By Weyman Bennett, co convenor Stand Up To Racism
Last week kicked off with a storm with revelations about Boris Johnson and the potential of domestic violence with the police called to his partner’s home. Rather despicably, Johnson came up with a quick and calculated solution to take the heat off. It is as Dr Samuel Johnson once said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.
By Thursday Johnson was eulogising about the Australian immigration point system. With his misogyny in the spotlight and causing potential damage to his campaign for the Tory leadership, Johnson responded by strategically signalling to the Tory back benchers. His tough talk on immigration served as a code—a reassurance that he will turn back the clock, endorsing out and out racism in political discourse.
The emerging far right movement internationally has a particular love of Australia’s policy towards immigration and refugees, where there is a decisive shift taking place—a convergence of the far right’s influence, and mainstream policy.
In Germany, Jens Baur, chairman of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP) in the Saxony region, told The Nation that he praised Australian “success” against refugees because it was an “effective deterrent”. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, architect of the Brexit Party, has praised what a fellow UKIP MP called Australia’s “innovative” refugee approach, and urged the European Union to follow suit.
Australian policy on immigration and refugees is brutal and vicious. What we are seeing now is a strong ‘nativist’ appeal for many of the mainstream right-wing parties to adopt the language of the far right in the hope of winning some of their assumed votes.
What Johnson is identifying with in Australia is mass detention of refugees. In the last year, the Australian government has spent $346,000 a year in a system of constant detention or offshore detention, placed in the hands of privatised multinationals in a profit driven system that tortures, deports and even sometimes leads to the deaths of refugees. In 2015, a report by the International Detention Coalition showed that Australia spends twice as much as the US detaining asylum seekers offshore. In 2016 UNICEF Australia and Save the Children produced a report that showed Australia’s policy on onshore and offshore detention, and of turning back boats, had cost $9.6 billion between 2013 and 2016.
When Donald Trump was first elected, a transcript was leaked of a phone call with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, where Trump claimed that the Australian system was much more hostile than the US system.
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am”, he told Turnbull, in response to the notion that no one who arrived by boat to Australia would be let in. Trump realised that his nasty administration could learn a thing or two from this system. At its heart has been a deliberate ratcheting up of racism, in particular towards Muslims and the threat of non-white immigration into Australia. It is no accident that selected Australia as a system to look to.
Johnson has a long history of making racist statements. Notoriously, in the Telegraph in August 2018, he described Muslim women who wear the Niqab face veil as looking like bank robbers or post boxes. Johnson is often seen as a clumsy buffoon figure, but these are not just accidental outbursts of his reactionary world view. His racist and sexist Niqab comments were as strategically timed as last weeks comments praising Australia’s immigration policy. Last summer, he was eyeing the door of number 10 and signalling his willingness to go down a road of racist populist politics, in the hope of a shortcut to becoming Tory leader. The fact that a tokenistic enquiry cleared him of any wrongdoing tells you what you need to know about the Tory party and racism, where Islamophobia is treated as a joke.
It’s worth restating some of the most appalling examples from Johnson’s track record on racism here:
- In a Telegraph column, this one written in 2002, Johnson described how Tony Blair would love touring the continent, greeted by “cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”–a racist term for a dark-skinned African child—and how “the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief”.
- After Barack Obama intervened in Britain’s EU debate, Johnson suggested that the then US president had an “ancestral dislike of the British empire” because he was “part-Kenyan”.
- In 2006, Johnson said, “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.”
- In The Spectator in 2012, he advocated the racist ideology at the heart of defending empire, stating, “Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. The British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right. If left to their own devices… the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”
These are not isolated statements, but a continuation of a set of views that have been honed and developed over the years. Johnson will say whatever is necessary in order to get his grubby hands on power.
The backdrop to the repulsive politics of the Tory leadership contest is Trump’s presidency, the alarming re-emergence of Farage as a key player in British politics, and the backdrop of the rise of a far right movement internationally with fascists operating and making gains within it.
Only this week Johnson was praising Trump, claiming he has “many good qualities… we conservatives have failed to talk up free market policies”. Again, he is stressing a deliberate alignment in his bid for the Tory leadership. Taking into account what Johnson represents here in the Tory leadership election, and the scale of his open racism, there can be a sense, particularly among the liberal centre, of hope for Jeremy Hunt to win, that this will be the lesser of two evils.
But it is ludicrous for anyone who wants to oppose racism to look to Jeremy Hunt here—a man who said he supported “150 percent” the racist statements tweeted by Katie Hopkins, and the decision by Donald Trump to retweet them, regarding the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The tweet referenced “Londonistan”—a deeply racist term depicting the capital as a no-go area, presumably for white people, due to so called domination by its Muslim population.
This was Hunt’s somewhat lacklustre attempt to win some favour from the US administration, and with an eye to winning the Tory leadership. This is an extension of the legitimisation of racism at the very heart of government. Previous prime ministers at least paid lip service to opposing inequality and the notion that it is not acceptable in mainstream politics to give blatantly racist views a legitimate platform.
Blame
Over the last 50 years, from the top of the establishment there has been a slow erosion of the positive projection of a multi-cultural society. Immigration was blamed for the 2008 crisis, when in fact clearly originated in the financial system. The banks were promptly bailed out to the tune of billions in clear sight, but wall to wall racist rhetoric on immigration was used to turn the blame away from the real cause of austerity in this country.
But there are moments that cut through—when the mask slips. No one can forget the horrifying image of a father and daughter, lying face down in the muddy water along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck.
This portrait of desperation was captured on Monday by the journalist Julia Le Duc, in the hours after Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez died with his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, as they tried to cross from Mexico to the United States, only for the hope of a better life, of survival.
That chilling moment—and sadly it was just one captured snapshot of many, many moments that take place systematically as a result of racist immigration and refugee policy—reminds us that there is something fundamental at stake here on the nature of humanity.
It recalls something Werner Herzog said at the beginning of Trump’s presidency: “Dear America: you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that a third of your people would kill another third, while a third watches”.
It is important to have clarity about the different nature of the forces of the racist right and new far right movement, and of fascism—from the right wing racist populism of Trump and Farage, to the pressure this puts on the right of mainstream establishment parties, to the backdrop of a far right movement seeking to take root, networked internationally, from its street movements to its suited wing. Trump is not a fascist.
And we should not forget that in the US as well as anywhere he goes, the politics he represents have provoked mass protests and movements that have united all those opposed to racism, climate change denial, and to sexism and LGBT oppression. This is a powerful thing.
But Herzog’s words reflect that the moment we find ourselves in, the challenges history has presented for us, certainly has echoes of the 1930s. The lesson is that we must build a mass movement equip to take on the racist right, smash the far right and fascist forces and unite on a broad basis to include all those who want to organise to challenge racism, Islamophobia and Antisemitism, and to challenge the ‘hostile environment’ and institutionalised racism.
That means organising to take on the arguments against racism in every workplace, community and college, at a national level, and to link up internationally with movements across the world who are doing the same thing. We can make a difference, as we have done time and time again in stopping the fascists and the far right making the gains they have managed to elsewhere. But we have to get organised.
On 19 October, Stand Up To Racism is hosting its international conference against racism and fascism—it will be big, and will have delegations and speakers from across the #WorldAgainstRacism international coordination, that organised demonstrations for UN Anti Racism Day in March in around 70 cities across over 20 countries.
See full details and book up HERE