Have you seen the video of the female dog walker who takes exception to the Brazilians who pass her by in the street, demanding they speak English? It’s not the friendliest of encounters and, I am finding, it’s highly representative of the increasingly broken country in which we live. The woman does not appear to be – how can I put this politely? – the sharpest tool in the box and, for all I know, thinks Brazilians speak Brazilian. What she does appear to be is very angry with foreign people. Is this yesterday once more?
Of course, I take this extremely personally. I’m bound to. After all, my paternal grandfather’s family came to Britain at the turn of the last century to set up the Mustad nail factory in Portishead, speaking mainly Norwegian. I never asked my grandfather whether people objected to his presence, or the fact that he spoke a foreign language, so maybe foreigners were more acceptable in those days.
Similarly, my mother, who came to this country from the Netherlands to marry into this Norwegian/English mash-up, was a migrant too, speaking a foreign language and never losing her Dutch lilt until the day she died.
I wonder if there were dog walkers who celebrated their respective deaths, after all they were foreign, in the case of my grandfather, the lowest of the low in that he and his family were economic migrants. Doubtless, they’d have been stealing the jobs of ‘our own people’, ‘taking their homes’ and scrounging unemployment benefits which, incidentally, no one in my family has ever claimed. But hey, they were foreign, they were migrants, they were a drain on the NHS when they became seriously ill. I am only surprised that Nigel Farage didn’t lead an army of protesters to the mobile home in which my grandfather spent his final years or the nursing home where my mother died.
Honestly, I don’t see any difference between the Brazilians who were subject to verbal abuse from the dog walker and my forefathers (and mother) who came to this country for either a better life or to marry the person they loved.
Racism, xenophobia and hatred of migrants did not start with Brexit. It has always been there, although because I am white, European and speak with a Bristolian accent, I have managed to escape the bad stuff, except on this blog where long ago I had to switch off the comments section because of the amount of abuse that was appearing. Brexit appears to have enabled racism, xenophobia and hatred of migrants to somehow acceptable and mainstream.
When ‘foreign’ people get abused like those poor Brazilian folk – and may I remind you that Brazil is NOT in the EU, in case you were wondering – they are, to my mind, abusing me and my personal history. It is NOT different for me because migration to and from the UK is part of my story, it’s part of my upbringing and it makes me who I am.
And every day, in every way, it just gets worse.
