Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian thriller Children of Men depicts a jingoistic government locking up migrants in crumbling internment camps along forlorn stretches of the English coast. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel appear to have watched the film—and consider it worthy of emulation.
Faced with a modest trickle of rickety boats washing up on British shores in the months before Brexit and since, Britain’s government has begun to stoke an ugly culture war by linking asylum with danger and chaos. For a country that seeks to rebrand itself post-Brexit as an outward-looking champion of the rules-based international order, and a prime minister who seeks to distance himself from the recently unseated U.S. president and his xenophobia, it is a parochial and authoritarian turn.
