Imagine your son came home from school one day making derogatory comments – clearly picked up in the classroom – about a refugee child in his class who had just acquired a new British passport.
Knowing your son was well-meaning but easily led, you might encourage him to imagine what that child must have been through to be granted refugee status. You might talk about the importance of helping those in need, not just for the people you help but for your own sense of fulfilment. You might teach him a little history.
Then again, you might just shrug your shoulders and tell your son he had a fair point.
You would, after all, only be taking your cue from the Labour Party.
Change in Home Office guidance
Even in these times of rapidly shifting norms, there was something shocking about the recent Home Office change in internal guidance, slipped in without the need for legislative scrutiny, to deny British citizenship to anyone arriving in the UK “in an unauthorised manner”; a move that – in the absence of safe routes – would make it almost impossible for refugees from anywhere but Ukraine ever to gain citizenship.
Much has been written elsewhere about how this seems not only vindictive but pointless. It’s encouraging to see the consternation it has caused, both within the Labour Party and wider civil society. It is already facing a legal challenge.
But I suspect the Prime Minister’s mind is made up.
Performative cruelty
Performative cruelty has become a thing that some politicians, including, sadly, the Labour Party, do these days. But it’s precisely when it comes from the Labour Party – a party which should be able to look at its roots and instinctively know better – that I find it so unconscionable. I know not everybody in Labour thinks that way. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that too many of those in positions of influence and power do.
It may be an extreme case, but it was an eye-opener to read of how Lord Glasman, founder of the increasingly influential Blue Labour and friend of US Vice-President JD Vance, in a recent interview with far-right former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, celebrated Trump’s “world historical” win and told him that “progressives are the enemy”. It’s hard to think of any major advance in civil liberties, from women’s suffrage, to the Race Relations Acts, to the legalisation of homosexuality, to – yes – the establishment of the Refugee Convention – that wasn’t pushed by people who today would be dismissed by the Lord Glasmans of this world as “progressive”.
Time for moral leadership
Most people, if you can shield them from the misinformation and propaganda that infect our daily news feed – on this issue more than any other – want to do the right thing by others. There’s a reason some politicians cynically preface their latest dehumanising comments on refugees with the assertion that the British people are compassionate; it’s because they know most of us like to believe we’re just that.
Yet too often the Labour Party, given the opportunity to tap into the electorate’s compassion, to show real, moral leadership that could harness that compassion to a sense of national pride, has chosen a different course.
“It’s what people want to hear”, you’ll be told by people who live and die by focus groups. Well, here’s a radical thought: Instead of telling people what they want to hear, how about telling them what they ought to know? Instead of encouraging them to be more cruel, how about encouraging them to be more empathetic? Instead of giving them the impression that asylum policy is primarily about deporting illegals, how about reminding them that it’s really about responding to the cries of people who desperately need our help?
How we treat refugees matters more than ever
In a recent article in the Guardian, Rafael Behr wrote of how Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their henchmen were on a mission to delete history; of their view that “the past, as traditionally narrated to warn against the very thing they represent, should be recoded.”
Labour, I am sure, would be horrified to be compared in any way to MAGA. Yet the truth is that any political party that contributes to the gradual drip feed of dehumanising language, policy and optics on refugees is contributing in its own way to that recoding. If we really are living in a “pre-war” phase, how we treat refugees – and how we would expect to be treated if we ever became refugees ourselves (an idea not quite as unthinkable as it has been for most of our lives) – becomes more, not less, pertinent.
Just a few days after the story about Labour’s change of policy, there was Reform MP Rupert Lowe on the front pages of the Telegraph, screaming that we should scrap the asylum system altogether. A direct link to Labour’s policy? Probably not. But part of the same dehumanisation of our fellow human beings to which Labour is contributing? Absolutely. To take a related example, Labour has largely succeeded in portraying the Rwanda scheme as an unworkable, impractical policy, but not as the inhumane, morally indefensible policy that it is. Because, amid the shock and disgust when Boris Johnson first touted the idea, when they could have said as much to a receptive audience before it became horribly normalised, they didn’t.
If the other options are Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage, I am mightily relieved that Sir Keir Starmer is Prime Minister of the UK at a time when we are experiencing a challenge of monumental geopolitical proportions. But that relief will never mean refraining from criticising him and Labour for fear of letting in something much worse – a common implication of Labour diehards comfortable in their knowledge that this electoral system allows them to play that game, especially when I believe that his actions are not only wrong but counterproductive. I expect better at the next election than an array of potential prime ministers whose main difference on this issue is the extent of their cruelty.
Showing kindness is a strength
One of the earliest ‘long’ words I remember learning as a child was ‘refugee’. I picked it up from my mother, Caroline Haviland, as it was so frequently on her lips. She had worked as a young woman in Austria in the 1950s, helping to build homes for refugees from Eastern Europe, and had carried that concern for the plight of those in need, whether overseas or at home, into all she did later in life. Responding to people who need your help was just something one did. Something this country did. Something any responsible member of the international community did. It wasn’t up for debate.
Last month, 200 or so of us gathered, some in person, some online, to remember my mother, who died in December. Among them were many who had known her in Austria seventy years ago – some refugees, some co-workers – as well as refugees she had befriended in Scotland in her later years.
Above all, we remembered her kindness. She was exceptionally kind.
But there is kindness in us all, even if those with malign intentions try to suck us dry of it.
Being kind to others is a strength. It makes us happier. It’s good for the soul.
Being unkind to others is a weakness. It makes us angrier. It withers the soul.
The Labour Party would do well to remember that.
More in society.
