There is no doubt that the actions of the most senior members of the Conservative party have encouraged the riots by right wing racist thugs that we saw recently in the UK. That encouragement was not some unavoidable consequence of legitimate policy positions, but through actions or words that senior Conservative politicians could have avoided without changing any policies. Yet ironically these riots during a leadership election give the party a unique opportunity to turn a page, and turn their back on Farage type populism. The signs are they will not take that opportunity.
In this post I will give two examples of how the Conservative party encouraged right wing thugs to attack hotels housing asylum seekers or attack Mosques. The first is by calling asylum seekers that come to the UK by small boats from France ‘illegal’. The second is by tolerating, even at the most senior level within the party, Islamophobic language. [1]
The 2021 Nationality and Borders Act, introduced by Priti Patel, criminalised those who arrived in the UK without authorisation, even if they subsequently claimed asylum. From that point on, Conservative politicians almost without exception referred to anyone crossing the Channel in small boats as illegal migrants, and much of the media followed suit. This had no policy purpose. This act, unlike subsequent legislation, didn’t stop the government processing asylum claims, and anyone who successfully claimed asylum was not immediately arrested because they had come here illegally. Most ‘illegal migrants’ who came via small boats claimed asylum, and most of those claims were granted.
So why introduce the term ‘illegal migrant’ for asylum seekers if it made no difference? If you talk about refugees, that immediately brings to mind why people are seeking asylum – war or persecution –