It is an old saying that we get the press we deserve. We encourage the tittle-tattle trivia that emanates from the newspapers by the very act of buying them. Not only that, we must enjoy it and agree with much of it too. That’s what worries me most of all.
The language of our politicians does not help, with prime minister David Cameron likening migrants to insects, referring to them as “a swarm”, encouraging the ever helpful Daily Mail to describe “the swarm on our streets”. The Express goes a step further, with it’s “Calais is a war zone” headline above a picture of maybe a dozen men, all black of course, being held back by pepper-spraying police officers. But Alan Travis, in the Guardian, tells a very different story. These are not “extraordinary scenes”. Travis adds, “They have been going on for years, not just at Calais but also along the coast at Dunkirk and Ostend and other ports, but with little success for the migrants.” This is not part of some 1940s Nazi invasion, as the gutter press seems to suggest, but the result of a movement of people who see Britain as the promised land.
I am particularly struck by the fact that many of those who have made it to Calais are children on their own, some as young as 12. I do not know if this is mentioned in the Mail and Express stories, but I find this heartbreakingly sad, although Cameron seems to be far more concerned about the effects this could have on some British holidaymakers.
To be fair, The Sun and Star don’t even mention Calais on their front pages, preferring to dwell on the sad death of “Apprentice legend” Stuart Baggs and other papers report on Jeremy Clarkson signing up to make TV shows with Amazon.
I know who buys the tabloids. I see them in my local Co-op branch every morning, secretly hoping to myself that they don’t believe a word they are reading, at the same time reminding myself that I do not have a monopoly in wisdom or the understanding of how politics works. I would like to think, for example, that people understand that the Sun and Times have a vested interest in, say, attacking the BBC, or that the Murdoch press, plus the Mail and Express will always push their right wing political agenda because it fits in with their owners’ narrative.
I do find much of what I read as dehumanising. The poor migrants of Calais are not all bad people who want to come here and screw every penny they can about our benefits system. They are, in their own way, trying to get a better life, just like my grandfather did in the early 1900s when he came to Britain from Norway with absolutely nothing. He was undoubtedly an “economic migrant” but did nothing but give to this country, barely taking a penny in his working life and beyond. He didn’t traipse halfway round the world, often in extreme danger, but his reason for coming here was the same: to get a better life.
The way the migrants are stigmatised is terrible. There are probably some bad eggs amongst them, just as there are some very bad eggs in our own so-called indigenous population. I just think we are not getting the whole story.
I defended Cameron yesterday because I felt he probably was doing all he could to help, but I am not sure now. I don’t know enough facts about the actual situation but his concern about holidaymakers suggested a man totally out of touch with the gravity of what is happening in Calais.
I don’t have the answers, bar saying that we should accept our share of migrants, just as everyone else should, but I do worry that the press agenda is extremely unhelpful and not a little corrosive too.
