2012 was our finest hour, what followed has been our worst
I CAN recall exactly where and when I felt most proud of the country I was born in.
The evening of July 27, 2012, in the London Stadium, watching Danny Boyle’s jaw-dropping Olympics opening ceremony, which ditched the usual jingoistic flaunting of our Empire-ruling history and told the world about another version of Britain that rarely makes the tourist biscuit tin lids.
It showcased this country’s humour, ingenuity, resistance, generosity and openness. We saw NHS nurses, suffragettes, CND protestors, punks, Jarrow marchers and the first wave of Commonwealth immigrants from the Caribbean marching behind a huge model of their ship, the Empire Windrush.
It made most of us feel good about living in a successful multi-cultural country, an emotion that exploded in that stadium the following Saturday when half-Jamaican Jessica Ennis and Somalian-born Mo Farah helped give British sport its proudest night.
Many on the right despised Boyle’s show, though. A Daily Telegraph report attracted 800 angry comments, the first of which read: “We don’t want that Marxist tripe vision of Britain.” And Tory MP Aidan Burley called it “leftie, multicultural crap”.
Downing Street distanced itself from Burley’s comments, saying: “Clearly we don’t agree.” But how clear was that disagreement?
Months after those Olympics, the then Home Secretary Theresa May introduced a policy of creating a “hostile environment” for foreigners with a group set up to examine Migrant Access To Benefits And Public Services. Their mission was to make it so hard for people to access the system without papers documenting their entire stay in the UK, they would be forced back to their country of origin. To hammer home the message, threatening billboards were driven around London saying: “Go home or face arrest.” May now denies this was a deliberate policy to deport people as she chased some mythical net immigration figure, but the then head of the civil service Lord Kerslake told the BBC that some ministers felt the hostile environment policy was “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”. At the time, the Tories were panic stricken over their core voters defecting to UKIP due to immigration levels. They had to appear tougher than Nigel Farage to win back those votes, so deliberately depicted immigrants as a problem rather than a solution to the nation’s skills shortages. It was partly why David Cameron called a referendum on EU membership, which allowed the Nigel Farage-led Leave EU camp to successfully play the xenophobic card, portraying dark-skinned foreigners as the enemy within.
The racist genie was out of the bottle. Hate crimes went through the roof, anti-fascist campaigning MP Jo Cox was murdered by someone wanting “Britain First” and members of that Windrush generation, invited by the Crown to rebuild post-war Britain, were now losing their jobs and benefits, being denied cancer treatment, and sent to deportation centres unless they had detailed documentary proof they weren’t undesirable aliens. Officials even destroyed their Windrush landing cards to make that act harder.
This has been a shameless period in British history as the bigoted and economically illiterate notion that immigrants are innately bad has become accepted wisdom.
The racist genie has to go back into the bottle.
We have to remove this lingering stench from the national conversation.
We have to remember that we’re all descendants of immigrants just like those who came over on the Empire Windrush.
We need to take our country back. Not to some all-white, 1950s fantasy world that never existed, but to that inspirational evening in 2012.
When Danny Boyle made us realise that Britain’s greatest assets are its tolerance, diversity, defiance of oppression and desire to embrace.
The racist genie was out of the bottle and an MP died