Last Friday, an 82-year-old woman wrapped up warm and set off on a 200-mile round trip for a meeting that she half suspected wouldn’t even let her in. As you read this, the film of her speaking that evening has been viewed more than five million times. Which is odd, because it’s not much to look at: a wobbly side-view of a woman with white hair, intense closeups of grey cardigan. Bridgerton this is not.
But it’s the words that count. Joan Salter has got herself down to Hampshire for a public meeting with the home secretary, and now it is her turn to ask a question. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, she hears Suella Braverman demean and dehumanise refugees and it is a reminder of how the Nazis justified murdering Jews like her. So why do it?
Even as the words come out, Braverman’s face freezes. The evening so far has been a Tory activists’ love-in, which, Salter tells me later, made her nervous about being the sole dissenter. But then the home secretary responds, “I won’t apologise for the language I’ve used” – and a disturbing truth is exposed about what Britain has become.
Braverman labels those seeking sanctuary in Britain an “invasion”. Quite the word, invasion. It strips people of their humanity and pretends they are instead a hostile army, sent to maraud our borders. Her junior minister Robert Jenrick once begged colleagues not to “demonise” migrants; now he stars in videos almost licking his jowls over “the Albanians” forced on to a flight to Tirana. Salter is right to say such attitudes from the top fuel and license extremists on the ground. We saw it after the toxic Brexit campaign, when Polish-origin schoolchildren in Huntingdon were called “vermin” on cards left outside their school gates, as race and religious hate crimes soared that summer.
Today, the air is once again poisonous. Far-right groups have been visiting accommodation for asylum seekers, trying to terrify those inside – many of whom have fled terror to come here – often before sharing their videos on social media. The anti-fascist campaigners Hope Not Hate recorded 182 such jaunts last year alone, culminating in a petrol bomb tossed at an asylum centre in Dover by a man with links to far-right groups and who would post about how “all Muslims are guilty of grooming … they only rape non-Muslims”.
Unlike those big men in their big boots frightening innocent people, Salter isn’t chasing social media clout. The grandmother wants to warn us not to return to the times that sent her, at the age of three, running with her parents across Europe in search of sanctuary. She does make a mistake in yoking the home secretary to the term “swarms”. As far as I can see, this figurehead for the new Tory extremism has yet to use that vile word. But I can think of a Tory prime minister who has used that word: David Cameron, the Old Etonian never shy of blowing on a dog whistle, who made a speech denouncing multiculturalism even as Tommy Robinson’s troops marched on Luton. And Margaret Thatcher talked of how the British felt “rather swamped” by immigrants. In those venerable names from the party’s past lies the big picture about the Conservatives’ chronic addiction to racist politics.
Because racism is not what polite people do – and yet Tories keep on doing it, commentators will often put it behind some behavioural cordon. It’s a few rotten apples, you’ll be told, after some councillor dons a blackshirt or moans about the new Doctor Who. Or: they need to fend off the effect of Nigel Farage. Or even, as one Times commentator wrote in 2019, Boris Johnson says it but he “barely believes a word” of it. Such clairvoyance! But that’s the thing about power: other people trot behind with a dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess you keep making.
Yet there was no Ukip when Benjamin Disraeli declared that the Irish “hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character.” It was no rotten apple but Winston Churchill, the Tory idol, who as prime minister pronounced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” The Bengal famine of 1943 is widely estimated to have killed about 2 million people.
I draw these quotes from a new book, Racism and the Tory Party, by the sociologist Mike Cole. Far from being a mere slip of the tongue, racism, he argues, “has saturated the party from the beginning of the 19th century to the second decade of the 21st”. From Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” to Theresa May’s hostile environment, it courses through Tory history. And it is not just words. In its online safety bill, the government wants this week to make illegal any online video of people in small boats that shows such Channel crossing in a “positive light”. Braverman still grinds on with her plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, to stay in hostels with 12 toilets and five showers for 100 inmates.
For the Tories, racism is a fire that they just love to play with. The heat it throws off can be electorally useful. But it is always someone else who gets burned. The targets change – two centuries ago it was the Irish, today it is Albanians – but the strategy is always the same: pick the group, render them inhuman, then chuck them out. The mystery is why a party with such a long and inglorious history can still be lauded by the press for sprinkling a few non-white people along its frontbench.
The woman who is today Joan Salter was in 1943 a three-year-old girl called Fanny Zimetbaum. As Polish-origin Jews, her family were not granted sanctuary in Britain from the Nazis marching into their home of France. Instead, her parents had to scramble through Europe, while Joan was shipped across the Atlantic to an orphanage in America. Only years later, through much wrangling, were the family reunited in London. By then, she remembers her parents as “thoroughly broken”.
When she was in her 70s and studying for a master’s, Salter went through the archives. She read a parliamentary debate from 1943, concerning 2,000 Jewish children in France refused British visas and who were then deported to Hitler’s Germany. She read foreign secretary Anthony Eden claiming “no knowledge” of the matter. Then she read the minutes and memos that proved he was lying: he was in the war cabinet meeting where the issue was discussed. Still the children were abandoned, just as her family were left to their fate.
From her own life, this remarkable woman knows that fascism is not just a one-off and racism never a mere faux pas. They are forces of evil that lurk on the political perimeter and threaten to consume our society wholesale. Joan Salter bears a warning. The rest of us should listen.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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