Brexit and the Foreign Virus
Introduction
I was an adolescent going through an existential crisis when one of my teachers at school gave me a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus (1947). Once I started, I couldn’t stop reading. I was haunted by a tragic story that contained overwhelming acts of humanity and kindness, against the background of a desperate fight for survival in the plagued city of Oran. I was thinking at the time that life without God would be an absurdity and, yet, I fell in love with Dr Rieux – to my young mind, an atheist saint who put his life at risk to save that of others infected by the disease.
At one point in the battle, Rieux thought aloud: “It’s an idea that can be laughable, but the only way to fight the plague is honesty”. His interlocutor then asked: “What is honesty?” To which Rieux responded: “I don’t know what it is in general. But, in my case, I know that it consists in doing my job”. And he gave himself body and soul to his work as a doctor. So powerful was the impact of his behaviour on my disoriented adolescent soul that I decided to study medicine and psychiatry. Since then, I have many times fallen short of the ideal of being honest. And I have needed to write as therapy, to redeem myself. No doubt, I am biased by my upbringing.
As I am writing this, the ongoing coronavirus crisis is teaching us a lesson about the illusory nature of national borders. And it is helping us rediscover the immense value of solidarity and international cooperation. That was at the core of the European Union’s project, the most ambitious supranational and transnational group venture in human history so far. The EU has indeed achieved the longest run of peace among its members, and its aid budget is by far the largest in the world. However, the humane side of the EU has faded away in the handling of immigration – the most determinant factor in the Brexit vote of June 2016 (O’Toole, 2018; Clegg, 2017; Goodhart, 2017; Leclerc, 2017; Oliver, 2017; Shipman, 2017).
Does Brexit honestly relate to immigration?
I have elsewhere argued (Ezquerro, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) that Brexit thinking and feeling seemed to have evolved from complex large and global group dynamics; linked to a constellation of historical and ongoing contributing factors, including the following:
• a reactivation of anti-immigrant attitudes, in the context of the ongoing migratory crisis;
• a nostalgia of sovereign British Empire;
• a tension within the UK about devolution to its constituent nations;
• a revival of English nationalism;
• profound regional inequalities within England itself;
• a divide between big cities and the rest;
• a generational divergence of values and aspirations;
• the global financial crisis;
• a disdain for the poor and vulnerable, expressed through austerity and the undermining of the welfare state;
• a sensationally self-indulgent political ruling class;
• unacceptable levels of inequality and social detachment;
• a persistent and insidious anti-EU propaganda;
• a deeply rooted British ambivalence towards the European project and a distrust of EU institutions…
The list is longer. However, during the Brexit referendum campaign “research consistently found immigration to be the public’s number one issue of concern” (Boscia, 2020: 14). And the pro-Brexit camp conspicuously exploited this by producing slogans that reactivated and amplified anti-immigrant attitudes.
Jenkins (2016) suggested that the Brexit vote was largely based on hard-wired emotions, declining into a sort of primitivism. On the one hand, ‘leavers’ threatened the voters with waves of immigrants, torrents of Brussels regulations, rampant terrorism and ‘Cologne-style’ mass sex attacks. On the other hand, ‘remainers’ retorted with thousands of jobs lost, the NHS in ruins and a decade of uncertainty.
One risk within this unhealthy large-group dynamic is that it can become an out-of-control political catharsis; in which deep emotions delve beneath party and tribe into the personal realm of anger, xenophobia and group hatred (Haidt, 2013; Volkan, 2014, 2017; Jenkins, 2016; Abse, 2019). The group-hatred dynamic contributed to the murder of Jo Cox, a support voice for refugees and Remain-campaigner, Labour MP in West Yorkshire. It happened on 16 June 2016, exactly one week to the referendum day. The murderer (a Leave-fanatic) repeatedly stabbed her and blasted off a shortened firearm, while shouting “Britain first”!
A few hours prior to the assassination of Jo Cox, and as part of a persistent strategy to incite racial hatred, UKIP leader Nigel Farage had unveiled an anti-immigration poster featuring a long stream of Syrian refugees at the Croatian-Slovenian border, under the slogan “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all” (Shipman, 2016: 389). The picture had been published the previous year in The Sun, under the devious title “One million migrants heading this way” (Davidson, 2015).
Jo Cox and her family were portrayed in one of the inflatable rubber dinghies that had been buzzing around Nigel Farage’s Thames flotilla the day before she was killed. Thomas Mair, the murderer, was arrested shortly after the attack. When he was asked to confirm his name at the Court, he replied: “my name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain” (Shipman, 2016: 387).
