For many, Gary Lineker is an emblem for free speech and a high profile defender (though as a prolific goal scorer in his day, I am not sure this is an appropriate noun!) of the marginalised and those without a voice in society. For his opponents; he is a highly paid, left wing celebrity who uses his fame as a bully pulpit to hector the government on whatever trendy cause of the day. At the outset, I am making it clear that I am not of the latter party. However much more serious objections have been raised to the 1930s Germany analogy by, in particular, Jewish groups who complain of the trivialisation and appropriation of the Holocaust.
It is not the aim of this piece to accuse or acquit Gary Lineker of that latter charge. Though it is worth pointing out that a Holocaust survivor at a meeting in the Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Faversham constituency levelled that particular accusation at her; that the demeaning and othering discourse used by proponents of the Bill is reminiscent of the sort of language that ultimately led to the murder of her relatives in the flames of the Shoah. For me, Gary Lineker or any other media personality has the right, on freedom of speech grounds, to use their private social media to express their opinions on any issue of the day within the laws of defamation.
For the lesson of the furore over Lineker’s tweet is that, in the words of Kenan Malik, contemporary anti-migrant rhetoric does recall the language of the 1930s but that the lingua franca was English.[1] He discusses how in the contemporary debates about Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution; two themes stand out in British policy: sympathy for the Jews facing the horrors of Nazism and the prerogative that their plight should not be seen as Britain’s problem. Malik quotes from Louise London who in her Whitehall And The Jews 1933-1948 states that Britain’s strategy:
It is not the aim of this piece to accuse or acquit Gary Lineker of that latter charge. Though it is worth pointing out that a Holocaust survivor at a meeting in the Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Faversham constituency levelled that particular accusation at her; that the demeaning and othering discourse used by proponents of the Bill is reminiscent of the sort of language that ultimately led to the murder of her relatives in the flames of the Shoah. For me, Gary Lineker or any other media personality has the right, on freedom of speech grounds, to use their private social media to express their opinions on any issue of the day within the laws of defamation.
For the lesson of the furore over Lineker’s tweet is that, in the words of Kenan Malik, contemporary anti-migrant rhetoric does recall the language of the 1930s but that the lingua franca was English.[1] He discusses how in the contemporary debates about Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution; two themes stand out in British policy: sympathy for the Jews facing the horrors of Nazism and the prerogative that their plight should not be seen as Britain’s problem. Malik quotes from Louise London who in her Whitehall And The Jews 1933-1948 states that Britain’s strategy:
was designed to keep out large numbers of European Jews – perhaps ten times as many as it let in… Escape to Britain was an exception for the lucky few; exclusion was the fate of the majority[2].
Malik goes onto cite the observation by the Holocaust historian Steve Paulson that German Jews were “treated as ‘bogus asylum seekers’ (because their lives were not yet in immediate danger) and ‘as economic migrants’ (because, having their means of livelihood, they would benefit economically by coming to Britain). In effect they were the 1930s vista of invading hordes of “immigrants trying to jump the queue, rather than people in desperate need.”[3] This should be the standard riposte to the scare and hate mongers on both sides of the Irish Sea who question the motives and economic status of refugees today.
Then, as now in Brexit Britain and its nightmare of “open borders”, the preservation of “British sovereignty” was brandished as an instrument to exclude refugees. To let in more Jews, officials claimed, would undermine sovereign control over who should be allowed entry. Then, as now, there was a desire not to allow refugees to set foot on British soil; in 1938, Britain imposed a visa system on migrants from Germany and Austria, “to stem… the problem at its source”, as Paulsson puts it.[4]
There laid bare in the shadow of the imminent perpetration of the greatest crime in human history is the immorality of British asylum and immigration policy in the 1930s and how it resonates today. Further injury was added to insult by the inclusion of Jews in the category of the 70,000 German and Austrian “enemy aliens” created after the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the later mass internment in May 1940 of 29,000 Germans, Austrians and Italians, mostly Jews.
