Have you considered getting some horns? They rather become you.
Dear Dominic Cummings,
I know. It’s not fair to label all Brexit voters and campaigners as racists. For one thing, you bamboozled thousands of curry house owners into backing leave by (very quietly) promising them relaxed immigration rules for workers from Asia. On the other hand, you’d be hard pushed to find a white supremacist who didn’t swing behind it. The question here is whether it was hatred of foreigners that was driving you.
Shame, cos I was quite proud of this one.
If I’d needed any
convincing, by the by, that Brexit was beloved of the far right, the last nine
years would have set me straight. I’ve been doxxed, received death threats, and
had someone send me a picture of the pub at the end of my street, merely for expressing
the view online that the UK might have been better off staying in the European
Union. And last time I went on a pro-EU march, a band of Brexit thugs outside
Westminster tube station physically attacked me and snapped my placard in two.
I’ll save us time and take it as read that you condemn such behaviour in the strongest possible terms, while taking care to note that those individuals are a tiny minority and not representative of the leave movement as a whole, yada yada.
In our university days, I never got any overtly Ku Klux Klan vibes from you, although Oxford at the time was whiter than a No 10 staffer’s septum and since you never left your room, I never saw you interact with anyone but me.
The Leave
campaign was a many-headed beast, but by far the two biggest heads were your
bunch, Vote Leave, and Banks and Farage’s Leave.EU. While you were at pains to
point out that there was no cooperation between your groups, somehow, your attack
lines somehow dovetailed beautifully.
Leave.EU took the low road, spreading egregious falsehoods and obsessively shrieking “immigration”, appealing to people’s lizard brains, their base emotions. Your Vote Leave, meanwhile, took a semi-respectable, pseudo-intellectual approach, avoiding outright deception in favour of half-truths, exaggerations and cherry-picked data.
Ah. Two classic pieces by the Bruegel of Bullshit, Darren Grimes of BeLeave.
Leave.EU’s manure fuelled the motivation – racism – but it was your seemingly rational arguments that gave the shit a patina of legitimacy. So millions of people were free to vote with their gut safe in the knowledge that they could justify it to themselves and others with impressive-sounding but meaningless stats and equally meaningless abstract concepts like “sovereignty”. The bald fact is, you’d never have got over the line without them, nor they without you.
“The EU … [has ] got this combination of free movement, can’t cope with Islamic nutjobs and growing political extremist parties” – Dominic Cummings, 2017
For all that, I’m
fairly sure that you, as an educated man, don’t subscribe to the belief that
white people are genetically superior to black or brown ones. I’m also sure that
you, as a devotee of data, know very well that immigrants are net contributors
to the economy; that they are twice as likely as native Britons to set up their
own business; that only a small minority of immigrants are terrorists or
rapists or scroungers and the crime rate among immigrants is no worse than
among the native-born; that the great majority of asylum claims are found to be
valid; that the only reason some are a temporary drain on state coffers is
because successive UK governments pandering to their perceived xenophobic base
have deliberately created an abstruse and arduous asylum process and that the
state forbids them from working for a year (compared with six months, for
example, in Germany); that much of Britain’s historic wealth and influence was
built on immigrant labour and technical skill (as well as on slavery, which is
just immigration minus the letting-them-in part); and that in future, without
significant levels of inflow, the UK’s population, and therefore growth, will collapse.
I’m sure you also figured out at some point that you can’t just click your fingers and get all of Britain’s young, sick, or recently retired people to fill in for the jobs that immigrants currently do.
You might even admit under light torture that the “problem” with immigration is not the reality of the thing – most people who’ve met immigrants hold no fear of them – but its perception, which has been shaped for years by the Daily Mail, the Spectator, Tommy Robinson, Farage, and, well, you.
You have been
vocal in recent years about the EU’s inability to reduce immigrant numbers. (Though
if this were a genuine worry of yours, one would think you’d prefer the UK to
be on the inside, since even though we take in fewer souls than almost any
other country, it’s just as much our concern as the other 27 states’, and it
might be useful to have access to Europol, Frontex, the Schengen Information
System and the European Arrest Warrant.)
Perhaps, though, you’re not a full-blooded racist, but merely a patriot: a believer in sovereignty and self-determination.
