Six months before the 2015 UK general election, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon claimed British towns were being “swamped” by immigrants and their residents are “under siege with large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits”.
On a flight to Bahrain recently I chatted with a fellow passenger from the north of England who shared with me some of his thoughts as to why voters had chosen to vote to leave Europe.
He said that many of the people he spoke to consider the rise in immigration to be a major influence on how they chose to vote, especially the ‘baby boomers’ and those in towns and cities with high levels of new immigrants.
Is the UK being swamped with immigrants as Fallon suggests? Today, with the rise of food banks and with the homeless population equivalent to the population of Iceland, many are struggling to do what it takes to put food on the table as they struggle with the consequences of austerity and Brexit.
This is not the first time a senior Conservative has used the word swamped to describe how the British feel about the rise of immigration.
Back in the 1970s Mrs Thatcher used the same word to describe how many felt as the country had to deal with two million immigrants. Today, there are close to 10m living in the UK who were born abroad.
Mrs Thatcher said, “If we continue as we are doing today, by the end of the century, there would be 4m people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
Such figures of speech as swamping have often played well with those sympathetic to politicians’ racist speeches.
When Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham in 1968, he didn’t actually use the words “rivers of blood”, but instead quoted Virgil’s Aeneid. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.”
The speech invoked the image of a flood of bloodied water, bloodied, that is, by the riots and unease unleashed by racial tension.
Let’s not forget Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom who is quoted as saying, “How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month in overseas aid when we’re in this sort of debt is completely beyond me”.
Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf attributes to Richard Armitage the threat to bomb Pakistan. George Bush is also quoted as saying “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”
Yes, some on both sides of the Atlantic may long for the halcyon days when you could call a spade a spade, but since the 1970s, those days are over.
Remember Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had deliberately used racially offensive language in the programme’s Burma special and used the N-word in an outtake.
Seems some of us still have some way to go when it comes to creating racial harmony that was contained in the song ‘Melting Pot’ by Blue Mink.