The Tories blew the dog whistle… and the attack hounds came running.
We were only one week into the school summer holidays when tragedy struck in Stockport and three little girls were senselessly murdered.
Rumors spread online that the attacker was a recently arrived asylum seeker, and a Muslim to boot. This was not true, 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana was born in Cardiff and lived near Southport. But the facts don’t matter when you are stirring up an angry mob. Groups of young white men came from miles around to attack a local Mosque near to the murder scene.
That was all the spark that was needed to start the fire of days of racially motivated street violence that raged up and down the country.
Riots followed in London, Manchester, Southport, Hartlepool and Sunderland, as far afield as Belfast and Plymouth, many of which saw mosques and other Muslim religious buildings targeted.
Different cities, different perpetrators, but the overall theme remained the same. White working-class men, often draped with England flags (as if they are representing their nation), angry that their country is being taken over by illegal immigrants/asylum seekers, or even the Muslims that have been in here for decades. The details didn’t matter to them — the fact is that these non-white people are growing too plentiful and they want their country back.
Much attention has been paid to the ‘mindless thugs’ who would defile the memory of those three little girls by vandalising mosques, setting hotels on fire and attacking the police, while at the same time claiming to be upholding British values. But I don’t blame them — they are just the foot soldiers; the stormtroopers; the dumb masses; the attack dogs. But who are the dog handlers? This level of hatred and anger didn’t just pop up overnight. Who was really behind this nationwide civil unrest? Is it founder of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson, directing operations while safely holed up in a hotel in Cyprus? Or could it be more sinister Russian cyber-bots, deliberately spreading mis-information on line to stoke unrest and de-stabilize the country? No, I think we can look closer to home for the answer. I blame the Tories.
I blame the Tories.
To be more specific, continued Tory Home Secretaries who for years now have been stoking anti-immigrant hate.
Theresa May and the Hostile Environment
In 2012, the former Prime Minister, then Home Secretary launched a policy designed to make life in the UK as difficult as possible for people without ‘leave to remain’, which helped foster a culture of suspicion of anyone who looked foreign. This involved forcing landlords, banks and even charities to refuse service to anyone who couldn’t prove they had the right to stay in the UK. It fostered a culture of suspicion of anyone who looked foreign. And May fuelled this by sending out vans with “GO HOME” signs through neighbourhoods. She also oversaw the Windrush Scandal which saw people of Caribbean origin being threatened with deportation despite having lived and worked in this country for decades.
To avoid accusations of racism the Tories then began a policy of pushing their ethnically diverse MPs to the fore to enact their most right-wing policies.
When the focus was not on brown skinned people’s right to remain in the country, it was on their criminal tendencies. In 2018 May’s successor as Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered a probe into the ethnic origins of child sexual abuse gangs, saying that establishing the “particular characteristics” of the perpetrators was “critical to our understanding” of why men convicted of grooming-gang sex crimes are “disproportionately of Pakistani origin”.
MPs said they were “alarmed by the similarities in cases across the country” and called for research into “common patterns of behaviour” in towns and cities including Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Blackpool, Keighley, Telford, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Middlesbrough and Newcastle upon Tyne.
The trope was stoked in the media. Just as in the 70s Black men were portrayed as muggers, rapists and drug dealers, now in the 00’s Pakistani men were portrayed as sexual predators, targeting innocent young white girls. It is perhaps due to paying such attention to the sexual crimes of Black and Brown men that the country’s news rooms failed to notice those sex offenders that sat among them for decades like Jimmy Saville, and most recently Hugh Edwards.
It is interesting to note that these same ‘patriots’ so keen to ‘protect our girls’ did not march on the BBC when it was discovered that one of their highest paid presenters had images of child sexual abuse on his phone. Perhaps because it didn’t fit in with their larger narrative of predatory Asian gangs.
Priti Patel and the Rwanda Scheme.
Priti Patel served as Home Secretary between 2019 and 2022. She is the child of Gujarati Indian parents who fled to the UK from Uganda just before Idi Amin’s decision to deport all Asians. But despite the kindness shown to her family in their time of need, she wanted no such kindness shown to others in a similar situation today.
She vowed to make the Channel “unviable” for migrant boats and in October 2020, in a speech about the UK asylum system, Patel lambasted those she termed “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers” for “defending the indefensible”.
In April 2022, she announced her Rwanda plan through which channel migrants would be transported to Africa. The government said that any asylum seeker entering the UK “illegally” from a safe country such as France, could be sent to Rwanda. They would have their asylum claims processed there, rather than in the UK. If successful, they could be granted refugee status and allowed to stay in Rwanda and if not, they could apply to settle in Rwanda on other grounds, or seek asylum in another “safe third country”. No asylum seeker would be able to apply to return to the UK.
The UK government had paid £240m to Rwanda by the end of 2023. If more than 300 people were sent to Rwanda, the UK would pay a one-off sum of £120m to help boost the country’s economy, with further payments of £20,000 per individual relocated. On top of that, up to £150,000 would be paid for each person sent there.
Despite the crazy economics of the scheme, the government argued that the real benefit would be as a deterrent. They argued that once it became clear to those leaving from France, that they had no chance of gaining asylum in Britain and would end up in Africa, they would simply give up and go somewhere else.
