British political culture is nearly as hostile to self-reflection as it is to refugees. When the Spectator splashes on Britain “failing Ukraine’s refugees”, it might consider how its previous headlines, such as “It’s time for Boris to turn back the Channel migrant boats”, helped forge a hostile environment for those fleeing war in Ukraine. Our political discourse apparently sees no problem with the former home secretary Amber Rudd, who resigned over the Windrush scandal, now grandstanding on national radio over Britain’s lack of generosity to refugees. When she declares the need for a “wholly different” approach to Ukraine’s refugees because “we’ve got war in Europe”, her sympathy for those who have been violently displaced sounds suspiciously like the British general who told the BBC that public opinion wouldn’t tolerate “people who look and live like us being slaughtered”.
Rich countries in general fail in their duty of care to the people they have helped to make refugees. Britain is a particularly egregious example of this. Around 85% of refugees are sheltered by poor countries with few resources and weak infrastructure; and of those hosted by rich nations, a third are in Germany. As things stand, Britain has accepted only 300 Ukrainian refugees – compared with 1.2 million in Poland, more than 50,000 in Germany, 17,000 in Italy and 6,000 in Spain. This is all too consistent with our recent history. Boris Johnson’s dishonesty is cruder and less finessed than his predecessors, but his policy is consistent with theirs: he boasts of resettling more vulnerable people than other European countries, when just over 9,000 people were granted refuge here in 2020, five and half times fewer than in Spain alone.
Demonising foreign “others” has long been a convenient means of diverting working-class anger at economic insecurity away from powerful interests. This is what drove a Conservative government to pass the Aliens Act of 1905 to keep out Jewish refugees and migrants from eastern Europe – “the native folk cannot assimilate this element”, as one Tory MP put it at the time – and for Margaret Thatcher to suggest “people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture”. Remember when David Cameron snarled that Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor “met with a bunch of migrants in Calais” and “said they could all come to Britain”? What could have possibly flashed through his mind other than the cynical idea that public fear of Afghans, Eritreans and Darfuris living in that squalid, dirty camp would drive Corbyn’s Labour into electoral oblivion’?
It’s hardly a secret that much of Britain’s press is an open sewer for noxious anti-migrant views; headlines such as “Halt the asylum tide now” and “Calais: send in the army” make the public defence of refugees an act of political courage in normal times. But it can be done. When that devastating picture of Alan Kurdi, a Kurdish toddler washed up dead on a Turkish beach, reached public attention in 2015, the number of people who believed Britain should accept more refugees surged. Why? Because the dehumanisation of refugees encouraged by our politicians and media outlets was momentarily confronted: parents kissing the foreheads of their little ones at night could visualise Alan as one of their own.
A large majority of Britons are now in favour of taking in thousands of Ukrainian refugees. This has put government cruelty and public opinion on a collision course. As a tide of human misery sweeps westwards, that old refugee-baiting trope – “Why can’t they just claim asylum in the first safe country?” – dissolves as rational human beings understand that a few countries alone should not shoulder this burden. The Tories now find themselves on autopilot, too ideologically inflexible to respond to the shift in public opinion and therefore indulging only the basest, most inhumane prejudices of a swath of their electorate.
The opposition is not immune from these criticisms either. Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has refused to support visa waivers for refugees; when Cooper held the same role before 2015, she indulged xenophobic sentiments with calls to strip migrants of benefits. New Labour – now the principal ideological inspiration for Keir Starmer – suggested schools had been “swamped” by non-English-speaking foreigners, and tried to ban asylum seekers’ children from schools. But Labour has another history it could draw on: when Hugh Gaitskell – himself no leftist – was the party’s leader in the early 1960s, he declared: “The Labour party is opposed to the restriction of immigration as every Commonwealth citizen has the right as a British subject to enter the country at will.”
As Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion descends into barbarism with the recent bombing of a children’s hospital, sympathy for Ukrainians will only grow. Some commentators and politicians say the quiet part out loud: that their sympathy is particularly great because these are white Europeans rather than fellow human beings in desperate need. But now is a moment to argue for a new permanent settlement – for a Britain that abandons its particularly inhumane indifference to the world’s most vulnerable and desperate people, whether they come from Ukraine, Yemen or Afghanistan. Mainstream parties have vacated the pitch, driven by electoral calculation, cynicism and cowardice, and so others must step up to offer the moral leadership that this country so desperately needs.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
