Are we a species that is frightened of itself?
IT’S two weeks since we heard that 27 migrants, trying to reach England from France, had drowned in the English Channel. The governments of the two nations at once set to censuring each other. Such politicking made me think of the note posted above the door of a Paris bookshop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.’
Seeing that we might be witnessing monumental changes not seen since the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago, I saw comparisons with the mass extinction of dinosaurs. You might say the dinosaurs didn’t know what hit them! They certainly had no warnings.
That event led to homo sapiens becoming the anchor tenants of Planet Earth, a species that’s excelled in genetic and creative progression. As enlightened proprietors though, you could say we’ve made a right mess of it. In fact, while progress has been memorably wise, mankind has behaved equally recklessly.
In shaping itself with egocentric conduct and rules, we have neglected our vulnerabilities. The thing is, we seem to have forgotten, or even ignored, the fact we are a species of life on Earth and not a series of separate tribes.
I mentioned this a few weeks ago in an article on climate change. The fact that we live in separate zones with different environmental assets and problems, has allowed and encouraged us to build borders and barriers, afraid of incursion and subjugation. We are, in fact, a genus that is frightened of itself!
And we weep when we see footage of innocent children washed ashore on holiday beaches, with despairing parents crying out names as the sea buries them. And we rage when we see footage of despairing parents calling their children as emergency workers search the debris of violated arenas bombed by religious extremists. What are we to do? How did we get to this confusing place? That’s the conundrum that confounds politicians, whose answer is to write yet more selfjustifying rules, yielding to retribution and reprisal rather than conciliation.
It’s been a while since my neighbour Bill passed on, happy for his given name to be translated from Wojciech. He spoke his English with an accent. But this postwar displaced Pole brought light to his neighbours’ lives with his lovely garden of cultivated English roses. Like many Eastern European refugees in 1945, Bill built a new life in Great Britain.
Post-war Europe saw millions of people from all nations homeless and stateless. But the world accommodated them. The 1951 census counted the Polishborn population of the UK at 162,339. Today their progeny is as much part of Englishness as the Celt, the Anglo-saxon, and Mediterranean tribes from which most of us descend.
The British Nationality Act 1948 allowed British Empire overseas subjects to live and work in the United Kingdom without a visa. By 1955, some 60,000 arrived. Annual increases numbered 46,800 in 1956 and 136,400 in 1961, government concerns responding to public sentiment occasioned the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. The total number of Commonwealth immigrants since 1962 to date is estimated at around 2,500,000.
A new Immigration Act in 1972, admitted entry to those holders of work permits, or people with parents or grandparents born in the UK. The effects resulted in the 2018 scandal when, despite living and working in the UK for decades, many Commonwealth and hitherto accepted British citizens’ children, were treated as aliens.
Ethnic transition happened on my doorstep, in Cobridge where the Victorian middle class handed on its palatial accommodation to Eastern Europeans, to Caribbean citizens and to South Asian people. Integration through education and work, in sport and achievement, demonstrated how well such integration worked.
Unlike the dinosaurs, the human species is able to anticipate a catastrophic event. But in my view survival depends on us all acting as one, a species not a cluster of tribes. The epigram above the bookshop in Paris is a sound recommendation, don’t you think?