As the Justice Secretary announces changes to the asylum system, Fleet Street Fox explains why it won’t make the place any nicer to live in
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will today announce reforms that make Britain feel better but behave worse
As 1,000 people marched this weekend through the East Sussex town of Crowborough in protest at a suggested refugee camp in a disused Army barracks, they told journalists they weren’t racist, just worried.
They clearly felt it was an issue of national identity, for they draped themselves in flags. They were almost entirely-white, and showed all the traditional symptoms of British dementia about refugees: they’ve forgotten how this sort of thing kills people, so they’re doing it again.
It’s people like this – good, clean, honest voters – who Labour today wants to convince that it has heard, and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will vow to tweak the asylum system accordingly. Out goes the 5-year path to citizenship, no more family reunification, and let’s be having your valuables to pay for it all.
We like to tell ourselves about how welcoming we are to “genuine” asylum seekers, and how Britain has opened its doors throughout history because we are if anything too kind, and it’s just this last lot which are taking advantage because of something the BLOODY FRENCH are responsible for. It’s more than likely you and Mahmood might even believe that, even though it’s complete hogwash.
Crowborough locals protest over plan to house 600 asylum seekers in abandoned army camp
The good people of Crowborough, Epping Forest, and other protest locales are happy to be photographed brandishing ‘no asylum seeker’ signs, unaware that about a century ago well-meaning people genuinely worried about ‘men of fighting age’ also marched against those fleeing their homeland, only then it was the Jews.
We tell stories about the Kindertransport, which brought in thousands of Jewish children. We don’t talk so much about their being barred from schools, or that their parents were unable to join them. We ask AI and it’ll parrot some guff about Jewish refugees being sponsored to work as domestic servants, and it won’t mention they weren’t allowed to work as the doctors they were qualified as, even though we had a shortage. Nor that everyone with a German accent was a potential enemy, and Jews were physically attacked, mistrusted, and shunned.
In 1938 medics threatened to strike if Jewish refugees were allowed to treat patients. When two such men got work at Leamington Spa, it lead to calls for a boycott and the suggestion they should be in concentration camps. After Adolf Hitler and his goons characterised opponents as dangerous Communists – take note, American friends – those few who did make it to these shores were interned as a threat to national security.
Britain struck deportation deals with other nations. Many didn’t make it to new lives in Canada and Australia, their ships and submarines being torpedoed by the Nazis on the way. After the war was over, when the camps were opened and their horrors reported worldwide, petitions were circulated demanding the eviction of Jewish refugees from British housing to make way for returning troops.
READ MORE: Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood faces Labour MP backlash over asylum shake-upJewish refugees from Czechoslovakia are marched away by police at Croydon airport on 31 March 1939. The refugees were detained because their documents were not in order. They were put on a flight to Warsaw but threatened to jump out of the window if the plane took off. The pilot refused to fly, so they were deported by train and boat to Denmark the following day.
‘Charity starts at home’ was a common excuse to cover up a total lack of Christianity then, too. Smiling middle-class ladies from the Home Counties told newspapers they were concerned about British values, the safety of their daughters around desperate, violent men, and that groundswell of asinine stupidity contributed to the death of millions. After the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed by Germany, we tightened immigration rules – and 70,000 were killed in the aftermath. Files show 10 times as many Jews were refused entry as were let in after Kristallnacht.
To be fair, the same was true of other countries. Many had legislation about “illegal aliens”, limited rights and reasons for entry, and once the war was over told them all to go back to countries where their neighbours had tried to murder them. It led to calls for a Jewish state. Britain refused many refugees entry to its Palestinian territories, and when they entered illegally the United Nations stepped in with a two-state solution which still hasn’t solved a damned thing.
The real reason for it all – from the “invasion” talk of newspapers and politicians to mistrust and ignorance of the not-so-great public – was economic depression and political failure. Unable to grow a magic money tree, humans pointed a finger at the ‘other’. Then it was Jews, today it’s Muslims. Strangely, these days you’re potentially an Islamic terrorist even if you’re Catholic and from the Congo. No-one said it had to make sense.
We live in a time when people earning six figure sums say they don’t feel rich. When people cannot buy homes because of the broken housing market and blame brown people who don’t have a country, never mind a roof. Even today qualified refugee medics have huge barriers to overcome before they can work in the NHS. And we could still find a use for the rest who, if they could work, would integrate, pay taxes, and assimilate a hell of a lot better than if they’re parked in a rotting barracks the government can’t sell.
Labour has moved to the right on immigration to save itself from electoral annihilation and the country from a Reform government, which despite the name would quite happily send us all back to the 1930s, with pipes and bicycles, and signs in your window saying which ethnicities you’re prepared to answer the door to. Perhaps no-one will feel uncomfortable that the British government wants to seize the sort of heirlooms that, for the Jews of the 1930s, were the seed money for businesses and new lives we’ve all benefited from since.
But how I wish Britain would slap itself in the face, and remember men fleeing war are “of fighting age”, because they don’t want to fight. That women bring dependents, because they want their children to live. And that if we are too exhausted to heed the truth, history or common sense, then we’ll never be rid of the Nazis.
