Merkel is right to impose restrictions on migrants

It has become increasingly clear that David Cameron was one of the key EU leaders who called the response to the refugee crisis correctly.

The prime minister insisted on taking migrants from camps close to Syria.

His German counterpart Angela Merkel in contrast made a disastrous blunder in saying that her country would take a million of the desperate people who are fleeing Syria. This sounded generous and was unfavourably contrasted with British ‘meanness’, but merely worsened the flood of people risking their lives to travel in rafts from Turkey to Greece.

And there was another factor too: no-one has dared to say that it is acceptable for host countries to defend their own core values. Imagine if Christians flooded into Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and then activists demanded that those nations respect their Christianity at once, and on a par with their Islamic traditions. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they would not get so far as entrance.

As the former Australian leader Tony Abbott, who was tough with immigration, has said, civilisations such as his country have taken centuries to build up, and millennia in the case of European countries. The notion that we can withstand vast numbers of people from alien cultures at a stroke without any difficulty whatsoever is naive.

Britain has a responsibility to its own long-term unemployed at a time when we want to help such people off welfare.

There is also no point pretending that the fact of hundreds of British jihadis and widespread ambivalence among UK Muslims towards Islamic terror (27 per cent had some sympathy with the motives behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a BBC Radio Four survey found) has helped foster the sense that this is the time for a fresh wave of Islamic immigration.

Ms Merkel is entirely right to propose stricter laws on asylum seekers after foreigners abused European hospitality by taking part in sexual assaults in Cologne on new year’s eve.