The Bury Rascal

I don’t have a problem with migrants being housed near me. In truth, I would sooner live near them than near the people whipping up this ugly campaign against them. My experience, after meeting many immigrants and refugees over the years, is that they are decent, hard-working people who want safety, stability and the chance to build a life. The right’s fixation with presenting foreigners as a threat is a disgraceful joke, engineered to divide communities and redirect anger away from the politicians who have failed them. No issue has been weaponised more cynically by Nigel Farage and his acolytes than immigration. He used it in 2016 to frighten people about European migration, and he is using it again now against people seeking asylum. The method is familiar enough: take an instinctive human fear of the unfamiliar, inflame it, then harvest the resentment. This latest stunt, a vindictive act of intimidation which may well be unlawful, belongs to that same nasty tradition of dehumanising politics. The difference now is the tone. It has become more openly cruel, more performative, more imported from the worst habits of American right-wing politics, where humiliation itself becomes the point. They are getting nastier and dirtier, and they should be called what they are: a disgrace. A movement prepared to treat vulnerable people as props in a political game is nowhere near fit to govern.