A lot of us have spent the past few weeks telling our children some fairly problematic stuff. That there’s an old man with a beard who breaks into our homes with a reindeer and watches them while they sleep. That it’s acceptable to talk about the ins and outs of a virgin’s womb. That there was a genocidal king who murdered newborn boys. I can’t think of any context in which we would tell these stories other than Christmas, but I suppose we feel they are balanced out by their happy endings. Santa is a creepy idea but he does leave presents. The traumatic experience of being homeless in another town with a birth imminent ends with a baby swaddled happily in a manger. We don’t tend to dwell on the next part, in which the holy family went on to become refugees in Egypt, although the Pope is among the religious figures who has suggested we should think about that more.
You don’t even need to go that far to see what is wrong with this year’s Christmas message though, which, courtesy of Sajid Javid, is that there is officially No Room at the Inn. The home secretary cut short his £800-a-night luxury safari holiday in South Africa to appear to us as a Tory Ghost of Christmas Present, with the message that Britain is now facing a full-on “crisis”.
There were plenty of scenarios that warranted that kind of conscientiousness. More people than ever relied on food banks to get through Christmas this year, around half of them children. More than 130,000 children faced Christmas in a state of homelessness, in temporary accommodation or B&Bs completely unfit for families. Almost every day, a woman is killed or takes her own life because of domestic violence, a form of abuse that often spikes at this time of year.
None of these are serious enough to be considered a crisis, however. That privilege is reserved for the five small boats in which 40 desperate people attempted to cross the Channel on Christmas Day, no doubt hoping to make the case that they deserved to seek refuge in the UK. That’s no small detail – there is a legal right, established in international law, to claim asylum in a country after you arrive there, which these people were within their rights to follow. But Javid wasn’t going to let that get in the way of his ghoulish seasonal performance, having already determined their status for himself as “illegal” migrants.
It’s not beneath us Brits to attempt to withdraw from international law on refugees – Conservative party leader Michael Howard campaigned on a platform of doing so in 2005 – but despite the many steps the government has taken to make life intolerable for migrants, that is not yet among them.
Even though we, as humans and citizens of international law-abiding nations, have a duty to process refugees and accept those with a legitimate claim, this can seem an overwhelming responsibility. I can sympathise with the former mayor of Catania Enzo Bianco, for instance, who I once saw weep with grief as he recalled the migrants he had buried in unmarked graves in his town in Sicily, just one tragic consequence of the more than 300,000 migrants who arrived by boat in Italy between 2014 and 2015.
The “crisis” of which Javid is speaking, by contrast, refers to the estimated 220 people who have attempted to cross the Channel to Britain since the start of November. The action he is advocating is the deployment of two Border Force vessels – which had been conducting search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean – and the toughening-up of measures to prevent crossings from France. Javid initially resisted deploying the vessels for fear that the prospect of being rescued would encourage more people to cross.
There are at least three reasons why it feels as if this is designed to appease far-right and anti-immigrant sentiment, rather than to actually solve any problems. This current “crisis” began in November, making it far from obvious why the dramatic re-entry of Javid in the middle of the Christmas holidays was necessary – except for effect.
Second, the idea that a crackdown on the French side would improve matters has absolutely no basis in fact. One of the triggers for the recent increase in the number of people coming across the Channel in boats – albeit still in very low numbers – is that conditions for migrants in France have worsened in recent weeks. Third, migration experts from EU countries, which have dealt with more than 1.8 million arrivals since 2014 – the majority from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – are unequivocal that the relentless focus on policing, defence and surveillance has not prevented migrants from entering Europe, but has increased the likelihood that they will die attempting to do so.
The truth is that Britain’s stance towards migrants has never had much to do with reason and everything to do with a cultural hostility that stretches back centuries. In just one example highlighted in a new book on Brexit and the end of empire, Rule Britannia, an 1893 magazine described immigrants and foreigners as “deceitful, effeminate, irreligious, immoral, unclean and unwholesome. Any one Englishman is a match for any seven of them.”
The greatest immigration scandal of 2018 – the treatment of the Windrush generation – was a reminder that we have always exhibited a unique hostility towards people who are visibly different. The arrival of a few hundred people from the Caribbean in 1948 prompted a moment of national soul-searching (prime minister Clement Attlee even considered diverting the Windrush to east Africa), while the decision to offer citizenship to 200,000 Polish migrants the previous year went almost unnoticed.
That Polish people are included in our newer incarnation of xenophobic frenzy gives me no joy whatsoever. It’s worth remembering that Dover, where the current “crisis” is unfolding, is the terrain of Tory MP Charlie Elphicke, who equated anti-fascist protesters with neo-Nazis, and defended a Tory councillor who described people of Middle Eastern heritage as “sons of camel drivers”.
None of this, of course, is actually about the refugees or migrants in question. It’s about us, and our capacity for hypocrisy. We deported Windrush migrants while the flags were flying in celebration of the Commonwealth, and we are dehumanising refugees while the Christmas trees are still twinkling. We need to tell the children this particular Christmas story, so they don’t grow up sinking to the same abject depths.