But here again, I can’t imagine that you, a self-professed philosopher king, haven’t twigged that membership of an economic bloc – impossible without some shared standards and values – involves surrendering a barely measurable fraction of national sovereignty in return for enormous benefits to commerce and culture and opportunities for its citizens. It’s a trade-off that 27 other advanced, wealthy countries have been more than happy to make.
I’m sure you’re also aware that Brussels never really dictated anything to the UK, because the UK was a full and equal partner in all decisions (some would say, thanks to the concessions won by Margaret Thatcher’s bullying, a more than equal partner). Indeed, many of the most unpopular laws “inflicted on” Britain, such as the measures to promote energy-efficient lightbulbs, were British proposals.
And if, as I will discuss in a future post, you hoped one of the bonuses of Brexit would be closer alignment with (ie subservience to) the US, can the notion of sovereignty really be so precious to you?
All of which leads me to near certainty that you, as a literate and numerate man, will have known full well that leaving the EU would do nothing to alleviate the immigrant crisis, so there’s no way you’d have inflicted such deep and lasting damage on Britain’s economy, its relations with its allies, and its global soft power, for that reason.
On balance, then, I’ll grant you the benefit of the doubt and conclude that racism was not your chief motivation for Brexit. While taking care to note that you collaborated with racists, used methods favoured by racists to win the hearts of racists, caused a massive rise in racially motivated attacks, and handed more political power to racists than they could have dreamed of 20 years ago.
Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a communist?
It’s way past time we had a grown-up, informed conversation about freedom of movement
Warning: pot at gold at end of rainbow may turn out to be punch in face.
I’ve made the case for migration being an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. That does not, of course, necessarily make it a good thing. Human instinct is not the most reliable moral compass. And since purportedly liberal voices have recently joined the far-right tub-thumpers in talking about “tighter controls”, and even the Guardian has to use “actually” in the headline of a positive story about immigration, there are clearly issues yet to be settled here.
So here’s a cost-benefit analysis: a comparison of the (alleged) benefits and drawbacks of human resettlement.
The downsides
Prior to 1066, most arrivals in the British Isles were invaders or raiders rather than true migrants. The relative calm that followed the Norman Conquest paved the way for the first peaceful settlers – and the slurs the natives have lobbed at them have barely evolved in a millennium.
‘They’re stealing our jobs’
Twaddle on every level.
It was never “your” job to begin with. It was a job advertised in the country where you happened to be born. It was the employer’s job, to give to whomsoever she chose.
The migrant is in no sense “stealing” the job; she is merely competing fairly for it. If you’re finishing second best to someone whose first language isn’t English, you might want to think about a different line of work.
The majority of immigrants take jobs that Britons simply don’t want to do, such as cleaning, fruit picking and social care. Many more take roles that Britons cannot do: the UK has huge skills shortages in a number of sectors, notably engineering, IT and healthcare.
(Incidentally, the racists who trot out this line can rarely back it up with evidence. When they do, it’s anecdotal: “It happened to me” or “It happened to my mate”. Sorry to break it to you, Socrates, but the value of anecdotal evidence is precisely diddly-squat. All the large-scale data says otherwise.)
Besides, the number of jobs available is not fixed (this common misapprehension is known as the lump of labour fallacy). Immigrants earn and pay taxes, pay rent, buy food and clothes and phones and all the other things natives do. This indirectly creates more jobs. Furthermore, many of them start up their own businesses (indeed, immigrants are twice as likely as locals to do so), thus directly creating more jobs. If there were a fixed number of vacancies in an economy, then unemployment after years of mass immigration should be stratospheric. It’s not. The latest figure is 4.1%, or 1.38 million people – among the lowest of all time.
It’s true that living in an economic union of 550 million citizens means there’s 10 times as much competition as when the UK’s borders were closed. But it also means there are 10 times as many job opportunities. That’s the whole point of an expanded labour market: more choice for employers, more for employees.
‘They’re driving down wages’
Not according to 99% of all research into this issue, they’re not. Some studies have found marginal evidence of a slight depression in pay for the very lowest-paid, but the picture is far from clear-cut, not least because it’s impossible to know what would have happened to wages in the absence of freedom of movement.
