On 24 June, while I was on stage at the Comedy Store in London, a man
told me to “go home”. The eagle-eyed among you will recognise that date
as the night after the UK voted to leave the EU.
Obviously, it was jarring. No one has told me to go home for 16 years,
and I assumed the idea had been forgotten. It’s the racist equivalent of
Limp Bizkit, or being worried about the millennium bug. Also, I come from Croydon, so telling me to go home really is incredibly cruel.
I dealt with the gentleman at the time, using some language and
terminology that could generously be described as “fruity”. I hoped that
this would be an isolated incident, the consequence of discussing this
subject in the eye of the storm. However, I was wrong. According the
government data, 6,193 hate crimes have been reported since the
referendum, a 20% rise on the same period in 2015. This led to home
secretary on Tuesday to announce that police handling of hate crimes will be reviewed.
Now, clearly not everyone who voted to leave the EU is a
racist (a phrase I’ve found myself saying so often in the last three
weeks, I’m thinking of having it printed on a T-shirt). But these
figures do suggest that the intolerant have been emboldened by the
result. Last week, Barclays claimed that the referendum had “uncorked a genie”
that was causing economic instability. Well, it turns out that genie is
also a huge racist. While that isn’t ideal, it is a great idea for a
gritty Christopher Nolan-style reboot of Aladdin, where the racist genie
has to reluctantly do the bidding of an Arab while intermittently
muttering: “Coming over here, taking our wishes.”
It’s easy to be angry with people. But you have always got to look at the root causes of the problem. In his song Only a Pawn in Their Game,
Bob Dylan takes on the story of the murder of civil-rights activist
Medgar Evers, but instead of just blaming the assassins, Dylan widens
his scope:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
Those
words have rattled around my head recently along with two key
questions: if we are all the pawns, then who are the grandmasters
playing us? Also, when you think about it, what is chess, if not a way
of encouraging slow, tactical racism?
For me, at least some of the blame lies with the leadership of the
leave campaign. They stoked intolerance, and then refused to take
responsibility. In the lead-up to the vote, a pro-Brexit minister told Newsnight:
“The only issue we can go on the offensive is on immigration.” The
hostility was relentless, from the campaign and its supporters in the
media. Former Times journalist Liz Gerard (@gameoldgirl
on Twitter) found that between 1 January and the date of the
referendum, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express each published 34
front-page articles about immigration.
In case you were wondering, none of them were positive. There were no
headlines such as: “Immigrant saves boy from killer shark” or
“Foreigners make a lovely jam”. There were 174 days between those dates –
which means two national newspapers carried front-page stories about
immigrants once every five days. What other subject dominates the
headlines once a week for six months? The answer is football, a sport
that, ironically, in this country is played largely by a talented group
of economic migrants.
Boris Johnson and Daniel Hannan have both claimed that there is no
relationship between the campaign and the rise in hate crimes. Then last
week, Nigel Farage made a cameo at the Republican national convention,
bemoaning the xenophobia of other countries and claiming that Donald
Trump’s attitude to Muslims makes him “very uncomfortable”. I’d say that
this was the pot calling the kettle black, but Farage would probably
suggest that I was accusing him of being racist to kettles. Honestly,
it’s political correctness gone mad.
In his convention speech, Trump claimed that immigration has impacted
negatively on African-Americans and Latinos, simultaneously attempting
to position himself as the champion of non-white people, while
legitimising the views of people who hate them. His doublespeak is
working – a CNN poll on Monday put him ahead of Hillary Clinton. An army of racist genies are licking their lips in anticipation, sensing the cork loosening.
The leaders of the leave campaign have left a floater in the swimming
pool of our public discourse and then happily swum away, leaving the
rest of us swimming in shit. In spite of this, I remain optimistic. The
audience at the Comedy Store that night came to my defence. Leave and
remain voters united in shouting my heckler down. It’s good to remember
that non-racists are in the majority. But we need to ensure we make our
voices heard. Otherwise, we’re just pawns in their game.
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