Today, just like every day, he’s beaming out his poisoned message. The High Court has ruled that asylum seekers can no longer be housed at the Bell Hotel in Epping. Farage pressed the advantage with a column in The Daily Telegraph demanding even more protests outside migrant hotels.
After a summer in which the most obscene innuendo and outright falsity have been reported straight-faced by the right-wing press, let’s have a moment of contact with reality.
Asylum seekers are not synonymous with sexual offenders. There is no evidence to show that asylum seekers commit more crimes than the general population – or that they commit more sexual offences.
This is the ancient, vicious fear, the blood-soaked paranoia, whipped up by Robert Jenrick when he warns of “mediaeval attitudes” and says: “I care more for my daughters’ safety than the rights of foreign criminals”. It’s the terror-fog that Farage seeks to spread when he warns that people “do not want their young women being abused and assaulted on the streets”. It is the lowest form of anti-migrant propaganda. If they had the slightest trace of decency within them they would hold their heads in shame.
They are the consequence of policy decisions which were adopted to please the critics of asylum. If they had one scintilla of self-awareness, a bat-squeak of responsibility, they would recognise their own culpability in the situation as it stands.
This was supposed to appease the anti-refugee voices in the press, who said asylum seekers took British jobs. Of course, it did no such thing. What this policy in fact achieved was to make asylum seekers entirely dependent on the state. It trapped them, sometimes for years, in bureaucratic limbo, living on the pittance we offer them, stuck in a half-life without the meaning which work offers or the material dignity which a wage provides.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and we are still having the same godforsaken conversation we were having then. The last Conservative government grew so hostile to asylum seekers it simply stopped processing the claims. They insisted this would reduce the “pull factor”. This is never true and wasn’t true then. Instead, the backlog grew. As the numbers spiralled out of control, they started using hotels as accommodation. And now here we are.
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For all Labour’s faults, it is at least trying to fix this problem. It has been worse than useless in the public debate – failing to challenge anti-refugee rhetoric and in fact encouraging it. But the Home Office is at least processing the claims. It has committed to ending the use of hotels by the end of Parliament.
There is another story we can tell, if we’re brave enough to stand up and do so. It is that most asylum seekers are genuine. This is a fact, not an opinion, which we know by virtue of the acceptance rate at initial decision and appeal.
They are fleeing some of the most terrible conditions it is possible to imagine. Britain can handle the numbers we receive, which are lower than for other comparable European countries. And we should damn well do so, if we still remember what it is to be kind, and decent, and motivated by empathy rather than suspicion.
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