At worst, according to the Migration Advisory Council’s calculations, a 10% increase in the number of non-natives entering the services industry may have resulted in a 1.9% decrease in wages for those employed in it – most of whom, traditionally, were migrants already.
Besides, any short-term losses are more than made up for in the long term by overall growth in the economy due to immigration, which benefits everyone.
‘They’re all scroungers’
This argument, in conjunction with the above, conjures the image of Schrödinger’s immigrant: a shadowy figure simultaneously stealing people’s jobs and lazing in front of Jeremy Kyle while wallowing in the opulence conferred by the UK welfare system.
It’s also bollocks. Government figures show that foreign nationals are far less likely to claim benefits than people born in the UK; while they make up 17.6% of the working population, they account for less than 7.4% of benefits awarded.
This is largely because the law grants foreign-born citizens less access to the welfare system in the first place. Under our arrangement with the EU, no EU citizen can claim benefits for the first three months of their stay, and they can be deported if they have not found work after three further months on benefits (or cannot otherwise support themselves).
Besides, it makes no sense. Who in their right mind would give up their friends, family and culture, uproot everything and go to all the trouble of building an entire new life in a country with unfamiliar food, customs and language, with the sole aim of pocketing the princely sum of £73 a week?
‘They’re all criminals’
Jewish usurers, Gypsy thieves, Italian mobsters, Irish thugs, Asian grooming gangs: virtually every wave of foreigners to set foot on these shores has endured systematic accusations of wrongdoing. While every cart has its bad apples, it simply isn’t true that immigrants are more likely to break the law than natives.
Unfortunately for your argument, Mr Racist, IRCs are … immigration removal centres, which hold people awaiting deportation, almost exclusively for immigration violations. They generally hold around 3,000 people. So the number of foreigners detained in English and Welsh prisons, for actual crimes, is only 8% of the total. Or below the national average.
In some cases, it appears that immigration actually lowers crime. One research paper, for example, found that the incarceration rate among foreign-born US citizens was a quarter of the rate for those born there.
Criminals, like benefit scroungers, are lazy. It’s their defining quality. The reason they commit crimes and sign on, rather than getting a job, is that they want maximum return for minimum effort. But (as any British plumber allegedly put out of work by a Polish counterpart will tell you) most migrants work hard.
It stands to reason. Is someone who has the get-up-and-go, organisational skills and commitment to do the necessary research, learn a new language, fill out all the paperwork, leave behind home, career and family, travel hundreds of miles, set up a bank account, etc, really going to turn into a slob on arrival? Is a rapist-in-waiting really going to go to all that trouble merely because he fancies raping British women?
Blackguards and wastrels are more likely to ply their “trades” nearer home, where they have established criminal networks and understand the local markets and loopholes, than to trudge halfway across the world to an alien land with a firmer rule of law.
It’s worth mentioning – because most Leave voters sure don’t seem to know – that under EU law, the UK already has the power to deport criminals of EU origin. It can also prevent known offenders from entering. In the year ending June 2017, 5,301 EU citizens were deported from the UK, and in the period 2010-2016, the Border Force refused entry to 6,000 EU nationals.
“But look,” say the racists, linking to a single story about an EU immigrant who committed a crime, or a handful of bad guys. Again, they’re generalising from isolated incidents to a broader pattern that the figures just don’t support.
“I don’t care if only 0.25% of foreigners commit crimes,” bleat other racists. “Ten thousand is too many! Get rid of them all!” That’s like banning all cars because 0.6% of them are involved in serious accidents every year, or banning all doctors because 0.4% of them have criminal convictions. Madness.
When racists attempt to support their claims with evidence, they invariably cite the Quilliam report, just about the only vaguely authoritative investigation into so-called grooming gangs conducted to date in the UK. Close analysis, however, reveals it to be no such thing; its assumptions, methodology and conclusions have all been rubbished by other commentators.
As a footnote, I would remind you that Britain’s departure from the EU threatens its participation in the European Arrest Warrant, under which almost 7,000 criminals were removed from 2009-2016.