All the major Western democracies imposed rigid immigration controls, against Jewish refugees, both before and throughout the Second World War. For instance when appeals were made to the British Foreign Office to take 19,000 Jews due to be handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy French regime for slave labour and then extermination in Poland, one officer replied
“We cannot turn our country into a sponge for Europe.”
Many of the aforementioned “enemy alien” internees were deported to Canada or Australia – ship load of deported Jews was sank when the Arandora Star was torpedoed in July 1940. For years, the existence of the concentration camps and the nature of the incipient Holocaust was denied or minimised on the grounds or in the words of another Foreign Office official: “As a general, the Jews are inclined to magnify their own persecution”[5]
That shameful episode is just one chapter of the racialised immigration and asylum policies pursued by UK governments since the turn of the 20th century. From the Aliens Act of 1968 which sought to keep out Jews fleeing pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe; through the 1968 and 1971 Commonwealth Immigration Acts with its invidious distinctions between “Old” (those from the White dominions of Australian, New Zealand, Canada etc) and “New” (those from the Caribbean and South Asian former colonies) Commonwealth subjects; the “hostile environment” for “illegal” immigrants instituted by a former Home Secretary in 2013 which led directly to the Windrush scandal whereby thousands of Caribbean residents in the UK born to immigrants from the West Indies were found to be “illegal” due to lack of identity residency documents such as passports; to the tsunami of lies told by Brexit campaigners during the 2016 EU referendum about 75m Turks being eligible to come to the UK and Nigel Farage’s infamous “Breaking Point” poster depicting Europe and, by extension, Britain being overrun by refugees of Middle Eastern origin right down to Suella Braverman’s justification for her Small Boats Bill in her apocalyptic claim that 100m asylum seekers and refugees can come to the UK.
Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill: The Chronicle Aftertold
The real story to be told about the Bill and its genesis begins in Australia. The model of intercepting refugee boats and putting asylum seekers into offshore camps was pioneered by Australia in 2001. In that year the conservative government of John Howard went into an election which he won as well as the subsequent one by promising to be tough on “illegal immigration”. It had already implemented a maximalist new asylum policy – one that meant that those who arrived by boat were sent for offshore processing on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru or the remote Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, to be detained indefinitely. In an explicit order from the Minister of Defence, “no personalising or humanising messages were to be taken of those who had come to Australia by boat. For they were, insisted the government, “potential terrorists”, “illegals”; “threats to national security” – the types of people it falsely said would throw their children overboard.[6]
A decade later, Tony Abbott built a campaign on a triple word slogan: “Stop the boats”. Politicians who opposed the measures were harangued as “soft on borders”. They secretly wanted “open borders”/ ”unlimited migration” with all its allusions to crime, terrorism and “illiterate” refugees taking Australian jobs and housing[7] and draining Australian public services.
