Imagine Italy took the Chequers approach to refugee redistribution. It would say “every country must take migrants off our hands, and we’ll say how many. You won’t have alternative or any control over the process we use to allocate it and we’ll be the judges
of whether you’ve done enough, for ever. We’ve had a negotiation in Italy about it, now you have to do it.” How would Britain (which has done next to nothing to help Italy) feel about that?
It’s such a lunatic position that even *this* Italian government isn’t trying it, and Italy’s moral claim for support with refugees is far greater than Britain’s moral claim on the single market.
Originally posted as a thread of 3 tweets on Twitter on 22 September 2018. View the original thread.