

Cameron relented and sent in the Royal Navy flagship HMS Bulwark to help the rescue effort. But after saving nearly 5,000 lives Bulwark was withdrawn by June and its replacement HMS Enterprise was given a different mission of gathering intelligence on the people smugglers and their routes.

The second moment came in early September when the rest of Europe was responding to the summer drownings by proposing a mass emergency relocation programme of 160,000 refugees who had made it to Italy, Greece and Hungary.

Cameron, feeling the political heat from opposition politicians, notably Yvette Cooper, and the media, was fuelled by the disclosure that only 216 Syrian refugees had arrived on Britain's own vulnerable persons resettlement programme in the first nine months of 2015.

A further 2,204 Syrian asylum seekers had arrived in Britain under their own steam, including through Calais, but Cameron defused a growing political clamour that he did not care by announcing the current programme to bring 20,000 of the most vulnerable Syrians from the camps to Britain by the time of the next election. Only 1,000 arrived by Christmas. It was deeply unambitious compared with Britain's past history of offering a safe haven, let alone the hundreds of thousands being given sanctuary in Germany.

It also came with the condition that Britain would play no part in the EU's own internal relocation programme designed to share the responsibility for refugees between northern and southern Europe. Instead Britain would reinforce efforts to strengthen Europe's external borders by going after the smuggling gangs and ensuring the rapid processing of asylum application programmes of those who did make it into Europe and the return of those who did not qualify as refugees.

While Britain sat out the refugee crisis, the rest of Europe found it was placing a severe strain on the very solidarity that binds the EUtogether. As the flow through the Balkans gathered pace in the autumn, border after border was temporarily reinforced placing a question mark over the very future of the Schengen borderless Europe. The Paris terror attacks momentarily raised unfounded fears that the refugee wave had been exploited by jihadis.

Countries such as Denmark dropped their previous pledges to take part in the relocation programme as politicians proposed seizing refugees' jewellery and cash. It is a measure of Europe's failure that so far only 160 or so of the one million refugees who made it to Europe by sea or by land have been relocated under the scheme.

The EU is left preparing for what is predicted to be an even larger movement of refugees in 2016, with divisive plans for a new EU border guard, a "smart" borders data tracking system and a "safe country" whitelist for rapid returns. Cameron may be congratulating himself for insulating Britain from the refugee crisis but all the signs are that it has only just begun.