‘They’re putting pressure on housing and social services’
There is some logic behind this one. Unlike the labour market, a country’s resources and services are, at any given point, finite. If more people arrive, there will be fewer houses, school places and GP appointments to go around.
However, governments always have the option to build more houses and schools, just as they have done to accommodate population growth throughout history. And as it turns out, immigrants disproportionately take jobs in education and healthcare, and, being younger and healthier, use these services less. As the UK is now discovering, if you create a hostile environment for foreigners, the teachers, lecturers, doctors, nurses and carers will be among the first to leave, and services will come under yet more strain.
“Why can’t we just train our own?” whine the racists. We can; but in the first place, it’s expensive – it costs £70,000 to train a nurse from scratch, £479,000 for a general practitioner, and £725,000 for a consultant. Second, it takes time: four years for a nurse, nine for a doctor. And third, you can’t expect exactly the right number of British students to step into a particular role simply because The Country Needs It. Supply does not always meet demand (which is another argument for a common market; it creates a larger playing field over which such imbalances can be corrected).
By the by, the notion that “Britain is full” is risible. The population density of the UK is 272/km2. By comparison, Monaco has 19,009 people per square kilometre, or 70 times the concentration. The UK population would have to reach 4.5 billion before it was as full as Monaco.
‘They’re destroying our culture’
A couple of hundred years ago, English culture was cockfighting, bear-baiting, maypoles and Morris dancing. Few got out their hankies when they faded away to be replaced with football, pubs and Celebrity fucking Big Brother.
In any case, the speed of change in the UK is constantly being exaggerated by the media. The endless stories in the Daily Mail and Express about people forced to say “Happy holiday” instead of “Christmas”, the word “Easter” being omitted from chocolate eggs and pork products being dropped from restaurant menus are usually anecdotal if true at all: scaremongering designed to sell more papers. Oh, and there are no sharia courts. There are a few dozen sharia councils that consult on matters of marriage and divorce.
To those racists who insist that the British way of life is under threat, I say this: Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures are all still pretty damned vibrant. If they can survive centuries of English dominion, why can’t English culture survive the arrival of a few million guests?
Culture is fluid. Like language, it’s a living, breathing thing. Any culture that stops changing withers and dies. And how do cultures change? By evolution, certainly, but mostly, like language, by borrowing from others. To illustrate this point, I’ve compiled a short list of aspects of “British” culture that aren’t actually British at all:
Fish and chips (Portugal, Belgium), roast dinners (France), full English breakfast (Germans popularised sausages and bacon, while baked beans come from South America via the US and their sauce is made from Mediterranean tomatoes), barbecues (Caribbean), beer made from hops (Netherlands), golf (ancient Rome or China, via pre-Union Scotland), April Fool’s Day (France, or the Netherlands; certainly not England), Christmas and all things Christian (Middle East), Christmas trees (Germany), Easter eggs (Africa via Iraq), New Year’s celebrations (Iraq), pantomime (Italy), curry (India/Sri Lanka), pizza (Italy) and St George (Turkey).
‘They don’t integrate’
Admittedly, some do so more successfully than others. Just two points here: 1) integration is a two-way street. If you demonise and/or intimidate immigrants and refuse to employ them or socialise with them, you can hardly blame them for sticking with their own kind. 2) I can state categorically that every one of my friends from the EU – the ones who are still here, as well as the ones driven away by Brexit – speak and write English to a far higher standard than the average Brexiter on social media.
‘Allowing free movement within the EU discriminates against non-EU citizens’
This laughable bad-faith argument is about migration from specific countries rather than migration in general, but I’m mentioning it here because it seems to have gained a lot of traction of late.
You can see its appeal. It allows Brexit diehards to paint Remainers as the bad, racist guys and by extension themselves as the angels. But the notion that, because certain people enjoy certain advantages and others do not, you must create a level playing field by removing them from everyone – “’S not fair!” – is absurd.
By this reasoning, Fitness First is discriminating against non-members by only allowing in paying members. Alice is discriminating against Jenny (and everyone else on the planet) by dating Brian, so she must remain single for ever. And you are discriminating against all other fruits by eating an apple, and so must starve.
It’s impossible to strike deals with everyone at once. This is just a cynical contortion of language in an attempt to mislead, one that smells very strongly of 55 Tufton Street.
