Racists don’t let facts get in way of an effective falsehood
NEXT month marks five years since three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Bodrum and sparked an outpouring of outrage and sympathy for refugees.
It didn’t take long for the compassion fatigue to kick in and once again refugees crossing the channel are pawns in a propaganda war waged by right-wing agitators such as Nigel Farage.
His “reportage” videos from the channel are depressing, not only because they are racist bile but because his boat always comes back in the end.
The videos get hundreds of thousands of hits and despite being part-mockumentary, partDad’s Army, they are dangerously effective in perpetuating the invasion myth.
The wartime rhetoric has been ramped up by the Home Secretary Priti Patel’s appointment of a “clandestine Channel threat commander”, or C-word for short.
Patel, the daughter of Ugandan refugee parents, is keen to show she has her big girl pants on, now she has learned what counterterrorism means.
More than 4000 people have successfully crossed the English Channel so far this year but it’s not that more refugees are coming to Britain rather that they have changed their route.
With fewer lorries to be smuggled in and limited ferry crossings, the perilous English Channel is now the only option for many.
Most are coming here because they speak English or have family here, not because they want to bleed the benefits system dry, since asylum seekers can’t access it anyway.
But racists never let the facts get in the way of an effective falsehood.
Coronavirus has heightened anxieties and made us insular and insecure, a perfect moment for Boris Johnson and Patel to exploit a perceived threat from an external enemy.
Mobilising against the refugee “swarm” is the government’s attempt to look in control when it has so badly mismanaged the legitimate threat of the coronavirus pandemic.
Refugees are a perfect patsy, painted as a homogenous group, dehumanised and demonised as potential terrorists, even when many are actually fleeing terror groups like Isis.
I have spent a lot of time in my career talking to refugees in various corners of the world and our conversations have only ever reaffirmed my belief that I would run too, given their circumstances.
In a refugee camp in Lesbos, precious picture albums were unwrapped, to show me photographs of former ordinary lives before they were engulfed by disaster and war.
One Syrian woman, Emah Mourad, huddled in a tent with her children, was about the same age as me and she showed me photographs of the day she married her handsome lawyer husband, and another where she posed in a field of flowers on holiday.
She said: “We had everything we could need, a lovely house, a normal life. Everything we had in Syria is gone.
“Now we have nothing left but we have to try to make a new future or what is the point?”
In Glasgow, I met Saffanna Aljbawi, a mother of four, forced to flee her family home in Syria in 2013 as the bombs dropped ever closer.
She left so suddenly there was still a coffee cup abandoned on a balcony table and her kids’ clothes remained on the washing line. Only luck of geography set me apart from these women.
The SNP’s shadow minister for immigration Stuart McDonald has called for immigration policy to be devolved to Scotland, saying the current “toxic” approach “does not speak to our values”.
He is right to aspire to cut loose from the inhumane approach of Johnson, Patel and Farage.
At the core of our response to the refugee crisis should always be – what would we do if we were in the same boat?
And if we are honest in our answer, we will treat refugees as we would hope to be treated ourselves.