Against my better judgement, I sat down and watched Question Time for the first time in months last night - so long ago in fact I can't remember when last I endured it. Holy fucking Jesus! When did it turn into 50 minutes of hate? At one point, I honestly thought some members of the audience might start flinging their own faeces at Yanis Varoufakis, Angela Rayner or Ken Clarke. On Brexit and immigration, it took a foreigner - a highly eloquent and educated one, admittedly - to point out the massive flaws in both leaving the EU without a plan and to hold up a mirror to the audience on the horrific nature of the demonisation of the young asylum seekers coming in from Calais by both our press and MPs.
"Treat them with respect. Treat them as humans. Treat their trauma." That's pretty humane, especially for an economist.
"Nah, show us your fucking teeth! Get the fucking X-ray machine out!"
Even when he was saying he respected their democratic right to vote Brexit, Varoufakis was, bizarrely, shouted down. As was the Polish woman in the audience who felt hate and discrimination was on the rise post-Brexit, after living here for more than 20 years. At one point, she had to say, "You can boo me in a minute, just let me finish." Before they attempted to heckle her again.
If that audience is representative (and I don't think it is, btw) of post-Brexit England, then we're well and truly fucked.
I know they have a somewhat apocryphal reputation for mistakenly hanging a monkey in Hartlepool; however, on last night's evidence, it seemed well-earned.
Anyway, earlier I came across this from Orwell written back in 1947 on our attitude to 'foreigners' and refugees. As always, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose:
"
The younger man remarked that he belonged to several business and civic associations, and that on all of them he made a point of putting forward resolutions that the Poles should be sent back to their own country. The older one added that the Poles were ‘very degraded in their morals’. They were responsible for much of the immorality that was prevalent nowadays. ‘Their ways are not our ways,’ he concluded piously. It was not mentioned that the Poles pushed their way to the head of queues, wore bright-coloured clothes and displayed cowardice during air raids, but if I had put forward a suggestion to this effect I am sure it would have been accepted.
One cannot of course, do very much about this kind of thing. It is the contemporary equivalent of antisemitism. By 1947, people of the kind I am describing would have caught up with the fact that antisemitism is discreditable, and so the scapegoat is sought elsewhere. But the race hatred and mass delusions which are part of the pattern of our time might be somewhat less bad in their effects if they were not reinforced by ignorance. If in the years before the war, for instance, the facts about the persecution of Jews in Germany had been better known, the subjective popular feeling against Jews would probably not have been less, but the actual treatment of Jewish refugees might have been better. The refusal to allow refugees in significant numbers into this country would have been branded as disgraceful. The average man would still have felt a grudge against the refugees, but in practice more lives would have been saved.
So also with the Poles. The thing that most depressed me in the above-mentioned conversation was the recurrent phrase, ‘let them go back to their own country’. If I had said to those two businessmen, ‘Most of these people have no country to go back to’, they would have gaped. Not one of the relevant facts would have been known to them. They would never have heard of the various things that have happened to Poland since 1939, any more than they would have known that the over-population of Britain is a fallacy or that local unemployment can coexist with a general shortage of labour. I think it is a mistake to give such people the excuse of ignorance. You can’t actually change their feelings, but you can make them understand what they are saying when they demand that homeless refugees shall be driven from our shores, and the knowledge may make them a little less actively malignant."
http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19470124.html
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