Since its implementation, Australia’s offshore detention regime – an exact replica of that proposed in the UK’s Rwanda plan – has been subjected to the entire gamut of exposure of cruelty – from the UN, from foreign and domestic courts; from Senate inquiries, government reports, public service whistleblowers, media investigations and human rights groups. They all exposed the inevitable evils: refugees murdered and wounded by guards, children sent to adult prisons to be preyed upon; systematic sexual abuse, mass hunger strikes; repeated suicide attempts and the neglect of seriously ill people until it was too late.[8]
And yet the policy never did “stop the boats” Record numbers of asylums seekers continued to arrive by sea; the offshore processing centres were overwhelmed and eventually ceased operation and the arrival of boats was only slowed (albeit dramatically) by the pushback intervention of the Australian navy whereby the occupants of the boats are intercepted and forcibly returned to their country of origin in contravention of international law.[9]
Likewise, the UK counterpart has come in from unusually hard hitting intervention by the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, who has urged MPs and peers to reject the Bill on the grounds that its proposals “create clear and direct tension with well-established and fundamental human rights standards. She stated that by preventing people who arrive irregularly in the UK from having asylum claims assessed, it would strip away one of the essential building blocks of the protection system. Not to be deterred though are the MPs on the right of the Tory party who have proposed a series of amendments blocking judges from granting injunctions to stop deportations and to limit the scope of relevant parts of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)[10]
Also, Tirana Hassan, new Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has warned of a copycat effect amongst other conservative European governments arising from the UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Warning that the plan would “completely erode” the UK’s standing on the world stage, Hassan cautions of a “ very slippery slope” whereby “just a couple of pages out of the autocrat’s handbook that gets passed around” leading to far right populist governments like Hungary, Italy and Poland adopting similar measures like the Rwanda plan.[11]
On too many occasions, sadly, labour movements and politicians have played their part in creating this discursive hegemony around immigration. It was Harold Wilson’s Labour government which passed through the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act as a kind of quid pro quo for the 1965 Race Relations Act, the first of its kind in British history. It is hardly coincidental that 1968 was the year of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and the marches by East End dockers in support of Powell. Labour PM Clement Attlee as Prime Minister expressed anxieties about the prospects for existing race relations from immigration from the West Indies in the wake of the docking of HMS Windrush in 1947. More recently, “immigration controls” stood out as one of the five demands on the mugs produced for Ed Miliband’s ill-fated 2015 General Election campaign. Currently, migrant and asylum advocacy organisations are expressing disappointment at what they see as the reluctance of Keir Starmer, Labour leader, to explicitly condemn the racialised hostility to migration embodied in the Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill in order to recover lost Labour Brexit voters in the “Red Wall” seats. Paul Mason comments that Lineker had correctly judged the mood of the vox populi – be that his potential supporters, of politicians and of the wider public over the “Illegal Immigration Bill. He observes that large parts of progressive Britain were dismayed by Labour’s initial response to the Bill – that it wouldn’t work[12], rather than the cruelty of its proposal to automatically deport arriving and existing asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing and ultimate settlement on the acceptance of their applications.
Aliens Act 1905
This Act sought to limit immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe and was passed by the then Conservative government and then rigorously enforced by the Liberal government which was elected to power in 1906. This Act derived its impetus from the ethnic and religious tensions between Jewish and Irish communities in the Stepney district of the East End of London. In 1903, the Government had appointed a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in response to requests from Major William Evans-Gordon, Conservative MP for Stepney and from local trade unions. Further Aliens Acts were passed in 1914 and 1919 which further inflamed local tensions by trying to root out illegal immigrants, particularly Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland.[13] Sound familiar?
In many ways, the Aliens Act was the result of twenty years of working class agitation which took two forms. The first was the grassroots proto-fascist British Brothers League which operated in the East End between its foundation in 1901 and passing of the Act in 1905. The second was the organised labour movement. From 1892, the TUC was formally committed to a resolution excluding Jews; it included the issue of immigration control was included in a list of questions put to all parliamentary candidates compiled by a special TUC conference in 1895 and in 1896 the TUC sent a delegation to the Home Secretary in 1896 demanding immigration controls.[14]
