A week ago, David Cameron capitulated to humanitarian rather than political instinct. Twenty thousand places in Britain are to be offered to Syrian refugees over the next five years. From a leader who had previously called off boat rescues in the Mediterranean, possibly allowing hundreds of migrants to die unnecessarily, this was gob-smacking generosity. For anyone with a heart, it was gesture politics.
This was only partly a response to public pressure. According to a BBC poll taken after the terrible picture of Alan Kurdi was published on the front page of nearly every British newspaper, 57 per cent of the British public still said that they either wanted to take fewer refugees, or to take no more.
Subsequent polls have shown similar results; most British people are not keen to help. Cameron was actually responding to the Sun, a newspaper whose opinion he values. Editors there had finally changed their tune and printed an appeal on their front page for compassion. It was a warning shot that public opinion could be changed, and Cameron listened.
Cameron’s dogsbody on immigration issues, the fastidious Home Office Minister James Brokenshire, boasted last week that the new resettlement scheme demonstrated “the UK’s proud tradition of providing protection to refugees.” This half-truth was echoed across the floor of the House of Commons by, among others, the SNP spokesperson on Home Affairs, Joanna Cherry, former Labour high-flyer Jack Dromey and Labour shadow cabinet minister Luciana Berger. The prime minister himself spoke of fulfilling “our moral responsibility to help refugees, just as we have done so proudly throughout history.” Sadly for all of them, this claim to a long and proud tradition of refugee acceptance falls apart under even the most basic historical scrutiny.
From 1933 to 1948, Conservative and Labour governments actively restricted the number of Jews entering Britain. Only once assurances had been received from the Anglo-Jewish community that the entire cost for refugees fleeing from the Nazis would be covered by British Jews and not the government, were any allowed in. As the numbers of arrivals began to rise, the Home Office introduced its first ever visa system, applicable to just two countries, Germany and Austria. This made it easier to restrict the flow. In 1938, the British government responded to the Anschluss not by opening the borders for refugees, but by reducing the number of visas available to Austrian Jews.
After Kristallnacht there was some softening, but the balance of public opinion was still against receiving more. Those Jews who arrived in 1940 were interned in specially-constructed camps, and told to minimise outward signs of their Jewish and Germanic culture. Few were allowed to work and had to rely on charities to survive.
Little changed after the war; a new immigration policy from the Labour government deliberately excluded Jews because they weren’t considered “assimilable” and, just as Hitler himself had suggested, they were seen as a security threat. At the time, a small number of Jewish terrorists were blowing up British civilian and military targets in Palestine. The actions of a few were dictating government policy towards the many, something that Europe’s Muslims are experiencing today.
The right-wing media barons had put a lot of pressure on the British government and swayed much of their readership through their anti-Semitic commentary. Leading the charge was the Daily Mail, whose headline “German Jews Pouring into this Country” reported on a British judge who condemned high levels of Jewish immigration as “an outrage”. The report noted that, “In these words, Mr. Herbert Metcalfe, the Old Street magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country ‘through the back door’, a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.”
When Indian Ugandans fled Idi Amin in the Seventies, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, now a columnist for the Independent newspaper, remembers receiving a horrible welcome: “People standing at airports with placards telling us to ‘get back to where you came from’,” she told the BBC in 2003. While Idi Amin had labelled them economic “blood-suckers”, sections of the British media suggested that the new arrivals would become “parasites”. Declassified government records show that Margaret Thatcher was doing everything possible to avoid the Indian Ugandans being settled in the UK; she was fishing around for a distant post-colonial island for them to move to.
The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Daily Express account between them for the majority of newspaper readers in Britain. They have for many decades campaigned against Britain becoming refugee-friendly, printing agenda-driven misinformation laced with racial prejudice. That most of the British public are therefore against taking in refugees is no surprise; everything they “know” about refugees comes from influential media outlets which understand how fear and loathing sells newspapers far quicker than balanced messages of charity and hope. As for the politicians, they should know better, and pick up a good history book.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.