Oh for goodness’ sake! When will our politicians and
pressmen stop frantically whipping up this pernicious xenophobia which
apparently lurks like a virus just beneath the skin of us little Britons?
Scarcely a day passes when the spectre of an island overrun with scarcely human
“foreigners” is conjured up by the three main party leaders, like Macbeth’s witches, with Nigel Farage like a malign Hecate
pulling the strings, abetted by the oh-so reasonable Sir (no less) Andrew Green
of the avowedly “non-political” Migration Watch.
Ken Clarke, one of the few Tory ministers with guts enough
to resist the populist tide, asserting that immigrants had made Britain “far
more exciting and healthier”, had No 10 Downing Street (presumably his nibs
himself) quickly ticking him off, and at the same Nick Clegg (Lib Dem) and
Rachel Reeves (one of Labour’s rising stars) denouncing the supposed epidemic
of benefit immigration. Our Ken had it about right when he said, “The idea that you can
have some fundamental debate that somehow stops all these foreigners coming
here is rather typical rightwing, nationalist escapism, I think.”  |
| Mt Kenya from Chogoria |
What a sad day it is when we have reached the point of closing what used
to be known as our bowels of mercy because of someone’s skin-colour or language
or preferences in food – and country of origin! Continually closing your bowels
leads to constipation. I was reminded watching Simon Reeve’s The Tea Trail on BBC last night,
traveling through Kenya from Mombasa to Kericho, of my gap year which I spent
on the east side of Mount Kenya. It was within very few years of the end of the
Mau Mau internments – about which I remember one of my fellow-teachers had
family experience. He and many in that part of Kenya would have had good reason to hate an Englishman like me. And yet he was consistently kind and friendly to me, and wherever I went I was welcomed with the utmost
hospitality. If one of the teachers' cars came a cropper on the potholed murrain roads, there was no lack of willing hands to rescue us. It’s a sobering fact that “Great Britain” is now less hospitable
than the former colony, which we once sought to civilise. Our policy-makers now are seeking to make conditions on access to medical help or social care for the alien and sojourner. We consider such things our right and ours alone. We seem to have lost any
humanity we once possessed, and become introspectively constipated.
Keep administering the laxative of common sense, Mr Clarke, and common
humanity. As Charles Kingsley put it, "Do as you would be done by."
