Drawing of a Victorian prison hulk
Ugly politics for ugly times – that sums up the way things are.
Whenever you switch on the TV news, there is home secretary Suella Braverman or prime minister Rishi Sunak spouting vileness. It’s enough to make you reach for the antacid tablets – bring on the Gov-iscon, designed to soothe the unsettling effects of political bile.
Handy that Great Expectations is back on television. Never mind your personal feelings about Steven Knight’s version (seen one episode, didn’t mind it so far), just notice the parallels, not least the prison hulks.
As part of the government’s attempts to stir up the small boats crisis and use it as a political weapon, the Home Office is reported to be preparing an enormous barge to house asylum seekers offshore.
Dickens compared the prison ships, covered in chains, to a “wicked” version of Noah’s ark – containing prisoners the public often regarded as little better than animals or beasts.
A similar cruel distancing happens when asylum seekers are herded on to insanitary old army camps – or floated offshore in incommodious barges. Instead of being seen as fellow humans, they are distanced, othered, blamed for their fate.
Imagine an alternative scenario…
We’ve spent billions keeping out migrants and demonising disadvantaged people, whipping up hysteria and stooping to the far-right politics espoused by the likes of Britain First, and thus normalising hate.
Couldn’t we just have been human instead?
Imagine if all the effort, all the endless money, all the stale acres of harrowed political debate had been replaced by intelligent thought and kind action.
Imagine if instead of othering migrants by pushing them away and keeping them at a distance, we had risen to the challenge with swift efficiency (rather than sclerotic inefficiency). Been welcoming and kind, instead of hateful and cruel.
Many of those people we are spending so much time, money and effort repelling would almost certainly become good citizens who would add to the variety and strength of British life.
A migrant corralled in a camp or on a barge is kept apart and made to seem less human. A migrant in the workplace or down your road suddenly becomes more human, less of an “other”, a neighbour, a friend.
But no. We are trapped in a politics suggested by those Escher drawings – his impossible constructions, where somehow you ascend or descend only to end up exactly where you started.
Sunak and Braverman holler about a crisis they are only making worse; the knottier the crisis becomes, the louder they shout, hoping to capitalise on the fallout and assuming we will all forget just how long their party has had to sort everything out.
Ugly politics for ugly times (part two).
Sunak’s crackdown on grooming and sexual exploitation of young people seems to have more to do with political calculation than anything else.
When Braverman tweets that “evil grooming gangs must never be able to prey on vulnerable children”, she is saying something everyone can agree with. Yet she seems mostly concerned, with her talk of political correctness and blaming Labour-led councils, to make political capital out of a painful issue.
Ugly politics for ugly times (part three).
Sunak has announced a review into how sex education is taught in state schools – seemingly all to appease one Tory MP, Miriam Cates, whose belief that children were being exposed to sex education classes that were “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate” seems mostly to have been based on urban myth, exaggeration and half-truths turns on their head.
To quote from the misguided Miriam during prime minister’s questions: “Graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely, and 72 genders. This is what passes for relationships and sex education in British schools.”
Only, well, it doesn’t. Still, you can’t let the facts get in the way of a good culture wars scrap.
I kept typing “culture warts” in that last sentence, and there may be something in that.