Socialist opposition to the agitation for immigration controls did come from the Socialist League, a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and whose most famous figure is William Morris. The League’s journal Commonweal took a totally principled stance against immigration controls and antisemitism. In one article – sarcastically called “Blarsted Furriners” – the journal condemned the chauvinism and antisemitism of other left-wing groups by posing the age long question for all self-professed socialists:
Are we then to allow the issues at stake in the struggle between the robbers and the robbed to be obscured by anti-foreigner agitation?[15]
Apart from that honourable exception and that of other individuals, the remaining opposition to immigration control within the labour movement came from its Jewish s members. For sadly, support for immigration controls was overwhelming within the labour and trade union movement. A 1892 book The Alien Invasion named 43 labour organisations, excluding the TUC, calling for restrictions on Jews. Many trades councils also came out in support of controls including London where control was supported by esteemed rank-and-file dockers’ leaders Ben Tillett and Tom Mann.[16] In language that distressingly prefigures Nazi strictures on racial hygiene the socialist magazine The Clarion stated after the passage of the Act that Jewish immigrants were:
A poison injected into the national veins”, they were “the unsavoury children of the ghetto, their numbers were “appalling” and their attitudes “unclean” (June 22nd 1906)[17]
Arguments used then in favour of immigration controls have sadly both historic and contemporary resonance. It was said that Jewish workers were taking away English people’s jobs, undercutting wages, weakening unionisation and taking housing away from the English. Just as it has done throughout human history, antisemitism, being the hydra headed monster that it is, girded the debate on the Aliens Act on plural levels. Antisemitic movements from a specific racist perspective mobilised against working-class Jews while antisemitic arguments from a partially Marxian perspective were articulated around the notion of Jewish capitalist domination.[18]
One way of squaring this circle was to try and make some distinction between “rich Jews” and “poor Jews”. An Independent Labour Party (ILP) pamphlet arguing against immigration controls in 1904 – The Problem of Alien Immigration – compared “the rich Jew who has done his best to besmirch the fair name of England and to corrupt the sweetness of our national life and character” with the “poor Jew” who should be allowed in.[19]
More frequently, socialist groups tried to tease out actual links between “rich Jews” and “poor Jews” in order to condemn the latter as in some way pawns of the former. This rhetorical strategy is most glaring in the example of Beatrice Potter, one of the founders of the Fabians, who in her investigation of East End life, continually argued that the only aim of a Jewish worker was to become a capitalist writing in one essay that:
The love of profit distinct from other forms of money earning” is “the strongest impelling motive of the Jewish race.
And, furthermore, denied any presence of the powerful Jewish labour movement developing there; claiming in the same essay, that Jews as embryonic capitalists “have neither the desire nor the capacity for labour combination.”[20]
Ben Tillett offered an even more resonant and conspiratorial angle. He argued that it was ultimately the British government which was a pawn in the hands of Jewish capitalists and was therefore reluctant to bring forward controls. He asserted that “Our leading statesmen do not care to offend the great banking houses or money kings” and went on to say: “For heaven’s sake, give us back our countrymen and take us your motley multitude.” (London Evening News, June 19th 1891) He spoke on the same platform as avowed Jew-baiters like Arnold White at a meeting of an early control organisation – The Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens.[21]
The Aliens Act was aimed specifically at Jews by invoking specific antisemitic imagery be it variants of the world Jewish conspiracy or references to supposed Jewish physiognomy. Jews were frequently referred to as “The Nose” in The Clarion (September 1st 1892) Much of the radical literature describing alleged Jewish capitalist domination drew upon classical antisemitic tropes. For example, the campaigning journalist and prominent Labour Party member, A.J. Hobson, famed for covering the Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, opined that the Transvaal was controlled by “Jew Power” and “those who came early made most and then left leaving their economic fangs in the carcass of their pray” (Contemporary Review vol LXXVII)[22]
To invert Gary Linker’s words; it was the 1905 Aliens Act and similarly restrictive immigration legislation in both the UK and US and the poisonous discourse around them that foreshadowed the language of Germany in the 1930s and the cataclysm of the Holocaust and other racial-biological mass crimes committed by the Nazis. Antisemitism was also an ill-disguised feature of another monstrous totalitarian system of the 20th century – Stalinism. The caricature of Jew as all-powerful capitalist was replaced in Stalinist (and other ultra-left) demonology, by the equation of Zionism with world dominations and of all Jews being Zionist or at least responsible for Zionism. The notorious intended “Jewish doctors” show trial in which five Jewish physicians from the Kremlin’s own hospital who were accused in 1953 of trying, under “the influence of Zionism”, to poison Stalin and other members of the Soviet Politburo, only it not to go ahead due to the death of the Red Tsar, is an example. [23] The seemingly contradictory spectacle of “Jewish cosmopolitanism” was also articulated by the Kremlin at this time.
