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Mar. 23rd, 2015 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
webofevil“Who’s going to win the election, then?” It’s a question whose elements float around the building like a nebula, coating everything in it with an unsettling film of uncertainty, but rarely do they gather enough momentum to coalesce into a planetoid that can, say, be bowled at me slightly mischievously by one of our cleaners, a lady in her 50s originally from Mauritius. I run through my usual spiel that basically no-one knows anything at this point, and demoralisation nationally is such that any of the grab-bag of horrors running for office might scrape into power on the pitiful smattering of votes that people will be bothered to cast.
“I think it will be Ukip,” she says. I say that, despite everything I just said, this is still powerfully unlikely. “I shall be voting Ukip,” she says proudly. I look at her, wide-eyed. “But… you know that they don’t like you, right?” I venture. She raises her chin in defiance and pride. “I have been here for 40 years and I have worked for all that time,” she says, “and now I see all these immigrants coming here and getting everything for free.”
We bat back and forth a bit on the veracity of the relentless media reports of hordes of immigrants swarming across the Channel like flying ants to find themselves greeted with cries of joy from self-hating white do-gooders, wrapped in a carpet of money and gifted all the mansions they can eat [1], but she’s immovable. She firmly believes every word they print. “I have always worked for my money,” she says.
“And so do most of them!” I reply, but she’s having none of it. Finally I have no choice but to approach the more delicate aspect of all this. “Okay, but you do know that most Ukip members and voters are really racist?”
“I think that I also am becoming a bit racist,” she confides with a sheepish grin, before launching into an account of the welfare fiddles she reckons her Pakistani neighbours are getting up to. Her own experiences as a black woman emigrating to the UK in the mid-1970s, which are unlikely to have been too rosy, have faded enough that they can be overwritten by the same poisonous far-right narrative that can always be counted on to snare those who have very little: that lot over there are already getting more than you for doing nothing, and if you’re not careful they’ll come and get your stuff too. (Yes, this narrative can be used by the far left too, but in their case they’re talking about the hyper-rich and privileged rather than people who also have very little—and it can’t be quite so easily dismissed as untrue.)
Doomed, I persist. “And you know that they don’t think your children are British? Ukip, and the papers that support them, don’t care if someone is born here and has grown up here—they will always see them as ‘hidden migrants’ and use that to attack them.” Here she sidetracks unexpectedly into a story about having been told officially (by a never identified “them”) that she would be allowed to call her children English but not British, a claim I've never heard before and which sounds a lot like a misunderstanding, but it derails us from confronting the central issue of whether, having voted for them, she would honestly be invited to remain in he adopted country were her chosen party ever to win any kind of majority. Not, I suspect, that she would ever give this scenario any headspace to begin with; she has the monomania, and ability to ignore troublesome and conflicting ideas, of the true believer. She'd still vote for them if Farage himself beeped her nose and daubed a racist slur on her coat.
So when pundits note that the votes of immigrant citizens will play an increasing role in future elections, bear in mind that it isn’t necessarily obvious just who those votes will be cast for. It is at least as likely that someone who has come into a society from outside and had to fight for their place will be minded to pull up the ladder behind them as it is that they might be sympathetic to the plight of anyone following in their wake—especially if there’re encouraged to feel that way by cynical politicians looking to hit the electoral jackpot that is always guaranteed by spreading distrust and fear.
[1] You couldn't make it up.
“I think it will be Ukip,” she says. I say that, despite everything I just said, this is still powerfully unlikely. “I shall be voting Ukip,” she says proudly. I look at her, wide-eyed. “But… you know that they don’t like you, right?” I venture. She raises her chin in defiance and pride. “I have been here for 40 years and I have worked for all that time,” she says, “and now I see all these immigrants coming here and getting everything for free.”
We bat back and forth a bit on the veracity of the relentless media reports of hordes of immigrants swarming across the Channel like flying ants to find themselves greeted with cries of joy from self-hating white do-gooders, wrapped in a carpet of money and gifted all the mansions they can eat [1], but she’s immovable. She firmly believes every word they print. “I have always worked for my money,” she says.
“And so do most of them!” I reply, but she’s having none of it. Finally I have no choice but to approach the more delicate aspect of all this. “Okay, but you do know that most Ukip members and voters are really racist?”
“I think that I also am becoming a bit racist,” she confides with a sheepish grin, before launching into an account of the welfare fiddles she reckons her Pakistani neighbours are getting up to. Her own experiences as a black woman emigrating to the UK in the mid-1970s, which are unlikely to have been too rosy, have faded enough that they can be overwritten by the same poisonous far-right narrative that can always be counted on to snare those who have very little: that lot over there are already getting more than you for doing nothing, and if you’re not careful they’ll come and get your stuff too. (Yes, this narrative can be used by the far left too, but in their case they’re talking about the hyper-rich and privileged rather than people who also have very little—and it can’t be quite so easily dismissed as untrue.)
Doomed, I persist. “And you know that they don’t think your children are British? Ukip, and the papers that support them, don’t care if someone is born here and has grown up here—they will always see them as ‘hidden migrants’ and use that to attack them.” Here she sidetracks unexpectedly into a story about having been told officially (by a never identified “them”) that she would be allowed to call her children English but not British, a claim I've never heard before and which sounds a lot like a misunderstanding, but it derails us from confronting the central issue of whether, having voted for them, she would honestly be invited to remain in he adopted country were her chosen party ever to win any kind of majority. Not, I suspect, that she would ever give this scenario any headspace to begin with; she has the monomania, and ability to ignore troublesome and conflicting ideas, of the true believer. She'd still vote for them if Farage himself beeped her nose and daubed a racist slur on her coat.
So when pundits note that the votes of immigrant citizens will play an increasing role in future elections, bear in mind that it isn’t necessarily obvious just who those votes will be cast for. It is at least as likely that someone who has come into a society from outside and had to fight for their place will be minded to pull up the ladder behind them as it is that they might be sympathetic to the plight of anyone following in their wake—especially if there’re encouraged to feel that way by cynical politicians looking to hit the electoral jackpot that is always guaranteed by spreading distrust and fear.
[1] You couldn't make it up.
