Even when promoting highly illiberal policies on immigration or asylum seeking, ministers can seldom resist making reference to what Boris Johnson called Britain’s “proud history of welcoming people from overseas, including many fleeing persecution”. The main piece of supporting evidence is always the roughly 80,000 Jews, and particularly around 10,000 children on Kindertransport, who were saved from Nazi persecution and likely death through finding safety in the UK.
Though acknowledging that this was a major humanitarian achievement, Paul Dowswell is determined that we do not turn it into a comforting myth we can use as a stick to beat today’s government policy. Then, as now, newspapers led by the Daily Mail (which greeted Hitler’s accession to power with an article that “fizzes with fanboy adoration”) “created a climate of fear and resentment” about refugees, and “governments used bureaucratic barriers and obfuscation to prevent their arrival”.
