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Refugee Crisis: PM Appears To Bow To Pressure

Refugee Crisis: PM Appears To Bow To Pressure

It has been the most shocking image of Europe's summer migration crisis so far.

And now the harrowing photo of Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach, which provoked an international outcry, appears to have moved David Cameron to bow to pressure to act.

The Prime Minister is poised to announce – possibly during talks with the Prime Ministers of Spain and Portugal in the coming hours - that Britain will respond to demands to take more refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war by announcing that the UK will accept thousands more.

Details of the numbers, funding and planned location where they will be accommodated are being urgently thrashed out in Whitehall, in talks between Government departments, local authority leaders and aid agencies.

Explaining the rethink, which follows Mr Cameron’s claim 24 hours earlier that "taking more and more refugees" was not the answer, a senior Government insider told Sky News: "The PM said today in his interview that we'd taken thousands already and will take thousands more.

"The PM said yesterday and repeated today that we're reviewing the position, which you can take as a steer that we're looking at what more can be done."

In his latest TV interview on the migration crisis, which followed publication on TV news bulletins and newspaper front pages of young Aylan cradled by a Turkish police officer, Mr Cameron said: "Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey.

"Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfil our moral responsibilities."

The Prime Minister added: "We are taking thousands of Syrian refugees and we will continue to do that. As I said yesterday, we keep that under review."

It is understood the refugees that will come to the UK will be drawn from the UNHCR camps on the border of Syria.

It is not expected the UK will allow the number to be as high as tens of thousands, as senior Labour politicians have proposed.

The refugees will be brought to the UK under an existing Home Office vulnerable person relocation scheme administered in conjunction with the UNHCR that resettles Syrians placed in camps on the Syrian border.

Only 200 have been taken by the UK under this scheme so far.

Mr Cameron believes accepting large numbers of Syrian refugees who are already in Europe will make the crisis worse and encourage more chaos, since it will only incentivise more people to undertake the risky journey from the Middle East.

Besides bowing to public opinion, the Prime Minister has also faced calls from a growing number of Conservative MPs, as well as Labour leadership contenders Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and the acting Labour leader Harriet Harman.

Had he not backed down from his earlier defiance, Mr Cameron would have faced enormous pressure from MPs of all parties when the House of Commons meets for the first time after its summer recess next week.

Another consideration in Mr Cameron’s U-turn is that in recent days several European leaders have warned him his intransigence over the refugee crisis risked damaging his attempts to re-negotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU ahead of Britain’s in-out referendum.