The right-wing press has spent a decade pumping out day-after-day propaganda that depicts asylum seekers as swan-baking, benefit-snatching criminals who surge into Britain in their hundreds of thousands to scrounge, steal and rape. Yet this week, those same journalists have been open-mouthed and astonished to discover that their campaign has had a real political effect.
They have reported with hushed horror that one quarter of British people is now sufficiently soaked in this invented hate to consider voting in the local elections for the nakedly racist British National Party. Well, what did they expect?
Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, took the unprecedented step last year of warning the British press that they were stoking “dangerous” levels of hate against refugees — but they continued unabated. They invented more slanders against refugees than an entire issue of The Independent could list — imaginary Kurdish asylum seekers who turn out to be terrorists, fantasy figures of more than a million “illegals” streaming in every year, and countless cookie-cutter rants claiming that bitterly poor people living on £38 a week in a damp council flat were being “hosed down with benefits.”
There was an intriguing moment in this week’s Spectator when one right-wing journalist came face to face with what he and his friends have wrought. Last year, Peter Oborne lauded Michael Howard’s asylum-thrashing election campaign — in which some Tory candidates even claimed MRSA had been caused by asylum seekers — as “superb,” and its leader as “honorable” and “admirable.” Yet he was astonished to travel out into the Real World (Dagenham) and find people who say things such as this: “Half the world is getting dumped around here. I’m a retailer. I work 50 to 60 hours a week. I’m working my guts out. And I see people from nowhere getting a Mercedes cheap. My daughter was ill and it took us ten days to see my GP. People come in from Eastern Europe and get seen straight up.”
Did he think the lies about Mercs-for-Turks would have no effect? Did he imagine people saw them as part of the political argy-bargy, rather than a serious claim about the Kurdish or Congolese or Iranian family living next door? Yet rather than acknowledge its own culpability, the right-wing press has found a new group to blame.
The rise of the BNP is not due to its own media-inflated racism, with its old, old history stretching back to the Daily Mail’s claims in 1938 that “the way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring into this country is an outrage.” No — it is due to the very presence of asylum seekers and immigrants, and the government’s “lavish treatment” of them.
Last month, I traveled to Yarl’s Wood — the detention center for asylum seekers just outside London — to witness this “lavish treatment” first-hand. Jules was asleep the night they came for her children. The first she heard was four, five, six men standing at the foot of her bed telling her not to scream. She could hear her daughters — the eight-year-old and the 17-year-old — shriek and sob and shake in the next room down, but she was not allowed to hold them. She had to pack a tiny bag, and quick. All three of them were going to be taken and locked away together indefinitely.
Five months later, they are still festering in a jail cell, the end-point for this swift shift from a bang on the glass door to a life behind iron doors and barbed wire. The eight-year-old has lost a stone in weight; her clothes are hanging off her like rags. The 17-year-old has retreated to a sullen silence, rarely speaking. Nobody has ever accused these women of committing a crime. All Jules and her children did was run for their lives, run for safety to London, a place they thought would offer them asylum.
As I sit with Jules in the stark visiting room of this not-a-prison-honest-guv, she explains that she might be held for another five months — or another ten. She has no idea. A curvy woman with a high, blond wig and defeated eyes, she tells me her story in a drained monotone.
It begins in Jamaica, where she was a successful businesswoman manufacturing and selling her own clothes. She decided to throw out her husband — “He was no good,” she says — and the troubles began.
He said he would “chop her” if she didn’t take him back. She ignored him — and took a knife in her chest and in her throat as a result. She lifts her wig, and it becomes clear it is not a fashion accessory. It is there to cover the angry scar that runs along her throat. “He burned down my mother’s house,” she says so quietly I have to lean close to hear. “He stabbed the little one. I knew if I didn’t leave Jamaica, I would be chopped to pieces.” A British judge granted Jules leave to remain in the country, but the Home Office appealed — and that’s why she was snatched from her London flat to this place; this collection of yellowing prison buildings in bleak Bedford scrubland.
She has no idea what is going to happen to her. Her children are not being properly educated. The youngest girl cannot cope with the fact she was not even allowed to say goodbye to her class and to her teacher. The teenager is distraught — “she did well in her GCSEs, she wanted to go to university.” She feels like she is going insane.
So this is where it ends, I thought as I sat and looked at her watery eyes. All the years of journalists demonizing asylum seekers, all the years of politicians caving in to them — it ends here, with children locked behind bars for the “crime” of seeking asylum. Jules and her daughters are not alone. Every year 2,000 children of asylum seekers are locked up in this country for months on end. Doctors are warning that we are inflicting irreparable trauma on these children.
One mother explains that even a year after she and her son were released from the detention center, “He still has nightmares. He is afraid of knocks on the door. He is even afraid when letters arrive. One year later and he is afraid of letters. It is so scary.”
Are the asylum haters happy now? No. We are still “cosseting” and “spoiling” refugees. The government policy of appeasing the far right by adopting ever-more-cruel measures has failed. Their lies have only grown. The BNP is a deserving target, but far too easy. It is the right-wing press that has pumped out racist sewage for years. They have no right to act surprised now that swarms of vermin are feeding on it.