The trial and execution in Czechoslovakia in 1952 of the prominent Communist Party politician Slansky who was Jewish and twelve associates in a show trial is another example of Stalinist antisemitism. The “cleansing of Zionists” from the Polish Communist Party in 1968 and the denunciation in the 1980s of both the Polish Solidarity movement and its intellectual ginger group KOR as having “the Pseudo-Left programme of the Trotskyite International which is inspired by Zionist illustrates the ill-disguised antisemitism that was at the core of Soviet antizionism.[24]
Contemporary Antiimmigrant Discourse
With the discrediting of the racial biology discourses that underpinned the horrors of Nazism and the operations of overt racism in Apartheid era South Africa, in the Jim Crow era of the Southern United states and in European colonial empires, opponents of immigration (or what they would term “mass migration”) in the language of identity, culture and opposition to the harmful impacts of globalisation. But sanitised as it may be of the overtly racist themes of the anti-immigrant movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, their 21st century successors have managed to synthesise the language of radical left and right; of traditional conservatism and collectivist rallying to articulate new and old populist folk-devils Now the new visible target of nativist hostility is Islam or “the Muslims”; the new conspiratorial elite are the “globalists” represented in institutional forms like the European Union (EU) or the World Economic Forum (WEF) who wish to impose an one-size-fits-all New World Order (NOW) form of global governance on us all or ubiquitous figures such as Bill Gates and George Soros. However as we shall see shortly, a familiar folk enemy stalks the imaginings of anti-globalists and ethno-cultural nationalists.
Consider these two cri-de-coeurs for our times:
Will the earth be reduced to something homogenous because of deculturizing depersonalising trends for which American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector? Or will people find the means for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been raised at the beginning of the millennium.[25]
♜ ♞ ♟
The Westernisation of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably represented as “progress”. “Homogenising universalism … is only the projection and the mask of an ethnocentrism extended over the whole planet.[26]
These sentiments could have come from the manifesto of any radical left-wing project; particularly those of an anti-globalisation, anti-American bent. They are, in fact, the words of Alain de Benoist, the founder of the Nouvelle Droit in France and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.[27].
At the heart of Benoist’s philosophy was the abandonment of racial superiority in favour of cultural difference, and the reworking of the relationship between community, identity and diversity. He wrote that “Different cultures provide different responses to essential questions; hence “all attempts to unify them will end destroying them.” In this volkish vision, “Everyone inherits a ‘constituent community which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms.”[28]
According to this cultural rather than racial logic, immigrants must always remain outsiders because they are carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation. Recognising the impracticality (rather than inhumanity) of deporting all immigrants and their descendants from France , Benoist proposed the establishment of “parallel” communities to allow both the ”indigenous” and the “immigrant” to maintain” the structures of their collective cultural lives.[29]
In this apartheid type model “the equal remains different” and citizenship should be reserved for those who are “one of us”. For to be a citizen, in Benoist’s world, is to “belong.. to a homeland and a past.” Therefore immigrants could – or, at least, should – never be citizens as democracy only works with the coin coincidence of demos and ethnos.[30]
This agenda has been successfully popularised by Marine Le Pen and her National Rally Party founded in order to detoxify the explicit racism and antisemitism of the former Front National. Three interconnected issues are predominant in the worldview of Le Pen: hostility to globalism, to immigration and to Islam. For her, Globalism “aims to standardise cultures, to encourage nomadism, the permanent movement of uprooted people from one continent to another, to make them interchangeable and, in essence, to render them anonymous.” Like Benoist, Le Pen frames her opposition to immigration as respect for difference. “The world will survive only through human and cultural diversity, through diversity … but the only difference that counts is that between the “French way of life” and the rest.[31]
But Le Pen’s primary cultural animosity is directed towards Islam and its adherents. With “the Islamisation of our country” she asserts, “the majority [of French people] no longer feel at home in France." Muslims had “taken charge of entire neighbourhoods where they impose their vision, their culture, their proscription”. Muslims, in her demonology, are looked upon as “invaders” and “colonisers” undermining French culture not by wielding cosmopolitan or imperial power but by supplanting one culture with another.[32]
Le Pen’s potent combination of reactionary hostility to immigration and Islam (sometimes cloaked by faux secularism around the wearing of Islamic dress such as the hijab) and opposition to austerity, defence of jobs and support for the welfare state, traditionally left-wing concerns has established her and her party as key actors in French politics; winning more than 41 per cent of the vote in the second round run-off in the 2022 Presidential elections and 95 seats in the French National Assembly. It is a combination that was been weaponised in various degrees by other far right populist parties in Europe such as Gert Wilder’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the Swedish Democrats and the narrative of the economically and culturally dispossessed native working classes was a potent contributor to the Brexit and Trump victories in 2016 and undergird the current. populist opposition to the “invasion” of Britain by “small boats.