‘They’re all riddled with disease’
What utter bastards! When they’re not stealing your job or raping your children, they’re infecting you with typhus and AIDS!
Accusations of uncleanliness have dogged migrants for centuries – the Irish and the Gypsies came in for a particularly hard time – and while this line hasn’t seen so much play in the Brexit debate, the fake news merchants at Fox Newsand the like are frantically pursuing the health emergency angle in their rush to demonise the central American migrant caravan.
The more hysterical nationalists are convinced that if immigration persists at its present levels, white British people will soon be in a minority, or eliminated altogether.
This is the slippery slope fallacy in action: the assumption that a trend will continue unchanged. But trends never do. Rates of migration rise and fall. The UK has recently experienced a peak in new arrivals, as a result of the accession of the eastern European states. As those states’ prosperity approaches that of the UK, the number of people moving here will decline.
No one’s seriously going to dispute this, are they? I’ve already mentioned the high levels of foreign-born staff in the NHS and the education system, but they also make up a disproportionate chunk of the workforce in catering, construction, fruit-picking, food preparation and technology. Food is already rotting in fields and patients dying alone in hospitals since the number of immigrants began to fall after the Brexit vote.
They’re great for business
Immigrants bring energy, dynamism and ideas. Immigrants are responsible for one in every seven new startups in the UK, and their ventures create 14% of all British jobs. Here’s a far from complete list of great “British” brands that were in fact founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants: Dollond & Aitchison, M&S, Tesco, Rothschild & Co, ICI, General Electric, Burton, Selfridge’s, Barings Bank, Barnardo’s, Mme Tussauds, GlaxoSmithKline, British Petroleum, Reuters, Schroders Asset Management, Moss Bros, Triumph, Lion’s soaps, Shell, Easyjet, Cobra Beer, Acorn Computers (ARM), WPP, Cafe Nero, DueDil, RationalFX, Deliveroo, Transferwise, Kano, Carwow and Hassle.
They enhance our culture
New food, new music, new fashions, new words. You can draw up your own fucking list this time.
They boost the economy
If you can find me a single authoritative, peer-reviewed study that shows that immigrants to the UK have a net negative effect on the economy, I’ll shag Katie Hopkins.
But you don’t have to trawl through academic papers for proof that freedom of movement is an economic boon. You just have to draw up a list of the richest cities and countries in the world and then look at their respective levels of migration.
They compensate for falling birthrates
Indigenous Brits are not reproducing at a sufficiently high rate to replace the existing population. British-born women have an average of only 1.7 children each, and a further 200,000 Brits leave these shores every year. Without immigration to make up the shortfall, the British population would decline by 417,000 every year.
And a shrinking population, as China is discovering, is catastrophic for the economy, because there are fewer people to pay tax and thus fund healthcare and pensions for the older generation.
They enhance our personal lives
As well as giving us access to a wider employment market, migration – inward and outward – vastly increases the choice of friends, business partners and lovers available to us. As this is hard to quantify, there’s little in the way of hard research on the subject, but I know I am not alone in having made dozens of wonderful, life-changing connections that would never have come to pass without freedom of movement.
They make war less likely
Last and foremost, freedom of movement between the nations of Europe has – exactly as it was intended to – increased mutual reliance, cooperation and understanding between peoples, tempered nationalist tendencies, and led to the longest spell of uninterrupted peace in the continent’s history. I’m in no hurry to throw that away.
So that means …
“Tottenham has turned French” – Unnamed Londoner, early 16th C
“A certain preacher … abused the strangers in the town, and their manners and customs, alleging that they not only deprived the English of their industry, and of the profits arising therefrom, but dishonoured their dwellings by taking their wives and daughters” – Sebastian Giustinian, ambassador to Venice, 1517
“A congregation … of distressed exiles growne so great and yet daily multiplying, that the place in short time is likely to prove a hive too little to contain such a swarme” – W Somner, 1639
“The nation it is almost quit undone//By French men that doe it daily overrun” – Anonymous, 1691
“Why should we take the bread out of the mouths of our own children and give it to strangers?” – John Adams, US president, 1800
“The Jews of the lower orders … have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
“Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are – some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” – Donald Trump, 2015
I feel ashamed to be a human being when I’m reminded of how little we have learned through the ages.
