UN envoy is wrong: Brexit actually reduced tensions
Few countries are more tolerant than Britain. Whether you measure attitudes to refugees, mixed-race marriages, religious minorities or same-sex relationships, we are habitually near the top of the league. A recent Ipsos poll, for example, showed that we were by some measure the most proimmigration of the EU states surveyed, twice as likely as Germans to take a positive view of inward settlement, and three times as likely as Italians. It also showed – contrary to what headlines suggest – that we have become more pro-immigration since the EU referendum.
Not that any of this mattered to Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia, who has filed a drearily predictable report on what ghastly bigots we are.
Britain, says the Zambian academic, is hostile to both immigrants and ethnic minorities, and has become more so since Brexit. Her evidence? Mainly talking to angry Lefties.
Now it is true that Britain, like any country, has its share of racist cretins. But it’s worth putting things in context. We remain a destination of choice for both non-EU and EU migrants. Since the Brexit vote – again, contrary to what you might infer from the headlines – 17 EU nationals have arrived for every 10 who have left. Perhaps, unlike UN rapporteurs, these migrants have a sense of perspective. British politicians, after all, wouldn’t dream of using the kind of antiimmigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that goes unremarked upon in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. We have avoided the intercommunal tensions that have become so routine in France, Germany and Belgium that they no longer lead the news.
Since the collapse of UKIP, Britain has become one of the only EU states where there is no significant nativist party. Far from inflaming tensions, the referendum seems to have actually soothed them.
Those politicians and commentators who insist that Brexit is souring community relations are creating the thing they complain of. A false narrative has been built up over the past two years, in which every nasty incident is linked to our withdrawal from the EU. What turned out to be a break-in at a tapas bar was one of the first examples of this fake news, followed by some supposedly racist graffiti at a Polish community centre – which was actually aimed at a Eurosceptic Polish think-tank. A violent incident in which a Polish man was killed in Harlow was widely written up as Brexit-related racism; the eventual court verdict, which showed that it was no such thing, got little coverage. (Two Poles have in fact tragically been killed in a hate crime since Brexit, but they are almost never mentioned, because the crime in question was the Manchester Arena bomb, which doesn’t fit the narrative.) Even the Windrush scandal has been linked to Brexit – as if Leavers somehow approved of the outrage.
Perhaps Ms Achiume is right to say that minorities sense a more hostile atmosphere after Brexit. All these bogus reports can hardly have failed to create one.
Here are a few ways you might organise a second chamber: direct election; indirect election; heredity; selection by lot; regional representation; appointment.
A case can be made for each one – except the last.
The purpose of the House of Lords, since the barons met at Runnymede, is to hold governments in check. Everything else it does is incidental. How preposterous, then, to have one of Parliament’s two houses appointed by the executive it is supposed to be controlling. (Only the 92 remaining hereditaries, paradoxically, have any democratic mandate). The only way for their Lordships to maintain such an indefensible arrangement was to keep their silvery heads down. Until last month, they were pursuing this tactic with exquisite elegance. Then, with sudden bolshiness, they decided to defy, not only the Government’s manifesto on Brexit, but the 17.4 million people who had mandated it.
The public’s mood has shifted: fully 63 per cent now want an elected upper house, and 27 per cent favour abolition. What was meant to be a transitional arrangement may finally, after 107 years, be reaching its last days.