When I first saw the story
about Priti Patel having considered putting a wave machine in the English
Channel to drive dinghies back to France, my instinctive reaction was to check the
date, forgetting that under the present UK government April Fool’s Day has become,
to coin a phrase, more of a long drawn-out process than an event. The proposal runs
against international law, of course. (There are no international waters in the
channel; all boats are either in French territory or in UK territory. Attacking
them in the former constitutes an act of war, and once they cross into the latter,
the UK is legally responsible for their safety.) But, as we have seen, mere
legality is no longer an important factor for a rogue state like the UK. It’s
one of a number of bizarre proposals to have been considered, including
shipping asylum seekers to an island in the South Atlantic, or to Morocco, Moldova,
or Papua New Guinea. Why spend a small amount of money on providing people with
the basics whilst their asylum applications are processed when we can spend a
vast amount of additional money building new facilities and shipping people to
far distant places as well as providing those basics? Johnson has always had a
bit of a penchant for grands
projets (see garden bridges,
Boris
Island, and implausible
bridges) which never come to anything. It’s more to do with image than
substance; in this case being seen to be tough on immigrants.
And that brings me to the use of an old
army camp at Penally to house asylum seekers. I know Penally reasonably well
(during three election campaigns, I reckon to have knocked just about every
door in the village), and it is not well-served with facilities able to cope
with a sudden unplanned increment in the population. On the other hand, the
wider area does cope with a large seasonal increase in population every summer (with
the obvious exception of 2020), so it should not be as large a problem as it’s
been painted as long as it is properly planned and executed (a wholly unrealistic
expectation of Patel and Johnson in itself, of course). I don’t know enough
about the conditions at the camp to know whether they’re suitable for the
purpose, but reports suggest that they really are not. The bigger question is
whether it is, in any event, appropriate to treat people like “cattle in a
holding pen” as Nicola
Sturgeon put it in response to a suggestion that remote Scottish Islands
were also on the list of possible sites for an offshore processing facility.
She thinks not, and I entirely agree. It’s dehumanising and inhumane.
Whatever, even if the conditions and
facilities were entirely suitable, I suspect that many of those objecting would
still do so. And lest anyone think that I’m being unkind to the good citizens
of Penally here, I believe that that statement would probably apply to any and
every town and village across the UK; people will object to having refugees in
their patch and would find other ‘valid reasons’ to oppose it. I’d like to
believe that it’s not a majority view, but I have little choice but to accept
that it’s the view of a substantial minority at the least. It’s easy enough to
blame the politicians who have planted the idea that we should reject refugees
(and I do blame them) or the tabloids for stoking anti-immigrant feelings (and,
yes, I do blame them as well), but we cannot merely shrug off the fact that a
substantial number of our fellow citizens harbour some very dark views when it
comes to refugees. They are content, and in some cases even enthusiastic, to
see refugees go without the basics, be sent ‘back’ without due process, be separated
from society, be demonised, and even, as Sturgeon characterised it, ‘treated like cattle’.
That doesn’t reflect well on any of us.
Those dark views, I suspect, are what lies
behind the wild proposals floated by Downing Street and the Home Office. And they
certainly explain why some of the Tories’ top advisers are delighted
about the leak. From their perspective, it gives the impression that the
government are serious about ‘cracking down’ on immigration. For their target
audience, it’s not something that makes the government look positively deranged,
but something which plays to their prejudices. When the ideas are eventually
rejected, it won’t be because they are downright silly, impractical, or horrendously
costly, it will be because the mythical ‘metropolitan elite’ is frustrating the
government’s wish to take firm action and putting obstacles in their way. I don’t
know how large the substantial minority to which I referred above actually is,
but given that the UK’s distorted electoral system only requires that a party
receive the support of 30-35% of the electorate to obtain a clear majority in
parliament, we should not underestimate the electoral value to Johnson’s Tories
of appealing to that minority.
Deliberately treating a particular group as
somehow less than human and undeserving of the same rights as the rest of us carries
very unfortunate echoes of the past. That it is being normalised, and that so
many of our fellow citizens support it enthusiastically, shows how easily a
society can slip into inhumanity, just in case we’d forgotten that lesson from
history. We are being led into a very dark place, and the route out is far from
clear to me.
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