Social media has replaced Enoch Powell’s racist scaremongering with shameful attempts to minimise the work of low-paid immigrants who rebuilt this country after the Second World War, writes Darren Lewis
In the sequel to the legendary Die Hard movie, Bruce Willis wonders out loud: “How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?”
With Nigel Farage making infinitely more serious hay from the Epping asylum-seeker crisis, anything is possible.
Because it has been quite something to watch the professional xenophobes and racist thugs on social media agitating to riot like it’s 2024.
Add the willingness of sections of the mainstream media to platform – and continue to drip-feed – bigotry and you can see why work is needed to dial down the temperature this summer.
Caught in the cross-fire of the Epping situation are a number of homeless families, legitimate citizens of this country temporarily housed there long before this crisis, ahead of moves to more permanent accommodation.
Friends living in the area report those families have been left terrified by the angry mobs targeting asylum seekers at a hotel.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s comments, suggesting tensions around immigration and falling living standards could lead to more riots, are just as concerning. What on earth is this government doing?
Why would anyone in a position of political influence accentuate the negative and appear to provide the justification for groups to choose violence as an answer for their frustrations?
The people whose businesses were trashed 12 months ago, dragged from the cars at intersections on the basis of their skin colour and singled out to be attacked in parks – they won’t thank politicians for being so careless with their language. They matter.
You expect it from Farage. He has been on TV crowing about the tensions in Epping reflecting the nation’s mood. They don’t – a small number of extremists have infiltrated social media to gain traction.
They reflect the toxic atmosphere Farage remains desperate to cultivate here. The kind of climate where masked operatives pull up in people carriers and drag Black and Brown people off the street as they do in America.
There can be little doubt that such a place is where the liars, thugs and those who wish to divide us want to take us.
So, some facts for you. It isn’t illegal to claim asylum. That right remains enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention.
The majority of asylum seekers live in low or middle-income countries, most of them close to the places they fled.
The asylum-seeker problem exists here because the government makes almost no safe and legal route available to any refugee other than someone from Ukraine. For everyone else, the Tories’ Nationality and Borders Act 2022 means you need to be here to claim asylum.
It was a deliberate act to frame everyone arriving here in need as an illegal. The current government – desperate to curry favour with the online Right – has no intention of changing things any time soon.
Yet even that isn’t enough for the xenophobes. “Stop the boats” remains a cover for extremists to continue their quest to purge this country of Black and Brown people.
The UK’s underfunded welfare system has been broken for decades and remains nothing to do with immigration. And yet social media has replaced Enoch Powell’s racist scaremongering with shameful attempts to minimise the work of low-paid immigrants who rebuilt this country after the Second World War.
And, no, not every person targeted by the systematic, multi-platform disinformation campaign to frame migrants as an existential threat is racist. Many are simply reacting to the lies they are being fed.
The racists are the ones doing what the likes of Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell, Nick Griffin, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage have done for years – injecting their divisive poison into the nation’s bloodstream.
That poison is threatening to take effect again this summer. It is incumbent on all forms of media to reject it in favour of preserving people’s safety.
We know what they did last summer. Let’s stop them.