Playing on prejudice

“You say you were quite ugly as a child
And turn my eyes down to the photograph
To see the sparkling eyes the hair blown wild
And I can almost hear your wide-mouthed laugh...”
From Memories of Desire by Bachchoo

As an elder of the Asian community I am often asked “Are you happy in London?” It’s a difficult question. The last time it was posed an Indian compatriot asked it in a different form. He asked “Are you happy being English?”
I put him right.
“In the UK there are the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish. They would all claim to be ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ etc. before they claimed to be British, just as say Osama bin Laden (Fish Be Upon Him) would claim to be a Muslim before he called himself an Arab. The only people who can describe themselves as ‘British’ first are Jews and ‘immigrants’.”
The categories change as time goes on and new generations are born. West Indian and South Asian immigrants to the UK used to retain their identity as Jamaicans, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, but time erodes and now we are happy to be labelled “British Asians”. The Olympian Mo Farrar went further and dropped the Somali from his categorisation. And, in my case, when officially claiming to be British, say in a passport queue at an airport, I remind myself of the song “Mera joota hein Japani... phir bhi dil hein Hindustani!” (Incidentally was that the first inkling of Indian globalisation?)
In 2014, when Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union, their citizens will be able to travel to and work in Britain without a visa. There is now a pervading paranoia in Britain that these new immigrants will arrive in millions and offer themselves at cheap rates for any available employment. There is the deeper fear that they will arrive on these shores having heard that Britain is an easy touch and that one needn’t do a day’s work in order to get housing and a stipend from the British welfare state which pays people who are unemployed to survive and indeed to prosper.
Any proper examination of the statistics and of projections of the movements of people from Bulgaria and Romania will demonstrate that no such threat to the British economy exists. The hypothetical Romanians and Bulgarians who will turn up as scroungers and alter the culture of British civilisation have today in the “British” imagination replaced the blacks and Asians as the new bogey threatening the politics of these islands.
The government, far from attempting to assuage this paranoia against the new “immigrants” has, in its announcement of intended legislation, announced that it will pass a bill to monitor and restrict the access of the new immigrants or job-seekers to unemployment payments, other welfare benefits, subsidised housing and access to the National Health Service which is perceived as being under pressure from foreigners turning up here with chronic illnesses and being given free treatment thus straining the resources that the British taxpayer pays for.
This prejudice has seen the spectacular rise in the electoral fortunes of a new party called the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) whose central and only platform, apart from reintroducing smoking in pubs, is stopping immigration by withdrawing from the European Union.
No politicians of the government or Opposition can combat this paranoia by stating the bare facts of immigration. It is more profitable for the government to out UKIP by attempting to demonstrate that they too are tough on immigrants.
Playing on prejudice has become a central political plank. The central example is the Tory party preaching that the country is in debt because it pays out vast amounts of welfare benefits to people who are wilfully unemployed and people who pretend to be disabled and claim living allowances while contributing nothing. In power the Tories appointed one of their former party leaders, Ian Duncan Smith as minister for welfare to come up with plans to tackle this culture of
welfare dodging and dependence. After three years of working out strategy Duncan Smith came up with strictures to curb this illegitimate welfare spending. The nation held its breath. At last the lazy and the criminal would face the punishment they deserved.
The savings to the exchequer of these strictures amount in total to £110 million per year. Now this would certainly pay for several ex-Prime Minister’s funerals or for new shelters for hamburger-stalls at another Olympic Games, but was it really a saving that would sort out the problems of the nation and get the shysters to give up their scrounging ways? Considering that the welfare bill of the nation is £90 billion, the saving that Duncan Smith made with his crackdown on scroungers amounted to 0.122 per cent of it! Was that the saving at the heart of nation’s debt problem? Or was it just a political reaction to an orthodoxy fuelled by ignorance, prejudice and envy which the Tory party and their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats
knowingly and cynically exploited?
Apart from this announced intention to legislate against Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants, there are those in the Tory party and a sizeable number of their MPs who believe that the welfare state is pampering the senior citizens of this country. In line with a directive from the European Union all citizens above the age of 60 are afforded the privilege of “Freedom passes” which are perennial tickets that allow them to use local transport for free. So any time of day or night I for one can access London’s buses and underground trains without paying for a ticket. My pass, which I applied for and got from the local post office, gets me fare-free local travel. It’s part of the reason I’m happy here.
But if the Tories who oppose this concession and want to withdraw free travel for elder citizens prevail, I shall have no option but to form the Romano-Bulger-Scrounger-Elder Party and man the barricades!