David Cameron should prepare himself for TV footage of refugees lying dead in the snow this Christmas, the Liberal Democrats' leader has warned. Tim Farron said the prime minister's reaction to the refugee crisis engulfing Europe was "inhuman" and made Britain look "irrelevant" on the world stage.
He was speaking to BuzzFeed News ahead of a two-day trip to the Greek island of Lesbos, where thousands of desperate refugees are arriving from Turkey every day on flimsy dinghies. Farron warned that as the weather worsened across Europe this winter, the experience of families fleeing conflict in the Middle East would "become just tragic and unbearable".
He said: "Frankly, to David Cameron I would say: You think the TV pictures are bad now. Just you wait till you get closer to Christmas, and people’s minds turn to goodwill towards all mankind, and we see families dying in the snow that we could have helped."
Unprecedented numbers of refugees are making their way through Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans, trying to reach northern European countries before the winter hits. Many are fleeing conflict in Syria. Farron said Britain needed to "take the pressure off what is an incredibly hard-pressed bottleneck" to prevent a "humanitarian crisis which dwarfs even the hideous situation we can see now".
Some 670,000 people have streamed into Europe so far this year, the biggest such displacement since World War II. Cameron has pledged that Britain will take 20,000 refugees over the next five years from camps on the borders of Syria.
Farron suggested that the government was hoping the British people would get bored by horrific images of the refugee crisis like that of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned in September. "I’m afraid people who don’t want us to take action are banking upon people getting compassion and outrage fatigue," he said.
He accused the prime minister of "turning his back" on the world's most desperate people and on Britain's European neighbours. He said Cameron was helping to feed a "rather dangerous" anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe and undermining his chances of securing a good deal ahead of the upcoming referendum on the UK's membership of the EU.
"This is just bad statesmanship by David Cameron as well as being inhuman," Farron said. "It’s not only wrong from a moral point of view, I think it's damaging to his personal standing. And it massively undermines his ability to renegotiate anything worth having because, frankly, many heads of government won’t give him the time of day.
"You see across Europe now there are groups feeding on a kind of anti-immigrant sentiment, from the Swedish Democrats to the Freedom party in Austria. The reality is when our government refuses to be involved in the grown-up management of the crisis then it leads to a rather dangerous range of opinion coming to the fore."
Farron is flying to Lesbos on Monday to speak to refugees and the volunteers who are helping them find shelter. "I think, although that will be genuinely harrowing, what I want to do is see it myself," he said.
"If nothing else, it motivates me to keep going on the issue, to remind myself there are people just like us who have experienced horrific situations and they’ve fled from them."