Burnt offering: Tony D’Souza responds to recent rioting across the UK

‘We are all immigrants from somewhere.’

You, who are reading this, will probably be as disgusted as I am by the scenes of wanton violence unleashed upon our streets by the recent anti-immigrant riots. They hung like a heavy cloud on our shoulders, just like the palls of smoke that hung over the riot-torn streets of Southport, Rochdale, Middlesbrough and a host of other towns. The riots came as a great shock. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have seen it coming. 

A little over one month ago, the general election returned an astonishing result for the Reform party led by Nigel Farage. It received over four million votes. Farage has long been accused of lowering the tone of political discourse in the UK and it seems he may have helped to spark the initial riots in Southport by espousing misinformation about the alleged attacker’s religious identity and immigration status. Farage asked whether ‘the truth is being withheld from us’. For the rioters, it was a like a red rag to a bull.

Farage, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Just as a fish needs water to swim in, these riots could not happen in a political vacuum. The ugly truth is that the political discourse in the UK has been poisoned for decades by politicians trying to cosy-up to the right. Sadly, it’s only too easy to find examples of this: Boris Johnson once described burka wearing Muslim women as ‘letterboxes’. Suella Braverman said, ‘There are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. Let us be clear: they are coming here.’ She also said, ‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed.’ 

This kind of language was a symptom of a deeper malaise. The tabloid press added the constant drip, drip, drip of anti-immigrant sentiment. The incessant call to ‘Stop the boats’ enabled one columnist to describe asylum seekers as vermin. The language of the far right was now becoming mainstream. 

If you need to ask where the riots came from, the answer is they came from this environment, a febrile environment, which over the years had come to normalise race hate and demonise asylum seekers.

As the dust settles and the broken glass is swept from the streets, and the smell of burning shops and asylum hotels begins to fade, we need to urgently ask ourselves what we are going to do now to prevent this happening again. The far right, which orchestrated the riots using social media, has an agenda, which is as simple as it is deranged. It is a nasty form of nativism, and its endgame is a vision of Britain that no longer has a single person of colour remaining as an inhabitant. How do we counter this? Here are some suggestions.

We need to start telling the truth about asylum seekers. The UK received 74,751 applications for asylum in 2022 (the latest year for which figures are available). This does not include Ukrainian nationals, of whom about 154,500 had arrived in the UK in 2022. 

This places the UK as the fifth-highest country in terms of asylum applications in Europe behind Germany, France, Spain and Austria. Germany received almost two-and-a-half times the asylum claims the UK got in 2022: a total of 217,735 from first-time asylum applicants. France received 137,505, Spain 116,140 and Austria 106,375 in the same time period. European figures also do not take dependents into account, nor do they include Ukrainian refugees. More than one million Ukrainians arrived in Germany in 2022 alone and Poland saw similar numbers register for support. It is not enough that these figures are true, we must publicise them so the general population knows the truth.

‘We need to ask ourselves what we are going to do to prevent this happening again.’

We need to start telling the truth about immigration. Migration has made the UK a better country to live in. For example, during the mid-2000s, there was a large inflow of workers from Poland and other Eastern European countries which helped meet the demand for much-needed skills like building and plumbing. The market greatly benefited from their hard-work ethic. At the same time the government sought to attract migrants from outside Europe to meet shortfalls in job vacancies in key public sector jobs such as nursing. The NHS is the best example, as anyone who has been to see a doctor or been to a hospital will tell you. Without migrant labour the NHS would probably collapse.

The UK has an ageing population, which means it is liable to see an increase in the dependency ratio, which is the ratio of retired to working people. We need people of working age to pay taxes so that we can afford to keep those people who are prevented from, or who are no longer, working (the Migration Observatory reports that, in 2019, seventy per cent of the foreign born were aged twenty-six to sixty-four, compared to forty-eight per cent of the UK born). This younger population benefits the economy. If migrants are of working age, they will pay income tax and VAT. Again, it is not enough that these figures are true, we must publicise them so the general population understands the truth and is not seduced by lies.

We need to do something about social media. Social media stirs up hate. Its business model seeks profit through algorithms that feed users with more extreme versions of what they already read. You do not have to have a degree in data analytics to understand this. Extremism thrives on social media, and it is time to make the social media companies take responsibility for this.

One model might be the automotive industry, which in recent years was plagued by the theft of catalytic converters. These were targeted by thieves because they contain valuable metals. The automotive industry addressed the problem by making the catalytic converters much harder to steal. Where once they could be removed in less than a minute, they are now protected by a special locking key. Could the social media moguls be prevailed upon to make similar changes in their algorithms so that hate is curtailed rather than enabled by them?

I am an immigrant. I came to this country in 1956 at the age of eighteen months. You might have seen me at Yearly Meeting. I am brown and bald, and a Quaker. If a racist asks me to go back to where I came from I can say, ‘Where? I come from here, just as you do.’ If you go back far enough, you will find we are all immigrants from somewhere, and you will also find – as Nanci Griffith wrote in her song – It’s a hard life wherever you go.

It’s a hard life

It’s a hard life

It’s a very hard life

It’s a hard life wherever you go

If we poison our children with hatred

Then, the hard life is all they’ll ever know. 

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Comments

Dear Tony D’Souza thank you thank you for this article in the 30th August 2024 edition of The Friend. Every paragraph was full of useful fact for thought and refection for thought. And a lovely poem to finish. Thank you very very much. Best wishes David Fish rugby local quaker meeting

By davidfishcf@msn.com on 8th September 2024 - 22:11

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