Like David Cameron claiming a decade ago that he could reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, vainglorious boasts are eating away at Johnson’s support. Rightwing opinion has been outraged by the Johnson administration’s failure to keep its impossible pledge to stop boats filled with asylum seekers crossing the Channel. Remember that the latest polling gives Labour a nine-point lead over the Conservatives on immigration. How can they be when their targets’ skins are white? In the run-up to the Brexit referendum and today, it allows the cynics in charge of our politics to plausibly deny that they are engaged in race-baiting. “White privilege” is a useless concept when dealing with the racism Europeans inflict on each other rather than on the descendants of their former colonial possessions. Instead, they calculated that maintaining rightwing support required spreading conspiracy theories as malicious as any they spin against people of colour. But if Priti Patel and Johnson had ordered the civil service to drop restrictions on Ukrainians, it would have done so and got on with the arduous job of finding them accommodation. Too many people writing about the restrictions have lost themselves in the wilderness of the Home Office bureaucracy, from where few emerge with their sanity intact. I want to emphasise the political nature of the decision to slam the door in Ukrainians’ faces. Even a terrible war cannot blow away the conviction that to win Conservatives must hammer European migrants. Opposition to the explosion of immigration after Tony Blair’s government allowed freedom of movement to eastern Europeans gave victory to the right in the Brexit referendum of 2016 and general election of 2019. The mythical European “superstate”, not the actual Russian empire, was the UK’s greatest enemy. If we were not so in thrall to American notions that racism solely consists of white supremacy, we would recognise the lethal prejudice for what it is.įor a generation, Europeans have been the British right’s “other”. We are imposing visa restrictions because opposition to the free movement of Europeans has become a neurotic obsession for our ruling class.
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