When debating Brexit with Leave voters on Twitter, I used to concede the point that “having concerns about mass immigration is not racist”. I take it all back. It’s racist as fuck.
The reason I’ve liberally peppered this post with the word “racist” is that, after looking at material from hundreds of sources and weighing the matter long and hard, I’ve concluded that there is no argument against immigration. The benefits are enormous, the costs negligible. The only possible reason left that anyone could have for objecting to immigration is xenophobia, English exceptionalism, Fear of the Other: in a word, racism.
Immigrants are people. Just like us. In fact, usually, better than us; more industrious, less likely to commit crimes, younger, healthier, brighter. If you deny or dismiss the fact that migration is a fundamental part of human nature; if you wave away the proven benefits; if you insist on stressing the downsides to the exclusion of all else, even though there is scant (if endlessly repeated) evidence to back up your point; then you, my foe, are a racist.
Historically, there have been some problems, but it’s invariably the migrants who bear the brunt. Locals might have been mildly inconvenienced by the unsanitary conditions in an Irish ghetto, or the din generated by Italian ragamuffins playing barrel organs on the streets of 19th-century London; meanwhile, the migrants themselves were starving, dying from cholera, being shunned and deported and lynched.
Robert Winder put it so eloquently in his book on migration, Bloody Foreigners, that I’m shamelessly going to quote him in full:
“Illegal immigration is a fine-toothed comb. The system catches the clumsy or the clueless; only the best, the bravest and the luckiest slip through. It should never surprise us when migrants prosper; nearly all of them have passed an exacting extrance exam.”
All this fearmongering about immigrants and minorities has no basis in reality; it is the tool of dangerous demagogues. It is they, and not the targets of their false fury, that we should be deporting.
On 31 July 2016, this story appeared on the Sun’s website. The headline was “Hundreds of Syrians in UK arrested over string of offences including rape and child abuse”.
The report went on to explain that in response to Freedom of Information requests, most of the police forces in England and Wales had supplied figures showing that almost 900 people of Syrian descent had been arrested in the UK over the previous year.
Towards the end of the story, the reporter included the line: “In England and Wales the majority of offences that Syrians were arrested for were immigration violations.” The number of actual arrests for rape listed in the story is two.
The Express story – the story that ran, and still runs, under your byline – did not see fit to include the rather pertinent information about most of the arrests being for immigration violations.
On September 30 2016, after a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation pointing out the misleading presentation of the article, the Star amended its headline.
How do these people form their abhorrent views of racial and religious minorities, I wonder?
On March 11 2017, eight months after the Sun on Sunday story, the far-right, pro-Russia, lunatic conspiracy website Planet Bros ran this “article”, rehashing the information in your report and linking directly to it, with the slightly – but crucially – adjusted headline, “Police Arrest 900 Muslim Migrants In England And Wales For ‘Sickening’ Crimes”. Needless to say, the detail about immigration violations is nowhere to be seen. [Edit, 16/6/17: this story has since been taken down. Which I suppose is to be regarded as a small victory.]
Thousands of people shared it online. It is still being retweeted as I write.
I work in news, so I know it’s highly unlikely that you wrote the headline for the original story yourself. I also know it’s probable that the words you wrote were significantly changed and/or reordered by a desk editor or subeditor. However, your name is the only one publicly associated with the Express story, and so it is to you that I write.
I ask only this. Are you happy with the way your report was presented? Are you happy that your work is actively being used to mislead people, to poison public discourse, and to stir up hatred against an entire race of people, most of whom are guilty of nothing more than overstaying their visa?
Are you happy to be contributing, however indirectly, to the deaths of innocent human beings?
Yours sincerely,
Andy Bodle
Update: Siobhan McFadyen’s response
(Received by email, 16/6/2017, three months after my request)
“I, Siobhan McFadyen, have reported Andy Bodle to police for harassment. Your claims and false, threatening and defamatory.”
I’m extremely curious to see whether writing one blogpost, sending one email and listing some incontrovertible facts constitutes harassment in the eyes of an English court of law.
