It’s all he does. It’s all he’s ever done. Nigel Farage spreads hatred and fear. He takes the best human attributes – of compassion and charity – and makes them politically impossible.
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.
While we’re here, let’s do something which never really happens anymore in the asylum debate. Let’s tell the truth, for once in our lives.
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.
The people in that hotel are not “illegal immigrants”. They are asylum seekers. The Conservative government did a very good job convincing people to adopt this phrasing by making it a criminal offence to arrive in the UK irregularly. But people have a right to seek refugee status under the Refugee Convention, which Britain is a member of, and many asylum seekers do not even arrive in small boats. They make a claim while in the country on a valid visa. The phrase “illegal immigrants” is used to delegitimise people who need our help. To close off our hearts and our minds.
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.
Yet, the insistence that they are, by definition, a threat to women, is now seemingly accepted across the political landscape. It has been the cry of the xenophobe and the rabble-rouser since time immemorial: “They’re coming after our women.” It was the cornerstone of war propaganda throughout the 20th century. It was a key aspect of Nazi propaganda against Jews. It is a core element of Viktor Orban’s anti-migrant propaganda in Hungary.
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.
Migrant hotels are indeed a travesty. They are ruinous for everyone – for the asylum seekers, for the taxpayer, for the government, for those who defend the asylum system and those who oppose it. But we can use a good strong dollop of truth here too.
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.
Until 2002, we allowed asylum seekers to work if their case had not been resolved after six months. This is in line with many other Western countries – the US, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands – although harsher than many others. Tony Blair brought that system to an end when he banned asylum seekers working at any time in their application.
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.
Nor did it help anyone else. It cost the taxpayer money because it replaced a self-funding individual with a state-funded one and removed the tax revenue the Treasury would have received by virtue of their employment.
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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The hotels are not the result of our national generosity. They are the direct result of a series of irrational anti-refugee policies pursued by multiple governments, all in a desperate bid to keep Farage happy, which he never will be.
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.
Ministers are at least attempting to resolve the problem. All Farage ever does is exploit it. The fact that his voice is so prevalent in our national debate is a damning indictment of our political culture.
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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