Silly racism season.
The silly season is descending, although frankly it's getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between the dog days of late July and August, and well, almost any other time of year. Apparently, "bitchy resting face ... makes Gangnam Style look like a slow burner", at least according to Hadley Freeman, and yet somehow I had avoided encountering this cultural phenomenon until she elected to write about it. Beards have also reached their fashionable peak, doncha know, and in what seems to be an extraordinarily late April 1st joke, Kerry Katona is to be Marilyn Monroe. Presumably alongside Peter Andre as JFK. Oh, and Guido Fawkes, he of repeatedly declaring he can't be sued fame, threatens to sue Claire Perry. Perry we've already established is a dangerous nincompoop, while Paul Staines is just a hypocritical tool.
Is there anything even vaguely serious going on then? Well, sort of. Coming from the same great minds behind the idea of putting up "adverts" pointing out how shit Britain is in Bulgaria and Romania (while at the same time declaring how great we are everywhere else), one of those billboard vans is being sent round six London boroughs telling illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest". Why, we'll even be kind enough to help you with your travel documents, and we'll tell the immigration officers not to "Mubenga" you, as long as you come along quietly, of course. Who wouldn't have their head turned by such a tempting offer?
Understandably, quite a few people are suggesting this is just a teensy bit racist. On its own, it isn't. There aren't that many pithy formulations you could put together that are simple to understand and carry the same message. I mean, they could have gone with "In the UK illegally and want to leave?", but that doesn't carry the same element of menace all rhetoric on immigration must now have. "Go home" though carries decades of baggage with it; it wasn't just a National Front slogan as Sunny says, go home (or words to the same effect) is still one of the first resorts for racists, regardless of who it's used against. "Go back to where you came from", even if you were born here and so were your parents; your skin colour doesn't fit.
When a government is reduced to such, err, dog-whistling, it ought to be apparent that it's in trouble. One thing the Tories remain terrified by is the likely failure to keep their promise to get immigration down to the "tens of thousands" by the time of the next election. Almost all the decline we've seen under the coalition has come as a result of the crackdown on overseas students, those grasping, scrounging bastards who come here, take almost nothing out and put hell of a lot in (is this right? Ed.). Hence this year, as well as being partially in response to the rise of UKIP, we've seen further punitive policy proposals, including the ridiculous prospect of landlords being asked to do the job of the UK Border Force, as though making illegal immigrants homeless is something approaching a solution. Sarah Teather made clear just how far the Tories would like to go when she revealed the "Inter Ministerial Group on Migrants' Access to Benefits and Public Services" was first known as the "Hostile Environment Working Group".
As pointed out before, this is a great example of how the new politics works. Politicians say they're listening to concerns, they talk tough and tighten the rules ever further, and then act surprised and chastened when the mood against immigrants hardens as the numbers stubbornly refuse to fall precisely because freedom of movement is clearly here to stay. Rather than confront voters with a few facts and ask them if they like being able to move freely around Europe even if they don't want to at this precise moment, we just get ever more discriminatory rhetoric. Once, that the government was paying for adverts which contained allusions to the racist slogans of years gone by would have caused a storm. That it hasn't shows both how the Tories have succeeded and why they will also end up being hoist by that petard.
Is there anything even vaguely serious going on then? Well, sort of. Coming from the same great minds behind the idea of putting up "adverts" pointing out how shit Britain is in Bulgaria and Romania (while at the same time declaring how great we are everywhere else), one of those billboard vans is being sent round six London boroughs telling illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest". Why, we'll even be kind enough to help you with your travel documents, and we'll tell the immigration officers not to "Mubenga" you, as long as you come along quietly, of course. Who wouldn't have their head turned by such a tempting offer?
Understandably, quite a few people are suggesting this is just a teensy bit racist. On its own, it isn't. There aren't that many pithy formulations you could put together that are simple to understand and carry the same message. I mean, they could have gone with "In the UK illegally and want to leave?", but that doesn't carry the same element of menace all rhetoric on immigration must now have. "Go home" though carries decades of baggage with it; it wasn't just a National Front slogan as Sunny says, go home (or words to the same effect) is still one of the first resorts for racists, regardless of who it's used against. "Go back to where you came from", even if you were born here and so were your parents; your skin colour doesn't fit.
When a government is reduced to such, err, dog-whistling, it ought to be apparent that it's in trouble. One thing the Tories remain terrified by is the likely failure to keep their promise to get immigration down to the "tens of thousands" by the time of the next election. Almost all the decline we've seen under the coalition has come as a result of the crackdown on overseas students, those grasping, scrounging bastards who come here, take almost nothing out and put hell of a lot in (is this right? Ed.). Hence this year, as well as being partially in response to the rise of UKIP, we've seen further punitive policy proposals, including the ridiculous prospect of landlords being asked to do the job of the UK Border Force, as though making illegal immigrants homeless is something approaching a solution. Sarah Teather made clear just how far the Tories would like to go when she revealed the "Inter Ministerial Group on Migrants' Access to Benefits and Public Services" was first known as the "Hostile Environment Working Group".
As pointed out before, this is a great example of how the new politics works. Politicians say they're listening to concerns, they talk tough and tighten the rules ever further, and then act surprised and chastened when the mood against immigrants hardens as the numbers stubbornly refuse to fall precisely because freedom of movement is clearly here to stay. Rather than confront voters with a few facts and ask them if they like being able to move freely around Europe even if they don't want to at this precise moment, we just get ever more discriminatory rhetoric. Once, that the government was paying for adverts which contained allusions to the racist slogans of years gone by would have caused a storm. That it hasn't shows both how the Tories have succeeded and why they will also end up being hoist by that petard.
Labels: Bulgaria-Romania accession to EU, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Conservatives, EU, immigration, politics, racism, silly season
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