Xenophobia occurs in all societies. There are always those among us who hate and fear people they see as fundamentally different. They may do so because they or their family have suffered at the hands of people similar to those they dislike. But xenophobia is usually an expression of a person’s inner anger, directed outward to a group of people they regard as an acceptable target. There are many candidates for being a target-group: people from different religions, people with a different appearance, people with a different sexual orientation, and of course foreigners. The selection of targets for xenophobia depends on local circumstances, or, more specifically, the availability of people to hate. An unscrupulous leader can then build a following by legitimising the persecution of this target-group. This gives his followers a shared sense of purpose, relieving them of the sense of guilt they might otherwise experience when they express hatred and act cruelly. Attacks on targets can even have a joyful quality. Philip Dray’s research into the lynching of Afro-Americans in the Southern USA (published as At the Hands of Persons Unknown) shows how ‘Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. [White] Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic.’ The souvenirs in some cases were body parts from the lynched man.
Joyous horror of this kind arises when there are available targets who, in the opinion of the dominant group, need to be kept in their place. Lynching was celebrated by the white population in the Southern USA because it confirmed their sense of superiority and hence their very identity. In other circumstances, xenophobia can instead be associated with a sense of inferiority to the target population. This seems a characteristic of some anti-Semitism, which involves a strange combination of fear of the different religious practices of Jews (including the invented blood libel) and suspicion of the distinctive dress of Orthodox Jews, but also a resentment at the astonishing success of Jewish people in many walks of life.
Inferiority may also arise because of a fear that a person’s culture and way of life is threatened by a dominant neighbour. The English are, for the Scots, the most available and conspicuous group of different people. They not only dominate the island and the state, but are present everywhere in Scotland and every night on television. Scottish xenophobia takes the form of sullen resentment (shown in the way many Scots support any football team playing against England) combined with a strident assertion of the distinctive nature of the Scottish people. SNP politicians may attack the ‘Westminster system’, but their followers know this a polite code for getting at the English.
English xenophobia, on the other hand, rarely involves a dislike of the Scots. Instead, African-Caribbean and Muslim populations provide a more identifiable set of targets, and fringe political parties like the BNP and the EDL aim to mobilise hostility against these groups. However, the most successful political party in England to use xenophobia is UKIP. This has a formal policy of opposing UK membership of the European Union, but its basic appeal is a dislike of all foreigners, irrespective of race. Indeed, the European Union is regarded by UKIP as the supreme committee of foreigners, eclipsing in their mind all the other international organisations like the UN, NATO, the OECD, the World Trade Organisation and so on. The European Union is therefore seen as being responsible for all the unsettling changes in the lives of many older people, from decimal currency to mosques in our cities. The leader of UKIP has even said that he feels uneasy hearing foreign voices on underground trains. Well I was a student in London in 1965 and I remember lots of foreign voices then, even before we entered what was then referred to as the ‘Common Market’.
A key part of being a xenophobe is a sense of betrayal - in particular the belief that our people have failed because our leaders have betrayed us. Hitler (and many others on the right-wing in the Weimar Republic) argued that the German Army had lost the First World War because it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by a conspiracy of communists and democratic politicians, secretly orchestrated by the Jews. UKIP and many Conservative politicians claim that Britain only voted to remain a member of the forerunner of the EU in the 1975 Referendum because the politicians of the time told them that they were only being asked to support a trading alliance. This is about as true as Hitler’s ‘stabbed in the back’ argument. The official leaflet issued by the Government before the Referendum discusses the need for the UK to be part of a wider alliance:
“... in the modern world even the Super Powers like America and Russia do not have complete freedom of action. Medium-sized nations like Britain are more and more subject to economic and political forces we cannot control on our own. A striking recent example of the impact of such forces is the way the Arab oil-producing nations brought about an energy and financial crisis not only in Britain but throughout a great part of the world. Since we cannot go it alone in the modern world, Britain has for years been a member of international groupings like the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund. Membership of such groupings imposes both rights and duties, but has not deprived us of our national identity, or changed our way of life. Membership of the Common Market also imposes new rights and duties on Britain, but does not deprive us of our national identity. To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense.”
