What happened in Moygashel, Northern Ireland on July 10, was a disgrace. An effigy of a migrant boat was paraded and set alight as part of a so-called celebration. It wasn’t just the model of a vessel that burned, it was a grotesque caricature of human suffering, complete with mannequins in lifejackets and banners declaring “stop the boats” and “veterans before refugees”. This wasn’t a protest or a critique of policy. It was an act of cruelty, a display designed to mock those who risk everything in search of safety.
There is nothing brave or patriotic about setting fire to the image of a refugee. It takes no courage to taunt the voiceless, no principle to kick the powerless. What we saw was not tradition, but hatred dressed up as community expression. And we must call it what it is.
Because when people burn effigies of migrants, they are not arguing with a government, they are waging war on empathy.
We need to be absolutely clear about who these people are and why they come here, because the myths being peddled by those who defend this behaviour are not only dishonest, they are dangerous.
Refugees are not drawn to the UK by the promise of benefits or a better standard of living. They are driven here by war, persecution, violence and fear. Many have fled regimes that torture, imprison or kill without trial. Others have escaped from countries ravaged by conflict, where bombs fall daily and children grow up never knowing peace. The journeys they make are not easy. They involve crossing multiple borders, risking their lives in dangerous terrain and, all too often, putting themselves at the mercy of smugglers and traffickers. These are not the actions of people looking for an easy life. These are the actions of people desperate to survive.
Despite what some would have you believe, there is no clear or accessible “queue” that refugees can simply join. The UK’s legal routes are vanishingly narrow, with tightly capped resettlement programmes and bureaucratic obstacles that leave thousands in limbo. Even those with family already in Britain often find themselves shut out due to arbitrary rules and slow-moving systems. When people board boats to cross the Channel, it’s usually not because they want to break the law, it’s because they have no other safe route left.
The claim that they should stay in France or another European country might sound reasonable on the surface, but it crumbles under scrutiny. Many refugees do stay in France; in fact, France receives far more asylum applications than the UK. However, those who continue onwards often do so because they speak English, have relatives here, or feel a cultural connection that offers a better chance of rebuilding their lives. The camps in places like Calais and Dunkirk are not safe havens, they are sites of repeated police violence, squalid conditions, and crushing hopelessness. No one chooses to live there. No one chooses a boat over a bed unless they truly believe it is the only way forward.
What’s broken is not the will of the refugees, but the systems meant to protect them. In Britain today, asylum seekers are often housed in hotels for months or even years, unable to work and forced into isolation while their cases grind through a slow, underfunded process. This isn’t just inhumane; it’s inefficient and costly. And yet rather than invest in a fairer, faster system, our government and its outriders have chosen to weaponise this failure, blaming those with the least power instead of those with the most responsibility.
It must be said again and again: refugees are not a burden. They are not statistics, or slogans, or threats. They are people, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who had lives, jobs, homes, and hopes before they were forced to leave them behind. Given the chance, they rebuild. They work. They contribute. They enrich the communities they join. They become our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues. And as a country that once led the drafting of the Refugee Convention, we have both a legal duty and a moral responsibility to offer them protection and dignity.
What happened in Moygashel is part of a wider sickness: a political culture that treats cruelty as strength and compassion as weakness. If we allow that logic to win, we lose far more than just a sense of decency, we lose who we are as a society.
So let’s be clear. Burning an effigy of a migrant boat does nothing to improve our border system. It doesn’t help veterans, and it certainly doesn’t honour them. It achieves only one thing: it tells those fleeing war and persecution that they are not welcome, not valued, and not safe. That is not the country I believe in, and it should not be the country we become.
If you want to push back against this cruelty, support groups like Care4Calais and the Refugee Council. Share their work. Donate if you can. Speak up when others fall silent. And never let the far right speak for you.
Because Britain should be better than this. And together, we can make sure it is.
