A noxious brew
Polly Toynbee on the ugly climate in the UK right now:
There are many decent people involved in the campaign to secure Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, many who respect the referendum as the exercise in democracy that it is. But there are others whose recklessness has been open and shocking. I believe they bear responsibility, not for the attack itself, but for the current mood: for the inflammatory language, for the finger-jabbing, the dogwhistling and the overt racism.
It’s been part of a noxious brew, with a dangerous anti-politics and anti-MP stereotypes fomented by leave and their media backers mixed in. Only an hour before this shooting Nigel Farage unveiled a huge poster showing Syrian refugees fleeing to Slovenia last year, nothing to do with EU free movement – and none arriving here. Leave’s poster read: “Breaking Point. We must break free from the EU and take control of our borders.” Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas and many others condemned it as “disgusting”, and so it is.
Nigel Farage and the leavers there, Donald Trump and his fans here. It’s a bad time.
Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the leavers have lifted several stones. How recklessly the decades of careful work and anti-racist laws to make those sentiments unacceptable have been overturned.
This campaign has stirred up anti-migrant sentiment that used to be confined to outbursts from the far fringes of British politics. The justice minister, Michael Gove, and the leader of the house, Chris Grayling – together with former London mayor Boris Johnson – have allied themselves to divisive anti-foreigner sentiment ramped up to a level unprecedented in our lifetime. Ted Heath expelled Enoch Powell from the Tory front ranks for it. Oswald Mosley was ejected from his party for it. Gove and Grayling remain in the cabinet.
When politicians from a mainstream party use immigration as their main weapon in a hotly fought campaign, they unleash something dark and hateful that in all countries always lurks not far beneath the surface.
It’s not Godzilla or T Rex or witches or zombies. It’s just humans, being humans.
When I moved from the UK to the US, several years ago, I was genuinely shocked at the amount of open racism I saw from just people on the street right up through the rhetoric of politicians. I was appalled and admittedly a little complacent – I didn’t think the UK was some racism-free utopia, but it seemed considerably better by comparison.
The EU referendum campaign has opened my eyes to a seething morass of racial animosity that apparently was right there beneath the surface the whole time. It’s horrifying – what has happened to my country of birth in the years since I moved away? I hadn’t even planned to vote in the referendum since I’m living in the US permanently and have no plans to return to the UK to live. So it seemed perhaps I should just let the people who actually do live there to make that decision.
The campaign changed my mind, and I have now voted Remain. I actually do think we are better off in Europe than out. But even if I did not, I could not stand idly by and let racists and demagogues annex and corrupt democracy into an exercise in beating up Johnny Foreigner.
Maybe I feel it acutely because I myself am a foreigner now, and know something of the challenges that face a person who decides to emigrate. And I’m ‘lucky’ to be white and come from a country my adopted nation has a very favorable view of, so I don’t face the kind of crap that some immigrants encounter.
Maybe the Donald Trump effect has thrown it all into sharp relief. But I barely recognize the Britain where an MP can be assassinated in the street, where campaigners can stand up and say blatantly racist things or where images of refugees fleeing for their lives can be turned into a fear-baiting poster about intra-European movement of people.
[…] a comment by Claire on A noxious […]
Doesn’t Boris Johnson have a long record of chumminess with Islamist creeps? Parochial politics trumps any trace of moral integrity…right across the board.