7 hours ago
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Our political memory fails us. We treat government policies as if we’re seeing them for the very first time. But much of what appears to be novel has deep historical roots. If we fail to understand those roots and the soil in which they grow, we will fail to resist the assaults on our humanity.
The home secretary’s new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful. But both are eerily familiar.
Just over a century ago, in 1924, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, sought to appease rightwingers by appointing Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. As Martin Pugh notes in his 2005 book, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, Joynson-Hicks had “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite”. As home secretary, he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other oppressions.
Joynson-Hicks made it as hard as possible for refugees to settle in the UK. As the historian David Cesarani has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration officers to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country”. He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal”. In other words, while there is no suggestion that Mahmood is an antisemite like Joynson-Hicks, his policies uncannily prefigured Mahmood’s.
The same goes for the context. The rightwing press, led by the Times, the Daily Mail, the Express, the National Review and the Morning Post, had spent the preceding 20 years whipping up paranoia about a “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables” entering the country. “Aliens” and “undesirables” tended to be code for Jews. Jews in Britain were widely accused of “tribalism”, of refusing to “assimilate”, of being “un-English” and unpatriotic and of “leeching” off the state. The Imperial Fascist League issued stickers with the slogan: “Britons! Do not allow Jews to tamper with white girls.” Jewish immigrants were blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment.
Joynson-Hicks spoke disparagingly of Jews, who, he claimed, “put their Jewish or foreign nationality before their English nationality” and believed that leftwingers “would like to see England flooded with the whole of the alien refuse from every country in the world”. Many rightwingers believed there was a conspiracy to create a Jewish world order.
In other words, the stories being told about Muslims and immigrants today are the same stories that were being told about Jews a century ago. Both Muslims and immigrants are now accused of tribalism and a failure to assimilate, of hostility to “British values” and of “tampering with white girls”. They are blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment and for “leeching” off the state. Rightwing conspiracy fictions claim that Muslims in Britain are seeking to create an Islamic world order in the form of a “global caliphate”. Figures such as Suella Braverman and Matthew Goodwin suggest that people from ethnic minorities cannot be truly English or truly British. Braverman proposes a literal blood-and-soil definition of Englishness, “rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity” with “generational ties to English soil”.
Just like the age-old generalisations about Jews, these characterisations are entirely false. To give one example, a poll last month found that Muslims in both the UK and the US are more likely than non-Muslims to believe that “democracy is the best system of government” and to express loyalty to the country.
So why all the hatred? Well, the primary source is the same as it was a century ago: the media. Still the Daily Mail (now owned by the 4th Lord Rothermere), the Express and other newspapers pour division and bile into our lives. Today they are supplemented by outlets such as GB News and the social media site X. But just as they did 100 years ago, governments will blame anyone and anything else for polarisation and hate. Last week both Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, apparently reading from the same script, took this blame-shifting in a remarkable new direction by accusing the Green party of “sectarianism”, which appears to mean that it attracted Muslim votes. Is “sectarian” now code for Muslim?
If you want to stop hatred, polarisation and division, stand up to the rightwing media. This, too, is a lesson from the past. The alliance between the first Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists could have led to disaster. But in 1934, soon after Rothermere published his notorious Hurrah for the Blackshirts! article and Mosley held his monster rally in London’s Olympia, one of the Daily Mail’s biggest advertisers, J Lyons & Co, owned by a Jewish family, threatened a boycott unless the newspaper dropped its support for fascism. When the Mail caved and withdrew its blessing from Mosley, his movement began to wither. I write this with pride as the family were my ancestors, and the Lyons chairman at the time my great-great uncle Sir Isidore Salmon.
Of course, it shouldn’t have been left to advertisers. Then and now, it’s the government that needs to confront the lies in the media. Instead, it endorses them and grovels to the oligarchs.
One result is that governments are constantly behind the curve. Net migration might turn negative this year, with dire consequences for crucial public services, especially hospitals, care homes and universities as well as many private employers. In political terms, the government’s rightwing policies are equally destructive. Not only does the latest polling put the Greens ahead of Labour for the first time in history, it also shows that of those who voted Labour in 2024, only 37% intend to do so now: an astonishing collapse. To appease the billionaire press, Starmer’s government has burnt its house down.
“Scheming aliens undermining our values” is a narrative built across a century and more, originally by antisemites. It has been drilled into our heads as if it were an incontrovertible truth. It creates an environment in which every minority becomes less safe – not just Muslims, recent immigrants, refugees, Black and Brown people, but also Jews and everyone else who has suffered at the hands of the far right. Learn it or repeat it: that is, and has always been, our choice.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
