I don’t know if I understand anything anymore. Things that seem outrageous to me seem to be normal to everyone else. Take the Kent Intake Unit (KIU). It’s a reception centre for unaccompanied child refugees, some as young as nine. Government minister Robert Jenrick ordered that Disney style murals painted on the walls of KIU were “too welcoming and sent the wrong signals” and should be painted over. Words don’t exactly fail me – this blog wouldn’t last long if they did – but the more I know about life the less I understand.
I am not sure how it would help young children, thousands of miles from home, if we made things less welcoming for them. Presumably, Jenrick must think that if they are treated as badly as they were at home, they might be on bended knee, begging to be put on a plane to Rwanda? But hang on. Children as young as nine? I doubt that it was part of their plan in life, not that young children have any plans at all.
I’m always whingeing about my own childhood, which I don’t remember as being particularly loving and certainly not joyous, but then I didn’t have to escape war and famine and having to leave everything behind, including most of my family and all my worldly possessions, in search of safety and a better life.
Depending on where these children came from it’s entirely possible they had no idea who Mickey Mouse was, just that here was a welcoming, smiley comic figure drawn on the wall. I would have thought this was a universal ‘thing’ given how many people take their children to the various Disney attractions around the world. It’s not as if these desperate children were being showered with cash and whisked off to EuroDisney at the taxpayers’ expense. No, it’s worse than that. Taxpayers’ money was used to cover over cartoon figures.
Imagine what it must be like to be Robert Jenrick. Not that long ago, Jenrick was involved in a scandal of an entirely different nature when personally intervening in a planning application for former porn baron Richard Desmond. Now, the not so great man is in the news again for ordering the covering up murals in order to make unhappy children unhappier.
I’m not sure how he sleeps at night. He certainly can’t have thought this through because who would want to have things like this as their legacy? You know the sort of thing? “Who was that Tory bastard who helped a porn magnate get planning permission for a multimillion pound project and then ordered that Mickey Mouse murals be covered up in order to upset young children so they wouldn’t want to stay here? What a pub quiz question.
We know it’s all about skin colour, really. A government led by Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and James Cleverley, which not long ago included Kwasi Kwarteng, who last year crashed the economy, Nadhim Zahawi and the ever odious Priti Patel hates people of colour. First and second generation Brits, the sons and daughters of migrants, usually economic migrants, kicking away the ladder of safety and opportunity for everyone else. And this we regard as perfectly normal.
Of all the bluster and bullshit of Sunak’s government, this is yet another low point, yet no one seems to bat an eyelid, it’s the new normal. Not only can we horrible to grown up refugees, we can be equally horrible to children by avoiding being too welcoming.
War and conflict and climate change will make the displacement of people even greater in the years ahead and Sunak’s government has already set in train plans to make things worse by cutting overseas aid, which is highly effective in enabling people to remain in the countries they live in. If life at home is bearable, where is the need to leave? Cheap populism and buying votes on the back of immigration scare stories has worked in the past and desperate governments, like this one, care about one thing and one thing only: retaining power. By being like Jenrick, these people have concluded that being beastly to Johnny Foreigner, including nine year old children is perfectly reasonable. Every day in almost every way, this government drags us down.
And in truth the most Mickey Mouse thing of all is the state of this clown car government. The image in my head is the Coldwar Steve picture that heads this blog. I hope it’s yours, too, because it almost happened like this and probably would have done if Jenrick had his way.
