 There is an inevitable tension between the infinite variety and unpredictability of human behaviour and the attempt to create and implement a system capable of monitoring and containing every exigency with justice and understanding. As law-makers politicians daily walk the high-wire between a right-wing, neoconservative media with its ‘little Britain’ followers, and a potential tidal wave of immigrants fleeing the seemingly endless disasters of global conflict. The state of the laws governing asylum is a barometer of where our rulers place themselves between the Scylla of an intolerant Fortress Britain and the Charybdis of uncontrolled, economic migration.
Too often there is an absence of historical perspective to inject some cool reason into the hot air of tabloid outrage. This information-saturated, breaking-news dominated culture has conveniently forgotten that those very colonial policies that have made contemporary Britons wealthy from the theft of the raw materials (including human-beings in the form of slaves) of other nations are the same ones which have led to the brutalisation and impoverishment of those who today seek sanctuary on this island.
Britain has traditionally been a country of immigration. Immigrants are not the alien ‘other’. They are this nation, characterised since time immemorial by its ability to create safe spaces within which new-comers can express the finest elements of their native cultures in tandem with those elements of tolerance and compassion which drew them to these shores.
Debates around asylum-seekers and refugees are today too often poisoned by an atmosphere of distrust and intolerance caused by the fear and loss of confidence exhibited by many of the inhabitants. This is the legacy of Thatcherism, prolonged by New Labour, that has destroyed the moral autonomy and community fellow-feeling of the English working classes, replacing it with selfishness, greed and competition. Now there are no communities into which the foreigner can be welcomed, so they are left to form their own in isolation, thereby exacerbating the distrust and misunderstanding which leads to the present prejudice, paranoia and violence.
With a change in those at the helm of government, we look to a lead from our politicians; not the reactionary chasing after public opinion like gulls behind a trawler. The balance has been awry for too long and the cost has been a coarsening of what it means to be British. We are all dwellers in one, ever smaller world; all human-beings trying to make the best of our talents and opportunities. Our response, as a society, to asylum-seekers and refugees is a test of our right to be numbered among civilised nations.
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