At that time, the ‘Yes’ vote for remaining in the Common Market was supported by most of the Labour Party, all the Liberal Party and almost all the Conservative Party. But there was a vigorous ‘No’ campaign led by sections of the Labour Party, a few Conservatives and the Scottish National Party. This argued strongly that the Common Market meant a loss of British sovereignty. This view was countered by the Yes campaign, which said that policy in the Common Market was decided by the national governments acting together, and that in a community of only nine members, Britain could veto any measure with which it did not agree.
At the time, this was true, but the European enterprise has changed greatly since 1975, partly because of British pressure. The UK Government, then as now, regarded the European Union as primarily a trading organisation, regulating a large free market in goods, capital and labour. Inter-European trade was impeded before 1987 by border controls and petty regulations in each individual country designed to protect their local industries from the products of other member-states. The Thatcher Government supported what was essentially a new treaty called the ‘Single European Act’ which was aimed at overcoming these obstacles. This brought in qualified majority voting (voting weighted in favour of the larger countries) to speed up the process of standardising product regulation. Customs post came down, and steps were taken to facilitate the free movement of labour.
It is ironic that it has been this very drive to create a more effective single market that has caused most political opposition. The European Union remains an astonishingly powerless organisation, nowhere near the ‘superstate’ of right-wing mythology. It has no armed forces, police force or inspectorate. It relies totally on its member states to enforce (with varying degrees of thoroughness) its regulations. The various crises on its borders, in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, show it to be ineffectual in foreign policy. But the single market has meant that every regulation, even those passed unanimously by its member states, can be presented by the opponents of the EU as a ‘dictat from the bureaucrats of Brussels’.
But the greatest political opposition to the EU is a result of the free movement of labour, which followed the Single European Act. This coincided with a massive expansion of the European Community from a club of a few prosperous Western European nations to an association of almost all European states West of Ukraine. Before the banking collapse of 2008 and the subsequent Greek debt crisis, there was a rough balance in the number of British citizens leaving this country to work and live in the rest of the EU, and the number of citizens from the rest of the EU coming to these shores. But massive unemployment in Southern Europe in the last five years has resulted in a rising number of people seeking work in the UK, coming mainly from Spain, Portugal and Italy. At present, the excess of people arriving over people leaving is about 200,000/year. This sounds a lot, but the UK population is now over 64 million, so net migration amounts to an increase in population of a third of one percent/year. At present, there are 2.34 million people from the rest of the EU living in the UK, compared with about 1.8 million British citizens living in the rest of the EU.
Of course, immigration is never spread evenly over a country. Huge international cities like London have always attracted diverse populations, but smaller communities can be profoundly affected by a rapid increase in strangers from other countries. This can, at least for a time, cause fear and concern about greater competition for jobs and houses and even for sexual partners. Xenophobic politicians can use this fear to build support. So we now get tirades in the press about foreigners who are supposed to be taking our jobs while mysteriously also living in idleness on our welfare benefits. UKIP leaders suggest that foreigners may also be disease-ridden, bringing HIV and now Ebola Virus to this land. These unpleasant claims are rarely challenged by our cowardly Government, which appeases UKIP and thereby continues to strengthen it.
Those of us who are not xenophobic do not hate and fear people because they are different. Instead, we find that people from different lands come with new ideas and experiences, and can therefore be stimulating company. They also bring their own tastes in food, which over time has greatly improved our own once-deficient cuisine. We do not automatically fear change, but believe that it may bring welcome improvements in our life. We think that the diversity of nationalities and cultures in our largest cities is far more exciting than the dreary grey places remembered from childhood. We do not talk of the past as being ‘in my day’, but believe we live in the present, whatever our age.
Of course, I am biased. Like many English people, I am the descendent of an immigrant. Two of my cousins have retired to live in other countries of the EU and, thanks to EU regulations, are eligible for local health services. My son completed a masters programme at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and paid the same (very low) fees as a local student. The EU has given us the chance to cross borders with ease to work, retire, trade and study. This is unsettling for those who prefer the idea that the world is divided into distinct and totally-separate nations, each restricted to own piece of territory, each a prison of the mind.
