There has been no shortage of commentary in the last few days about the groups of vicious thugs aligned to assorted far-right, racist ideologies who have attacked asylum-seeker hotel accommodation, mosques and police.
Among those rushing to condemn the rioters are former minister and Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick, who made no reference to the role he and his government had in fanning the flames of racism and division that have contributed to current events. Conservative peer Baroness Warsi called him out on X for his “faux outrage” and urged him to “use this awful moment to reflect on your language and conduct and what impact it’s had on where the country finds itself”.
As with many disturbances of this kind, there was a trigger event for the current disorder that could not have been specifically predicted. The horrific murders of three children at a Southport dance workshop, falsely attributed on social media to an asylum seeker who recently arrived on a small boat, lit the fuse.
But as Jenrick and many of his colleagues glaringly failed to acknowledge, the riots did not explode out of a vacuum. Politicians, some sections of the media and fake news have laid powerful foundations for many years, leaving the new government to mop up the mess.
Prior to 2018, asylum seekers did not travel to the UK in small boats. They used other less visible but no less dangerous means, such as clinging to the underside of Eurostar trains or hiding in airless lorries because there were (and still are) few safe routes to the UK for those fleeing war and conflict. Closing off these clandestine routes for asylum seekers to reach the UK didn’t stop them arriving and created the Channel dinghy route. If anything, Brexit exacerbated the issue. Before we left the European Union, there was a mechanism to return some asylum seekers – if they had passed through other European countries before arriving in the UK, sometimes they could be returned to one of those countries. This agreement ended post-Brexit and no new agreement was negotiated to replace it.
The rate at which asylum claims were processed slumped from 2016, partly due to inefficiency and partly, I imagine, because ministers feared that processing asylum claims too quickly would signal to voters that the UK was a soft touch. The growing backlog and the pandemic were a perfect storm that led to an explosion of hotel use – and the gift of a photo opportunity for the far right, which turned up regularly at this accommodation to bait bewildered asylum seekers and capture exchanges on film they could livestream.
The discontent of far-right, anti-migrant voters was nourished with toxic narratives from the likes of former home secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, the former slamming immigration and human rights lawyers doing their jobs as “lefty lawyers” and the latter scaremongering that 100 million asylum seekers could cross the Channel to invade the UK.
While legislating against the peddling of racist lies online, and the conviction and imprisonment of those who have participated in current disorder, are important, there’s one thing politicians haven’t tried. It isn’t complicated to implement and it doesn’t cost anything. Start telling the truth and tell it over and over again. Disseminate factually accurate information with confidence through schools, community and faith groups, local authorities and other organisations.
Successive governments, including the last Labour administration, were scared of telling the truth about asylum seekers, much less daring to express any humanity about the persecution they had fled, which often included rape and torture.
It is urgent that this government starts to forcefully put truthful information into the public domain. The failure to do this over decades has created a vacuum that the Stephen Yaxley-Lennons of the world have gleefully filled.
Many who would not go out on to the streets and riot nod in agreement at racist trigger phrases such as “We’re full” and “Stop the boats” and “Enough is enough”. There is currently a paucity of alternative, factually accurate information for this group to access. The gaping hole needs to be urgently addressed, and only the government can do this.
Here are a few facts the new government could start with. In 2022 some 46,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats; in 2023 it was about 29,000 – not quite the scale Braverman predicted, and just a fraction of overall migration to the UK in both of these years of about 1.2 million.
Asylum seekers are not stealing council houses from homeless British military veterans because they do not have the right to access council housing. And asylum seekers are not stealing British jobs because the vast majority are banned from working.
Successive governments have been terrified of standing up to far-right tropes for fear of losing votes. But in the interests of healing the deep and destabilising fissures in our society and creating a more cohesive future, telling the truth boldly is more urgent than ever before.
Diane Taylor writes on human rights, racism and civil liberties
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