Suella Braverman and floating prisons
Not to be outdone, Patels’ successor Suella Braverman’s enthusiasm for stopping migrants even stepping foot in the country, took almost cartoon-villain-like proportions, earning her the nickname ‘Cruella’. Braverman served as Home Secretary between September 2022 to November 2023. Her parents came to this country in the 1960s, from Kenya and Mauritius. But she clearly wanted to pull the ladder up behind her, saying in an interview that she dreamed of the planes full of migrants taking off to Rwanda.
Frustrated by the flights being delayed by legal challenges from ‘leftie lawyers’, she came up with a new scheme to deter asylum seekers — prison ships. Three storeys high and the length of a football pitch, the hulking grey Bibby Stockholm was the first vessel secured under Braverman’s plans to reduce the cost of asylum accommodation and provide a temporary home for about 500 male asylum seekers while they waited for their claims to be processed. Unfortunately for her, that scheme didn’t work either. Traces of Legionella bacteria were found in the barge’s on-board water system, just days after the first migrants boarded in August 2023. Welfare concerns were also sparked after Albanian migrant was found dead in his cabin — thought to have taken his own life.
The contract for the Bibby Stockholm barge, will not be renewed past January, the Home Office has now announced. Extending the use of the barge, which is moored off Portland, would have cost more than £20m next year.
Braverman’s dreams were never realised. Those flights to Rwanda never happened. She puts the 2024 Tory election massacre down to the party not getting a grip on immigration, and despite her high profile, chose not to stand for the Tory leadership, knowing that the party would not sign off on whatever extreme ideas she comes up with next to stop immigration of anyone with brown skin.
Ever since the Brexit referendum, the Tories have been creeping further and further to the right, to try and capture the disillusioned working class. Those who supported UKIP, and voted for Brexit, and most recently those who supported Reform Party. Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage have built entire careers by capturing and harnessing this resentment. And its so easy to do isn’t it?
Infact, let’s do it now. Come on down and let’s play the Blame An Immigrant game together…
· You can’t get a GP appointment? It’s because all these immigrants are clogging up the system.
· Can’t get your kids into the local school? Its because of these Muslims with their 4 and 5 kids per family.
· Can’t get a council house? It’s because the council are spending all their resources housing asylum seekers in luxury
· England’s football team lose the European Cup final? Its because those bloody darkies missed their penalties!!!!
No matter what your ailment in life, you can blame it on an immigrant — not the rich elites in power, but those fleeing poverty and persecution in search of a better life.
With their catchy three-word slogans like ‘Stop The Boats’, and ‘Take Back Control’, and their steady drip-feed of islamophobia, right-wing politicians and the media have dehumanised immigrants and asylum seekers, and as any historical example of genocide shows, once you dehumanise a group, it is easier to kill them.
So now we have a new Labour government. One of their first moves was to cancel the Rwanda scheme. And Kier Starmer has promised that all the rioters will face ‘the full force of the law’. (Difficult to see how he will do that, when the prisons are already full and there is a backlog of 1000s of cases in the courts.) But this is just addressing the symptom, (rioting) not the cause (Islamophobia and racism). When a dangerous dog bites someone, you punish the owner, not just the dog. What can be done to combat these years of negative propaganda? Is the Islamophobic genie already out of the bottle?
What the new government and the media really need to do is admit their complicity and to change the narrative. To admit that immigrants are not a burden, that they are actually good for this country.
The NHS is on its knees, not because of immigrants — it’s the immigrants who are holding it up, as anyone who has spent any time in hospital recently can attest. Around 265,000 out of 1.5 million staff reported a non-British nationality in June 2023, up from 220,000 a year earlier. This amounts to nearly one in five of NHS staff with a known nationality.
There are so few white English doctors or nurses, not because immigrants took their jobs, but because they have left the NHS to work abroad in US and Australia. NHS staff have been demanding better pay and conditions for years, but the Tories were too busy spending the money on ever more elaborate schemes to keep out immigrants. So now we rely on doctors and nurses from Asia.
And at the end of life, the people looking after your demented grandparents in the care home are also immigrants. About 19% of the care workforce is foreign, with most coming from Nigeria, India, Romania, Poland, the Philippines and Zimbabwe, according to 2023 data from Skills For Care. With median hourly pay of £10 according to Skills For Care, social care jobs are among the lowest-paid in Britain, with workers earning less than shop assistants.
Doing gruelling work with little pay in a challenging environment makes adult social care an unattractive career for most Britons.
CONCLUSION
Working people are struggling in this country, not because of the draining effect of immigrants, but because of the things governments choose to prioritise.
If you can’t get a council house, it’s not because asylum seekers took it. It’s because successive governments for the last 30 years have stopped building them, and passed on the responsibility of housing the population down to the free market.
On the contrary, without migrants this country would fall apart. And its been the case for the last 70 years. When the NHS was set up in 1949, it was staffed by people like my grandparents recruited from the Caribbean. A similar recruitment drive was held at the time by the Post Office and London Underground.
Without the income from foreign students, several UK universities would be forced to close.
The reason you can eat fresh fruit and vegetables 52 weeks of the year is because some farmer is employing migrant labour to do the back breaking work.
Immigrants are the reason you can get cooked food delivered to your door, 24 hours a day.
Its time we started being more honest. And if we want British jobs for British workers, then we have to start paying them internationally competitive wages. If working class people want their kids to get housing, then the government has to start building them. Burning down hotels, won’t help.
ENDS