England Is Now More Pro-immigrant – But It's More Islamophobic Too
10 September 2017Phil McDuff
Reading through Hope Not Hate's latest report on their surveys of English
attitudes towards race and immigration, one comes away with a mix of optimism
and pessimism. Those of us who are what the organisation describes as
"confident multiculturals" – or what the tabloids would describe as
out-of-touch liberal elitists – can be heartened by what seem to be an
increase in our ranks. We now make up 22% of the sample, up from 8% in the
first survey in 2011. The two most pro-immigrant groups now make up 39% of the
overall total.
At the other end of the spectrum, those who are "hostile" to immigration have
remained consistent, but with a shift from those who are most fiercely opposed
– down from 13% to 5% since 2011 – to the group described as "latently
hostile," up to 17% from 10% in the same period. This indicates that even
those people harbouring anti-immigrant views are more likely to engage with
the political process than to resort to direct violence themselves or support
it in others.
However, the report also details a significant rise in anti-Muslim sentiment.
42% of people said that the recent terrorist attacks have increased their
suspicion of Muslims in Britain, including many of those in the more liberal
groups. Around 50% of people would be willing to see relaxation of human
rights protections to "help fight terrorism," and a similar proportion see
Islam itself as "a threat to the west".
Only 10% of the population see themselves as being "similar" to Muslims. This
baseline perception of fundamental difference seems to reinforce the
stereotype that immigrants fail to integrate and also, ironically, opposition
to wanting them to do so. Muslims themselves are, overall, much more in favour
of children from different backgrounds going to school together as a measure
to improve integration, compared with the population at large.
This polarisation is worrying because it provides more evidence that England
is failing to resist the processes of cumulative extremism, or what academic
Douglas Pratt calls "reactive co-radicalisation", in which extremist
conceptions of "the other" become normalised across the population. In such an
environment, responses to violence themselves triggers counter-responses in a
vicious cycle of increased suspicion and enmity.
Media presentations of Islam and Muslims are doubtless contributing to this
process. As Pratt says in his essay Islam as Feared Other, the religion is
portrayed as "de facto oppositional" to "European" culture, so fundamentally
different that its mere existence threatens our own. The conception of Islam
in the current nationalist imagination is not so different from the
antisemitic or anti-black tropes of history (which, of course, haven't gone
away), and incorporates elements of both. The fear of the primitive savage and
the fear of the invading alien culture poisoning western culture from within
are both old racist tropes reworked for a modern Islamophobic discourse.
Even the shift towards increased political engagement by those with extremely
anti-immigrant views provides little comfort if those people are simply
becoming more confident that the state will effectively carry out policies
based on this rising fear of the other. With an increasingly rightwing
Conservative party in power, the decline of Ukip, and street-based far right
groups such as the British National party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL)
may not signify a positive trend of increasing tolerance for difference. This
may, instead, signify that the Islamophobic demands of the far right have been
increasingly incorporated into our mainstream politics.
It is easy to see how politicians, pulled to and fro as they are by electoral
concerns, could find themselves tempted to pander to these fears. The path of
least resistance is always to position yourself against the current enemies.
Many seem to believe that they can play both sides, by denouncing obvious
crimes by the "othered" population while providing boilerplate "but not all of
them, of course" disclaimers to provide cover for their nudge-nudge-wink-wink
invocation of racist tropes.
It's difficult to know who does this cynically and who has simply found
themselves befuddled through failure to properly appreciate the environment in
which they speak. It's unlikely that Sarah Champion, for example, set out to
consciously perpetuate the "dark men raping our women" trope when she wrote
the piece for the Sun that led to her resignation from the shadow cabinet, yet
she did so anyway. Abi Wilkinson unpicked the contradictions in the narrative
in the wake of the sexual assaults during Cologne's 2016 new year celebration:
in the west "only women who conform to strict rules about appropriate
behaviour deserve not to be assaulted" by white men with status, but if the
assailants are refugees from Islamic countries this is presented as not simply
an individual crime but a clash of civilisational values.
It is not good enough for politicians, especially those on the left or liberal
side, to plead ignorance of how their clumsy attempts to play both sides would
be "misinterpreted". Nor is it acceptable to try to sell immigration simply as
an economic benefit, delivering a ready supply of low-waged fruit-pickers or
nurses.
Our society is, despite everything, moving slowly and tentatively towards
being more open and less bigoted, but this cannot be presumed to be a natural
process that will continue indefinitely without hard work from progressives.
To preserve it, we need to actively resist the dangerous and divisive strains
of bigotry in our society, not simply hope they go away by themselves.
• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
©
EsinIslam.Com
Add Comments