Does it matter if Lee Anderson, the deputy chair of the Conservative party, thinks disgruntled asylum seekers should “fuck off back to France” and says so?
“If they don’t like barges then they should fuck off back to France,” Anderson said. “These people come across the Channel in small boats … if they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France, or better, not come at all in the first place.” He was speaking to the Daily Express, with the knowledge that this once-great British newspaper now thrives on printing such things.
One can be dismayed, if not surprised. Anderson likes to see himself as his party’s man of the people. He serves a purpose as the supposed link between a political organisation controlled and given its raison d’etre by the hyper-wealthy and the Friday-night saloon bar of a rundown pub.
He is there to offer a different tone and to push a particular envelope. He has a show on GB News, which in itself is a phenomenon designed to say “fuck off” to decent TV broadcasting.
But still: “Fuck off back to France”? Does it matter that he said it, that the justice secretary, Alex Chalk – whose shtick is fresh-faced good cop – defended Anderson’s right to have said it in his “salty” way, and that No 10 gave Anderson its blessing?
That depends what you want from democratic politics in our troubled, fractious time in this early portion of the 21st century. Anderson, asked to explain himself, said that he only sought to refer to undeserving migrants. He can have that view. We all have views. He has free speech, as we all do.
But it does say something about this time, and something about his party, that he should be defended by the hierarchy for choosing – for political advantage – to pour more verbal sewage in the already fetid political swamp. He was, after all, using language that might well see him arrested were he to direct those same words, expressed in that same way, to an individual on the street within earshot of a diligent police officer.
It isn’t a question of whether he can speak like this. It is a question of why, given his platform and the heft of his title, does he want to?
If the idea is that he, as a tribune of ordinary people, has to speak in the plainest terms, one can grapple with that argument. But does that also carry an assumption that ordinary people can only engage with meanness, coarseness and indecency? I don’t think that is so. To suggest that “ordinary people” must want or need debate at this level reveals an offensively narrow-minded view of the diversity of views across a huge country. People clearly do not have one view on migration, but only a minority of deeply unpleasant people – however trenchant their views – would want the case set out in such a dehumanising way.
I don’t even think that Anderson’s party used to think that. It is a sad peculiarity of our time that one can read the words of Anderson and hanker for the what now seems a golden age of Tory civility, when his precise role was once executed by Norman Tebbit. One cannot imagine the so-called Chingford skinhead, unlovely as he was in his pomp, pursuing his objective of appealing to a rightwing working-class element in so foul a way. But then, one cannot conceive of the Thatcher governments, staggeringly unlovely as they were, contorting to slither underneath the bar for indecent policy that has been set by this recent succession of Tory governments. To that degree, Anderson well represents the laboratory-engineered toxicity of the Sunak era.
Last weekend, I finally got a ticket for James Graham’s great play Dear England, which deals with Gareth Southgate’s tenure thus far as England manager and the way he has sought – with strength, humility and empathy – to lead successive groups of young men who carry the hope of a nation and the burdens of a troubled society into sporting competition.
Graham’s Southgate, as portrayed by Joseph Fiennes, is an amusing figure because as he tries to cajole and persuade, we see behaviours and hear tones we recognise of a Briton keen to assert himself and move a project forward, but also keen to be respectful. We laugh because we recognise that type. John Major struck a chord for similar reasons.
When the play was over, the stranger sitting next to me asked what I thought. I said, forget about the football – I thought we had just been watching the only truly decent national leader this country has had for more than a decade.
And now we have “fuck off back to France”. It matters that politics stays above that.
Hugh Muir is a Guardian columnist
