A manufactured refugee “crisis” with more than one goal

We are witnessing an all-out ideological assault on asylum seekers arriving on perilous boat journeys across the Channel, by ministers of a government out of control. This manufactured “crisis” has been deliberately pushed centre stage. Soundbites from the Prime Minister and Home Secretary provide the headlines for a mostly compliant media.

One of the most chilling moments in the build up of this “crisis” came in the mid-January this year. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who vowed to continue where Priti Patel had left off, was challenged at a meeting in her constituency by Joan Salter, a child Holocaust survivor, who accused her of using dangerous and demonising language about refugees.

Salter was not hyperbolic in her manner. She did not accuse Braverman of plotting mass murder of refugees, but said clearly and calmly that Braverman was deploying dehumanising language and rhetoric about an “invasion” by refugees that was reminiscent of that used in Nazi Germany towards those it targeted and scapegoated as the cause of the problems faced by “ordinary Germans”.

There was no trace of empathy in Braverman’s response to this Holocaust survivor, nor even a flicker of recognition of what Joan Salter’s family’s experiences were like, and what her early years might have consisted of. Just a cold-hearted denial of what she took as an impertinent and unjust accusation against the government’s policy. Over the next few days Braverman demonstrated her determination to double down on her initial cold-hearted response.

In essence, Gary Lineker made the same charge, but with the added knowledge of how much worse the rhetoric had got in recent weeks, not only from Braverman, but from a coterie of other extreme right-wing Tories since that exchange with Salter, and how this had breathed new life into the splintered far right groups who have been taking to the streets and inciting others to do so near the hotels where refugees are currently accommodated around the country.

If I were Braverman I would have found that face-to-face confrontation with Joan Salter discomfiting to say the least. Now she and her defenders, among her closest colleagues, are throwing rhetorical grenades in response to… well let’s be clear what she is actually facing… a tweet, a few typed words expressing an opinion on social media albeit from a Twitter user with a considerable following and media profile. The big guns among very right-wing journalists have been running to her defence, angry at those who make any analogies with Nazi Germany, and angry at “left wing lawyers”, who seem to be simply doing their jobs of defending human rights.

These right wing commentators take any reference to Nazi Germany to mean gas chambers at Auschwitz between 1942-44 in the context of World War. Both Salter and Lineker were clearly referring to the increasingly vicious and repressive policies and processes that were enacted within Germany in the 1930s, against a targeted minority that other Germans were encouraged to shun and to hate. Lineker’s employers, the BBC, want to discipline him for expressing his personal and widely shared opinions.

In 1930s Germany, while a Nazi government in was stripping rights away from a tiny minority of its citizens – around 0.7% – labelling and blaming them for every social, political and economic problem, and using increasingly dehumanising language to do so, a fascist ideologue here in Britain, called Oswald Mosley was building a street army that was menacing Britain’s Jewish population, especially in their heartland of London’s East End. 

His dream, openly stated, was of running a government in this country that was “unencumbered by a daily opposition”. His assault was on democracy as much as on the Jews. It is shameful – and depressing – that Labour, the largest opposition party, has decided to argue the issue, as on Priti Patel’s Rwanda Plan first promoted several months ago, not on questions of the human rights of those demonised, nor with a call to foster humanitarian instincts in the population to counter the growing rhetoric of incitement, but on competence, cost, workability and efficiency. They complain the government is not turning away more boats, more quickly, and, like Sunak’s government, they make sure they talk about “boats” not “human beings”.

I took issue with Emily Thornberry on that dangerous terrain of Twitter the other night. She  had tweeted that “We need an asylum policy that is firm, fair and fast, not this latest Tory bill which solves nothing.” I replied: “Think you forgot the word ‘humanitarian’, and forgot to describe refugees as human beings with rights – not just a ‘problem’ to be dealt with.”

Inside parliament it was left to the SNP’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, to ask PM Sunak “from whom are his government taking inspiration, Nigel Farage or Enoch Powell?”

I am not a fan of politics by analogy but I am glad that Gary Lineker wrote his tweet, echoing the points about the demonising and dehumanising rhetoric from the Home Secretary that Joan Salter had made with reference to the Nazi government in 1930s Germany. Keir Starmer and his shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have predictably distanced themselves from Lineker’s tweet. The most cynical condemnations of Lineker, though, have been from a few Tory ministers, who have made it known that they are descended from family members directly affected by Nazism. Somehow that self-awareness did not prevent them from being willing to serve in Tory administrations that proudly proclaimed their record in building a “Hostile Environment” for refugees (a system that was also responsible for the Windrush Scandal that devastated the lives of many Caribbean families and deported individuals to destitution and early death in the Caribbean)

And, although the Tories have withdrawn Britain from the EU, their party representatives continue to be active in a grouping within the Council of Europe that they dominate together with Poland’s ultra-nationalist and authoritarian Law and Justice party. This grouping includes several parties known for their far right inclinations. Members of those parties have indulged in Islamophobic, anti-Roma, homophobic, and antisemitic rhetoric. I have yet to hear condemnation of those Tory associations from the likes of Grant Shapps or Robert Jenrick who have invoked their families’ suffering under Nazism to attack Lineker.

Lineker’s comments are also timely for an additional reason because what we currently have here in Britain is a Tory government that seems hell-bent on blurring what has usually (though not always) been a clear line separating right-wing conservatism from right wing authoritarianism and fascism. And they are not alone. In Poland, Hungary, Italy, India, Israel, we can see those lines being similarly blurred. Domestically, the Tories demonising rhetoric against refugees is of a piece with their authoritarian plans on policing and sentencing and their desired crackdown on protest, especially protests involving environmental and Black Lives Matter concerns.

If I have any criticism of Lineker’s references to Nazi Germany it is that he could have added that, through the 1930s, right wingers here in Britain both on the Tory benches in Parliament and in the more rabid right-wing press, were complicit in shielding from criticism and even praising Hitler’s Germany, openly expressing antisemitic sentiments, and demonising Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who sought sanctuary from it in the late 1930s. The Sunday Express in June 1938 said that Jews were “over-running the country”. The Hampstead Advertiser condemned Jews allegedly ‘smuggled into the country without passports who set themselves up in business… from the sale of dope”. Meanwhile the Daily Mail, which ran a gushing feature in the summer of 1933 about the new Nazi regime, under the heading “Youth Triumphant”, which praised how it had cleansed Germany from its “alien elements” in government, ended the decade with a headline: “German Jews pouring into the country”.

Next month, no doubt, there will be representatives of our Conservative government, rubbing shoulders with many other very right wing leaders in Warsaw, where there will be ceremonies marking the 80^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an incredibly heroic campaign by hundreds of starved young people aged between 13 and 43 (most in their 20s) that held out for nearly a month against a mighty armed force. I hope those that attend will take a moment to ask themselves what kind of a world those young people were fighting for. In their own words, it was a world of dignity, freedom and humanity.