If people are freaking out because there is a spider on the wall then they need to get a sense of proportion. I mean, that’s the nature of fears in the modern world, generally speaking, isn’t it? Some fears can be materially grounded in existential danger, of course, but most generally aren’t. Do you find that people who are scared are good at snapping out of it after being lectured on the irrationality of their fear?
But there isn't a spider on the wall. Only around 30,000 people arrived on small boats last year, less than a third of those processed through the asylum system with the rest mostly coming from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Immigration is currently high, though it's predicted to fall, and it's largely foreign students (over half a million a year), healthcare workers and middle class workers often from places like France, Germany and Ireland.
Whilst the housing of refugees in hotels in very poor areas was a stupid policy, most of those objecting to immigration are not really experiencing any effects from it (like the posh white couple in the south west you mentioned in an earlier post). It is neither a cultural clash or a cultural encounter in a lot of places. It's a phantasm. A moral panic. And as for those targetting Mosques, they've been here for generations in some cases. There has been no sudden social shift.
We've been here before. 15 years ago it was disabled people and benefit claimants. Whilst that didn't lead to pogroms it did lead to disabled people being physically attacked and hate crimes rising sharply followed by brutal cuts and mass impoverishment. Much like now there was a cross class belief that most claimants were scroungers, that benefits were too high and easy to get and that 'intergenerational worklessness' was a huge problem despite it barely actually existing. And like now this was accepted by all the main political parties as the truth, reported by all media as the truth and even charities created to support people in poverty began promoting or at least accepting this narrative.
Even some benefit claimants went on about scroungers. And I think this is key. The idea of hordes of asylum seekers flooding the country is a whipped up fear of an imagined other that are not viewed as human but a kind of amorphous malignant horde meaning to do us harm. That's why racist dave or whatever his name was could stick up for spymaster, he's not one of the horde. The fear is of an abstract other, not the nice Ghanian family who live next door, or your mate's Polish boyfriend. Whether it's chavs, claimants, migrants, queers, travellers, lone parents, disabled people, it goes round and round, this spectre always exists and is whipped up as a way to project people's anxieties, and often very legitimate anger about their circumstances onto. But it's never real. It's always based on lies, exaggeration, rumours and fear-mongering.
I don't know, I'm finding it hard to have a settled opinion on this. But I think there is a danger in the approach of taking people's concerns seriously that you just end up propagating the moral panic. That's what sections of the left did with claimants and it just poured fuel onto the fire. The concerns are not legitimate for the most part. They are not based on what is actually happening.
