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British Politics Descends Into Nativism and Farce, and Trump Hasn’t Even Arrived Yet

Britons who want to leave the European Union have been relying heavily on anti-immigrant hysteria to make their case.

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Fishermen and campaigners for the "Leave" campaign demonstrate in boats outside the Houses of Parliament in London, U.K., Wednesday June 15, 2016. The Brexit battle took to London's River Thames as boats supporting the "Leave" and "Remain" campaigns jostled for space, while Irish rock star Bob Geldof harangued U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage using a sound system. Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Fishermen and campaigners for the "Leave" campaign demonstrate in boats outside the Houses of Parliament in London, U.K., Wednesday June 15, 2016. The Brexit battle took to London's River Thames as boats supporting the "Leave" and "Remain" campaigns jostled for space, while Irish rock star Bob Geldof harangued U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage using a sound system. Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images Photo: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg/Getty Images

With just over a week to go before Britons vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, the campaign for “independence” from the EU has turned farcical and deeply nasty, with nationalists relying heavily on anti-immigrant hysteria and racism to make their case.

And it turns out that Donald Trump has chosen next Friday, June 24 — the day the referendum votes will be counted — to visit his mother’s ancestral homeland, Scotland. Trump’s avowed purpose is to celebrate the reopening of a golf resort he owns there, but the timing suggests he may be hoping to be on hand to cheer the success of a reactionary political movement based on the same sort of appeals to nativism and xenophobia that have served him so well in America.

As the writer Alex Massie observed in a column for The Spectator on Wednesday, what seems to drive many of the anti-EU voters is “a much more narrow conception of Britain and Britishness than the one I find attractive.”

“A conception that thinks Britain is broken,” he continued, in terms that will sound familiar to anyone who has heard Trump speak, “that she has been betrayed, that there is something dismal about the modern world, that something has been stolen from them, that so many of the things that make Britain a success — its relaxed and liberal internationalism — are instead signs of failure and national capitulation.”

The Leave campaign, led by a former mayor of London with aspirations to be prime minister, and the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP — which is something like the British version of the Tea Party movement— has been accused of overt racism in its appeals to white working-class voters, which focus heavily on the supposed threat to traditional values posed by an influx of swarthy foreigners, particularly Muslims.

That was quite apparent in an editorial cartoon shared on Sunday by the campaign for a British exit, or Brexit. The cartoon showed the British escaping in a lifeboat marked Brexit from the EU ship of state, which was heading for disaster while beset by violent, money-grubbing, sexually depraved pirates with dark skin, beards, and turbans.

Clicking twice on the image to look more closely at a larger version reveals other details that are even more clearly racist. To start with, the ship is at risk of imminent disaster in part because one member of its crew is punching holes in the deck by firing a cannon that is marked “Diversity.”

The ship also flies, above its EU sail, what looks like the flag of Pakistan. Informed readers will be aware that Pakistan is neither in Europe nor a member of the European Union. There are more than a million Britons of Pakistani origin, but the migration of these families had nothing to do with the EU, because Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth, which unites former imperial possessions with the United Kingdom.

More significantly, as Philip Stephens of the Financial Times observed last week, there is the Leave campaign’s recent focus on making the false claim that Turkey is about the join the union.

Flick through the campaign material of the Brexiters fighting Britain’s EU referendum and you will find a video of a brawl in the Ankara parliament. Next, a poster with an image of a U.K. passport declaring that “Turkey (population 76m) is joining the EU.” Then statistics about Turkey’s high birth rate; and a warning that Britain’s National Health Service will soon be swamped by expectant Turkish mothers.

After this follows the assertion — unsubstantiated, of course — that Turkey has higher levels of criminality and gangsterism; and a map showing that Ankara’s supposedly imminent accession will extend Europe’s external frontier to war-ravaged Syria. None of this needs decoding. The dog whistle has made way for the klaxon. EU membership talks with Turkey, we are to understand, will soon see Britain overrun by millions of (Muslim) Turks — most of them thugs or welfare scroungers.

In reality, although Turkey has been in talks to join the European Union for decades, there are enough obstacles in place — including its rivalry with two member states, Greece and Cyprus, and the authoritarian bent of its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — that no one involved in those talks expects it to take place for, at least, decades more.

Nonetheless, the Leave campaign’s leaflets, billboards, and social media ads proclaim that Turkish membership is a done deal, so Britons would be well-advised to flee while they still can.

Perhaps attempting to pivot away from overt fear-mongering and racist messaging, a leader of the Leave campaign, Nigel Farage, sought to invoke Britain’s glorious past as a naval power, and win the votes of fishermen, by leading a flotilla of flag-draped boats up the River Thames on Wednesday to the House of Commons.

The photo-op somewhat backfired when members of the campaign to stay in the EU, led, improbably, by Sir Bob Geldof, the Irish rocker and social activist, appeared in a flotilla of their own to jeer the nationalists over a very loud sound system.

A boat carrying supporters for the Remain in the EU campaign including Bob Geldof (C) shout and wave at Brexit fishing boats as they sail up the river Thames in central London on June 15, 2016.A Brexit flotilla of fishing boats sailed up the River Thames into London today with foghorns sounding, in a protest against EU fishing quotas by the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. / AFP / BEN STANSALL (Photo credit should read BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)

During a confrontation between campaigners for and against the European Union in London on Wednesday, Bob Geldof made a rude gesture at a boat filled with pro-Brexit nationalists.

Photo: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Images of the confrontation, and jokes about the farcical nature of the mock naval battle, soon appeared on social networks, prompting remixes and memes.

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/743030674022662144

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/743042302336204800

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/743090448479203328

Contact the author:

robert.mackey@​theintercept.com @RobertMackey

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