Partridge Iciclebubbles wrote:KK wrote:But isn't the argument from those posters that they could be coming; that doesn't explain why you'd blame the EU for the racial make-up of the UK right now.
If you think there are too many Romanians in the UK and you want them to leave, voting out of the EU makes sense. Voting out of the EU because there are currently too many Indians, does not. The caller on LBC seemed to be complaining about there not being 1 white face in his hospital/supermarket, and while obviously not everyone in the EU is white, proportionately speaking, that would be filed under non-EU immigration policy.
Those posters and leaflets from around the time of the referendum added to the sense that Britain was full up, that brown people were arriving in droves and that the EU would just let anybody in. The media for a long time had been spreading the view that being in the EU meant unlimited immigration, thick people had no idea that that meant French, German, Polish and Romanian people and not Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican and South African.
The type of person that would call James O’Brien to moan about too many Pakistanis in the supermarket is not the sort of person that can differentiate between Romania, Turkey, Pakistan and Syria. These are the same people that I remember in the pub after the London tube bombings who wanted to go and “smash up the Paki shop” for revenge. It didn’t matter that the shop was run by (British born) Indian Hindus, “they’re all the same innit!”.
That’s why the Farage poster and the Vote Leave leaflets were so dangerous and why they attracted the racist vote.
Such people don't differentiate between different types of foreigner. It's just a case of "us" versus "them". It's a tribal mentality and harks back to seeing a different group of people over the hill, with strange clothes and customs and they have a different word for "dog" and "chair" that isn't "dog" or "chair" and being worried that they are going to violently take over your little village and whisk away your crops, livestock and child-bearers.
You aren't scared of "foreigners" because they come from a specific country or for geopolitical reasons attached to that country, you're scared because they are the "other" and unlike you and your little tribe. And your tribe may not be representative of your community, your town or Britain as a whole, but is largely populated by the people you choose to associate with. So it's effectivrlt representative of nothing.
Now, obviously, the group in question is generally the Muslim population (let's forget for a moment that Muslims aren't a homogenous group from one select portion of the world). In the 70s it would have been people from the Indian sub-continent. In the 50s, possibly people from the West Indies. In the 1880s it would have been Jewish people. There's always an "other".
It just so happens that people like that caller can't quite get their head around things, and so manifest a lot of their problems with "the other". Their son(s) couldn't get a job at a local supermarket, but there were 22 brown people on the tills, ergo it has to be the fault of those people that my son didn't get a job.
Now, there are legitimate arguments to be made for and against what kind of immigration controls a country implements. But that caller didn't seem to care where people came from (some of those brown people probably came from as far away as Finchley which is on the strawberry floating Northern Line for crying out loud) but more that when he looked around, he didn't see people recognisably like him or what he is used to.
Also, as a bit of an aside, I do find it slyly ironic that a lot of the far-right hark back to the glory days of the British Empire, without realising that at its pomp, the Empire was so widespread that it automatically made more "foreigners" British that ever before. Some of the "brown people" the caller complained about, possibly have roots back in the days of Empire. Just in case we forget, India and Pakistan were effectively Britain until 70 years ago, and the Empire was a quarter of the Earth's land and it wasn't just all the nice, fair-headed whities either. I don't really know anything about Imperial Britain's immigration controls but we might also want to consider how far we flung our net back in those days (sometimes quite literally, unfortunately).
Still, the caller can't actually complain why seeing a brown face presumably different from his own is bad, beyond some tenuous personal "evidence" about it stopping his son get a job. The sad thing is, while I am sure a number of Remain voters had legitimate personal concerns, there are more than a few than had this sort of cognitive dissonance and just squashed together all of life's little problems and epitomised them in the brown person bagging their carrots on a Thursday morning (not a euphemism).
Also I've had a drink tonight too, so eat that, Tragic Magic.
