Sometimes I wish that this minor blog was able to reach more people than my couple of hundred loyal followers and then for at least some of the blogposts would be read and acted upon by a certain group of people, in this instance the people who attacked the young Kurdish Iraqi asylum seeker in Croydon. It appears that around 10 people set about this young man after they established where he was from and a further 20 people came to watch. What the hell is happening?
You might answer that by saying “nothing new”. We have always had terrible instances of foreign people being attacked by racist thugs. We have had instances of black British people being murdered by racist thugs. We have even had so called reverse racism attacks so no particular group is blameless nor innocent. This could be a particularly bad example of racist thuggery or it could be more than that, an emerging pattern of hatred towards foreign people that has emerged since we voted to leave the EU. We know that hate crime has increased since 23 June 2016. Could there be a link? Well, we don’t know whether this is a run-of-the-mill vicious attack or something else but this surely needs to stop.
Much as I deplore the behaviour and actions of the senior Brexiteers, and the similarly unpleasant tone of voice from the prime minister down, I do not believe that the majority of people who voted leave will feel anything more than revulsion as to what happened, even those who found themselves nodding in agreement when Nigel Farage stood before his vile poster or bought the Mail, the Sun and the Express, which spewed out xenophobic hate on a daily basis (and still do). The so called “will of the people” was not, surely, to attack people who look a bit different from the rest of us. It’s time for our so-called leaders to make this crystal clear.
Theresa May has been full of bluster since she entered number ten. She is engaged in Tory Party management which was what ultimately brought down David Cameron by pandering to the hard right Euro-haters on the benches behind her. She has appeased them by talking their language, just as she attempted to appease Donald Trump when she made her toe-curling visit to Washington. This will not do. We don’t just need May to condemn this single attack, we need her to condemn the mindset that people like her and the right wing press continue to fester. This needs to stop.
Brexit has divided the country like never before and will continue to do so for at least the next decade as we try to extricate ourselves from Europe. May has made no attempt to unite the country, if anything encouraging the more extreme elements in politics and the media to divide it still further.
We all knew, didn’t we, of the chaos that would begin to unfold once we started to leave Europe, but I’m not sure we anticipated the hatred of foreigners that would come to the fore. If this ghastly atmosphere of hate continues to escalate, I fear for the future of this country. No one really wants this, do they? Can we not live in a liberal, tolerant, secular and peaceful country, instead?