However, explicitly racist or racialised themes have not disappeared from anti-immigrant discourse. The 2010s saw a series of books warning of Europe “committing suicide”, such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany abolishes itself”, Eric Zemmour’s Le Suicide Francais (“French Suicide”) and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (“Submission”).
Arguably the most influential (and lethal) trope in contemporary nativism in the Western world is the creation of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory by the novelist and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus. In 2011 Camus published Le Great Replacement in which he proposed that globalists had created the “replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity”, allowing les elite remplacistes – “the replacing elites” – swap white Europeans for non-Europeans. In a perverse inversion of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, he describes non-Europeans in Europe as “colonists”, the elites remplacistes as “”collaborationists”, and the process of replacement as “genocide by substitution” .[33] It is hardly surprising that one of the inspirations for this Mein Kampf - meets -modern nationalist mythos is Enoch Powell.[34]
In the Anglo-American world replacement theory has gained traction with influential academics such as the economist Paul Collier who worries about the “indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital and the London based American novelist Lionel Shriver who writes that “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland go back hundreds of years … and, yet, they have to “submissively accept” the ”ethnic transformation of the UK … without a peep of protest." Since 2016, the Great Replacement theory has become received wisdom in Republican circles in the US. Polls show that a third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in it and that a secret cabal “is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”[35]
The Great Replacement Theory and associated conspiracist narratives have acted as inspiration for far darker expressions of ethno-nationalism in the form of white nationalist terror. In 2011 Anders Breivik in his online manifest published prior to his van bomb attack in Oslo and the gun massacre of young left-wing activists on the island of Utoya which killed a total of 77 people blamed the Frankfurt School and “Cultural Marxism” for policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness. In 2018, Robert Bowers shot dead eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He claimed that Jews were committing “genocide” against whites by leading a conspiracy to bring Muslims into the country. The previous year white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville chanted “Jews Shall Not Replace Us.”[36]
But the most apposite comment of all in light of the above discussion is the justification by Australian Brenton Tarrant for the two mass shootings he perpetrated at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 which killed fifty-one worshippers and wounded forty. He stated:
These words appear in his manifesto “The Great Replacement”. [37] The real-life consequences of nonsensical but inflammatory theories in what, for so many, is a disturbingly changing world.
This odyssey into the history of UK migration and refugee policy tells us pace Gary Lineker it is not necessary to cite the most extreme example of hate filled language i.e. Nazi Germany (although such is the ultimate warning from history of where hate married to conspiracism leads to) to critique the inhumanity of the UK’s Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill. There are plenty of shaming episodes from past immigration and asylum policy and from its templates to use as comparators without causing unintended offence and grief to victims of Nazi Germany.
