“This campaign has stirred up anti-migrant sentiment that used to be confined to outbursts from the far fringes of British politics. The justice minister, Michael Gove, and the leader of the house, Chris Grayling – together with former London mayor Boris Johnson – have allied themselves to divisive anti-foreigner sentiment ramped up to a level unprecedented in our lifetime. Ted Heath expelled Enoch Powell from the Tory front ranks for it. Oswald Mosley was ejected from his party for it. Gove and Grayling remain in the cabinet.” (Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian.)
I don’t normally talk about politics on my blog, but recent events have made it impossible not to. Over the past weeks of the EU referendum campaign, Chris and I have become increasingly dispirited, increasingly despairing at a level of political discourse that set a pathetically low intellectual bar from the outset, but that has descended, as the referendum draws closer, into openly racist scaremongering and dangerous sophistry. To see this in the run-up to any election would be grim enough; to see it in the run-up to what may be the most important political decision our country will have to make in the past half-century is, to put no finer point on it, terrifying.
The murder of Jo Cox yesterday is a devastating personal tragedy for those closest to her. For our country at large, it is the most potently horrifying symbol of the pass we have reached as a nation. It would be wrong to go the easy route, to characterise Thomas Mair solely as a troubled loner who didn’t really know what he was doing. He may be all of those things – but the resentments and anger that were festering inside him did not come from nowhere. In a political culture that legitimises the stigmatisation of refugees, of minority ethnic groups, of Muslims, of people who stand in support of these groups and others, that sees it as being OK to talk about ‘these people’ and to put up Nazi propaganda-style posters as a ‘normal’ part of political campaigning, what else can we expect?
I don’t blame the British people. I blame those members of the political class who are shamelessly stoking up vague, mostly unexamined prejudice for their own political gain. In a time of immense and rapid social change, politicians should be helping citizens, through informed debate and truthful engagement, to come to a better understanding of their concerns. What some of them are doing instead is verging on the criminal.
Just one of the tricks of capitalism, to divide and rule. As Jo Cox herself suggested, many of the people being goaded by the Leave campaign have far, far more in common with those oppressed minorities than with the career bigots who are even now in the process of turning the political landscape of this country into something that I, as a British citizen, do not recognise and that frightens me more and more every day.
Yes, our country is being taken away from us – but not by Syrian refugees or Polish farm workers.
There is still time to turn back the tide. I know that most of you reading this know that anyway, and feel the same as I do, but I have to say the words.
Come on, Britain. We can do better than this. We ARE better than this. This is awful.