Tory Hostility, the Holocaust Survivor and the Home Secretary
JVL Introduction
Below are two pieces published in the Guardian; Adittya Chakrabotty writes that Tory racism is nothing new and Joan Salter, Holocaust survivor and an educator writes about why she travelled 200 miles to confront the Home Secretary. Embedded below is the video of that exchange. It is chilling. There is not even the pretence that the government’s motive is to stop trafficking. Ms Salter writes: Suella Braverman’s “…audience listened attentively as she told them that so many problems facing our country, from housing shortages to NHS waiting times, were caused by illegal migrants. It was up to her government, she claimed, to resolve this by deporting the problem.
Whether Braverman believes this to be the only solution, I cannot say, but it was obvious from questions asked by those listening that this was the message they had absorbed. Comments criticising the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving these desperate boat people, instead of leaving them to drown, were shared openly and to applause from others in the audience.”
The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Ordinary People”; ordinary people were victims and ordinary people carried out the atrocities or ignored them. It really is time for us ordinary people to stand up and support refugees and oppose racism in all its forms.
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Thu 19 Jan 2023. Read the original here.
Suella Braverman proved it again: racism is a fire the Tories love to play with
The home secretary was confronted by a Holocaust survivor for her inflammatory language. But it’s a rich party tradition
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Reactionary politicians know that they can often say or do things without having to worry about being challenged by a media interviewer. And so ordinary people need to do it.
We need more of this.
Similar challenges like this in the USA in 2016 led Hillary Clinton to move away from her use of the term ‘super predator’. And Democrats today are not so supportive of mass incarceration as they used to be.
How very real this description of racism is. It is always a small group of people that are chosen as detrimental to the population at large. It is sad that even Europe which suffered racism in the 1930s and 1940s has learned nothing. Even stranger is the fact that most inhabitants of European countries today are descendants of immigrants a few generations back.
Easy to target Anthony Eden – he has fewer admirers then even Neville Chamberlain (for the latter see David Edgerton “The British Nation – its Rise and Fall” (Penguin, 2nd ed 2019) – though note his p xxi on JOSEPH Chamberlain, originally on the extreme left of the Liberal party. But also see DE on Mosley (his pp 15-6, 165-6 ) and his eventual triumph in a nationalist postwar Britain..
Was it not, however, the then Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison who closed the door on Roumanian Jews seeking sanctuary from their genocidal persecutors? upon the ground that it would only encourage more to apply, and whose party happily allowed entry of the entire Galizien Waffen SS division to British mines (their tell-tale SS tattoos had to be concealed from other miners by the provision of separate showering facilities)…Harsher conditions imposed upon the Kenyan Asians..
……according to ‘the Guardian’………….Jeremy Corbyn’s politial assassin and nemesis of Socialism; again the primary source of JVL.
There is a problem with language which is used to catagorise groups which are disapproved of. Children born outside marriage were stymatised as “illegitimate” and the term “illegal” to categorise those asylum-seekers and refugees , en masse, is also inappropriate. When 70% of those who arrive by unofficial routes are, after home office assessment, accepted as legitimate asylum or refugee status applicants how does that square with “illegal”?
No one is illegal or illegitimate and branding them as such is puerile and populist politicking, presumably with an eye on potential electoral popularity. Those arriving by unofficial routes are being used as pawns in a cheap political game. If the home office had appropriate screening processes on the French side of the border then much of the incentive driving the “people-smuggling trade” would evaporate and that would be a constructive way to undermine those profiteers.