Coarse and brutal

[cosmolinguist]

A friend -- a proper friend, not just in the fb sense -- posted something on facebook about how immigrants might be "fleeing their homelands" but shouldn't break the law of the country they're moving to. "Get the help and support you need, but don't take the piss," he says. (Or something pretty close to that anyway; he deleted it before I could respond, which is why I have to vent my pent-up aggression here.)

Christ. If only it were as easy as "get the help and support you need." This friend has had a terrible time with the NHS. He used to work with unions. He's been posting stuff about austerity being hard on the poor and disabled, the U.S. police system being set up to kill black people, and other ways that our governments are happy to treat their own citizens...and yet he thinks immigrants can "get the help and support they need," just like that?!

The Home Office's backlog of asylum requests is horrific (and the process itself is inhumane even when people get to it). The Home Secretary has removed the questions about the Human Rights Act and how to claim benefits, and replaced them with questions about kings and queens and what a Christian country Britain is, from the test all non-EU and non-Commonwealth citizens need to take if we want tostay here. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, a party I joined for being the pro-immigration one, is proud of a policy that stops access to interpreters during things like driving tests. Even Paddington would have a hellish time moving here.

Even if UKIP never form a government, they're already getting what they want: Britain is doing a damn good job of making itself a country no one wants to move to. One of my favorite bits of that article is:

The political stage is peopled with characters who wouldn’t get past a script meeting in Emmerdale: the woman who has an abortion at 28 weeks because she’s suddenly not that into the idea; the perfectly well person who would rather fake debilitating depression than get a job; the homo economicus who goes to a food bank even though he can afford food, because it’s free.

To this we must add the immigrant who has help and support to follow all the laws of her adopted country, who can fit perfectly into a racist, bigoted, xenophobic system of laws, who chooses to 'take the piss" anyway.

Here's my other favorite bit of that article:

The only people making the case for immigration are doing so on the basis of their tax receipts and how much business depends upon them, which is code for “depends upon low wages”. Who would go to a country that talks about foreigners like that? What does it say about how they see their own people, that their politicians can make a business case but can’t make a human case?

The only thing maintaining the flow of migrants is that nobody reads the Daily Mail until they arrive, and only then do they realise how coarse and brutal our politics have become, how pessimistic.

I shared this link on Facebook when I first read it. A friend shared it on her wall too, calling it "sad reading." Maybe for her, an old-school British leftie, but writing it isn't what makes it so. I read an article more or less like this a couple of times a year, and while I'm always glad when they're there, that's nowhere near enough. It's not going to get any better until some kind of critical mass is reached, of clear-eyed compassion rather than uninformed fear looking for easy targets.

Comments

[syntaxofthings]

Blarg. So tired of people being anti immigration.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm tired of politicians and the media being so anti-immigration that individual people don't even know that's what they're being. I'm tired of people thinking it's worse to be called a racist than to do something racist (I'm increasingly coming down hard on the distinction between "you're a racist" and "your behavior is racist," using the latter to try to get around people treating it as just name-calling and emphasizing that we all are racists because our society and culture are racist and we can't escape it). I'm tired of pandering politics that races to the bottom rather than lifting us up out of this grubby, selfish pit of despair and antipathy we've sunk into.

[syntaxofthings]

Yes. ♥

[silveradept]

And here I thought stupidity about migrants and the undocumented was solely (and thankfully) a thing that happened on the far-right fringe of the States.

[cosmolinguist]

It's definitely not unique, unfortunately. Far-right xenophobic parties are on the rise all over the EU.

[calissa]

And Australia has just passed some legislation that makes me heartily ashamed of my country.

[silveradept]

No doubt engendered by the continual feel of the recession and the austerity politics that follow.

[andrewhickey.info]

It's actually far more prevalent over here, partly (though not solely) because in Britain it's an even more direct proxy for race. To all intents and purposes Britain was about 98% white until the early 50s, so the entire black and Asian (by which in Britain we tend to mean the Indian subcontinent rather than East Asia) population are either immigrants themselves or are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. So "I'm not racist, it's just that I hate immigration" is a fairly standard code for "I am racist".

While in the US all people who hate immigrants are racist, you can be racist and not necessarily hate immigrants, because your black population has been there about as long as the white population, give or take. Over here the two are far more linked.

And UKIP, who are the Tea Party as near as makes no difference, have been getting support from about 15% of the population, so all the main parties are chasing after the anti-immigrant vote to get those voters back.

[silveradept]

I would have thought, with the system in place, that if UKIP is polling that way, they would get maybe a few seats in Parliament, but not enough to be coalition makers or impediments. Enough to satisfy the racists while everyone else gets on with the business of government.

[andrewhickey.info]

That's the most likely situation, but we simply don't know any more. British politics has entered a completely chaotic phase, with six parties gaining enough votes to matter to the predictions in a system designed to only work with two. Not only is it basically impossible to predict what will happen at the election, it's impossible to predict the effect one's own vote will have. Fascinating if you're me, but not the best situation to be in...

[doctorstewie.livejournal.com]

I sometimes think we are headed for a civil war. Much as I want to think otherwise, it seems sometimes that the language of the right ( hate and violence ) may be the language we must communicate with them in.

I worry that in rejecting forceful change, we are allowing the right to win.

BUT what I think we need are left wing politicians who can engage with the public in the same way that a twat like Farage can. The left is sorely short of charismatic leaders. The right has them dribbling out the wazoo. The devil, it seems, does have the best tunes.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't think charisma's enough, even. We need something nearly impossible: for a system designed to benefit rich white cis men who went to the right schools and know the right people to give us someone who is either lacks sufficient of those traits or is empathic enough with those who do that they (he, probably) will buck the current media and politics' trend of fact-free content-free rhetoric to keep the peasants fighting amongst themselves while a few lucky bastards run everything and tell everyone they're not lucky because they deserve and have worked hard to have all of us as serfs.

...and, breathe. :)

[doctorstewie.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should have specified that I think those traits are essential as well. It just didn't occur to me that a REAL left wing politician wouldn't have them.
There is something wrong with me.