In the Anglo-American world replacement theory has gained traction with influential academics such as the economist Paul Collier who worries about the “indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital and the London based American novelist Lionel Shriver who writes that “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland go back hundreds of years … and, yet, they have to “submissively accept” the ”ethnic transformation of the UK … without a peep of protest." Since 2016, the Great Replacement theory has become received wisdom in Republican circles in the US. Polls show that a third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in it and that a secret cabal “is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”[35]
The Great Replacement Theory and associated conspiracist narratives have acted as inspiration for far darker expressions of ethno-nationalism in the form of white nationalist terror. In 2011 Anders Breivik in his online manifest published prior to his van bomb attack in Oslo and the gun massacre of young left-wing activists on the island of Utoya which killed a total of 77 people blamed the Frankfurt School and “Cultural Marxism” for policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness. In 2018, Robert Bowers shot dead eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He claimed that Jews were committing “genocide” against whites by leading a conspiracy to bring Muslims into the country. The previous year white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville chanted “Jews Shall Not Replace Us.”[36]
But the most apposite comment of all in light of the above discussion is the justification by Australian Brenton Tarrant for the two mass shootings he perpetrated at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 which killed fifty-one worshippers and wounded forty. He stated:
The attack was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity. To ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted [and] unrestrained in cultural nor ethnic expression and autonomy. To ensure that the peoples of the world remain true to their traditions and faiths and do not become watered down and corrupted by the influence of others.
These words appear in his manifesto “The Great Replacement”. [37] The real-life consequences of nonsensical but inflammatory theories in what, for so many, is a disturbingly changing world.
This odyssey into the history of UK migration and refugee policy tells us pace Gary Lineker it is not necessary to cite the most extreme example of hate filled language i.e. Nazi Germany (although such is the ultimate warning from history of where hate married to conspiracism leads to) to critique the inhumanity of the UK’s Illegal Migration and Small Boats Bill. There are plenty of shaming episodes from past immigration and asylum policy and from its templates to use as comparators without causing unintended offence and grief to victims of Nazi Germany.
Notes
[1] Kenan Malik ‘Stop the boats’ does echo the language of the 30s – but those words were English. The Observer 19 March 2023.
[2] Malik, op cit.
[3] Malik, op cit.
[4] Malik, op cit.
[5] Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, Clarendon Press, 1979 quoted in Steve Cohen (2019) That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic. An anti-racist analysis of Left antisemitism. pp.69-70 London: No Pasaran Media.
[6] Ben Doherty Australia’ ‘stop the boats’ playbook will damage Britain. Guardian Journal pp.1-2 28th March 2023
[7] Doherty, p.2
[8] Doherty, p.2
[9] Doherty, p.2
[10] Tory MPs push to Toughen Migration Bill as European Rights Chief Sounds Alarm. Guardian 28th March 2023
[11] Warning Over Global Fallout from Rwanda Asylum Plan. Guardian. 27th March 2023.
[12] Paul Mason “What Gary Lineker has taught us about the art of taking a stand” The New European. March 23-29, 2023
[13] John Bew (2017) Citizen Clem. A Biography of Attlee. London: Riverrun Press pp.69-70
[14] Cohen, p.26
[15] Cohen, p.28
[16] Cohen, p.27
[17] Cohen, p.27
[18] Cohen, p.33
[19] Cohen, p.36
[20] Cohen, p.37
[21] Cohen, p.38.
[22] Cohen, pp.42-43
[23] Cohen, p.56
[24] Cohen, pp.56-57
[25] Kenan Malik (2023) Not So Black and White. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. P.275 London: Hurst & Company
[26] Malik, p.277
[27] Malik, p.275
[28] Malik, p.276
[29] Malik, p.277
[30] Malik, p.277
[31] Malik, p.278
[32] Malik, p.279
[33] Malik, pp.282-83
[35] Malik, pp.283-84
[36] Malik, pp.285-86
[37] Malik, p.286
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