By and large, there was an unspoken consensus among politicians and the media that the murderer was a lone nutter. In many ways, this lack of proper analysis from a group perspective implies a denial of the fact that slogans and propaganda are internalised into the collective mind of society – and that an individual unconscious is always a social unconscious (Hopper, 2003; Hopper and Weinberg 2011; Ormay, 2012).
Three and a half years later, this conspiracy of silence was broken by Rose Hudson-Wilkin (Church of England’s first black female bishop and former chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons). On Christmas Eve 2019, she pointed out that Brexit discourse had been damaging to parliamentarians and to British society as a whole – and tragically contributed to the death of Jo Cox (Mohdin, 2019).
The first documented death of a migrant on the shores of Europe occurred on 1 November 1988, in the Spanish town of Tarifa, in the Strait of Gibraltar. The journalist Ildefonso Sena shot a picture which showed the swollen but clothed body of a Moroccan man in his mid-20s, lying face up, partly covered with sand and seaweed, like a ghost on the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day. Behind him, there was a small boat: a wreck that froze the heart. Since then, many more came; and more; and more. Fellow human beings sinking with their eyes wide open on the beaches of wealthy Europe.
In 1993, a group of Dutch activists created United for Intercultural Action (UIA), an NGO which has evolved as a European-wide network against racism and in support of migrants and refugees. That very year, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) was founded and, also, the Maastricht Treaty came into effect (creating a common EU citizenship). The UIA team has been gathering every reported instance in which someone died trying to migrate into Europe.
How many deaths have been recorded since 1988? The figure is close to 40,000. However, the real number of deaths is higher, as many have died without trace during the crossing (UIA, 2019). The vast majority of casualties have perished while on route for Europe (most of them at sea), but quite a few have died in custody or have committed suicide while waiting for a response from the European authorities. A devastatingly large number of the deaths have been anonymous. Mothers, fathers, siblings and other attachment figures crying to theirs in so many cemeteries full of nameless graves…
In December 2018, the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid cut short his luxury safari holiday and delivered a dramatic speech in which he said Great Britain was facing a “full-on crisis” (as five small inflatable boats carrying forty desperate people were intercepted near Dover trying to cross the English Channel, on Christmas Day). He stated there would be no room at the Inn for “illegal” migrants.
That happened at the very time many British children were being told nice stories about the birth of Jesus Christ. But these tales overlooked the reality that, in order to survive, Jesus and his parents became refugees in Egypt. And Pope Francisco nearly became persona non-grata for suggesting that we should think more about that.
Hirsch (2019) reported that in an extraordinary communiqué, the Home Office proclaimed that, with his emergency return to the UK, Mr Javid had “taken control of the response to the rising number of migrants attempting to cross the Channel in small boats”.
In another rhetorical speech, Javid stated that the Christmas arrivals may not be “genuine” asylum seekers. He asked for an urgent call with his French counterpart with a view to toughening up the measures to prevent further crossings from France. He also commissioned a detailed study of the options from Border Force about the provision of additional vessels in the Channel, including more cutters as deterrence.
The so called Channel crisis was unfolding in parallel with the Government drawing up contingency plans for a possible no-deal Brexit. Some of these plans included: the awarding of a £14 million contract to Seaborne Freight (a ferry company with no ferries) to provide emergency capacity to ease severe congestion of people travelling from continental Europe and, also, the deployment of 3,500 extra troops to protect the UK borders from a possible invasion of migrants (Hirsch, 2019).
During the course of 2015, Greece had often received more than 10,000 arrivals on its shores, in a single day; but that wasn’t as serious for the Tory Government as the arrival of forty ‘strangers’ in Dover. Greece was let down by the EU (including the UK). Four years later, the country can hardly contain the most dangerously overcrowded refugee camps in Europe. In the infamous Moria camp on the island of Lesbos some 20,000 people live in a space designed for just under 3,000.
As I write, there is a race against time to raise awareness about the coronavirus threat and to design strategies for the protection of an already extremely vulnerable population. Greek Archbishop Sevastianos Rossolatos recently criticised the European Union for abandoning his country to cope with massive immigration: “The EU has helped us in certain political crises – but on the migrant issue it’s shown great inconsistency” (quoted in Luxmoore, 2020: 23).
Javid’s sensational Christmas performance, fighting migrants ‘on the beaches’, had nothing to do with reason or with security. Instead, it appeared to have been designed to fuel pro-Brexit and anti-immigrant sentiments. How on earth could he categorise these fellow human beings as “illegal”, after the psychological trauma of separating from their primary attachment figures in a desperate journey for survival?
The European migratory crisis overlapped with the recent Windrush generation scandal, which has unfolded since 2018. It concerns West Indian migrants arriving in the UK in 1948, in a boat named The Empire Windrush. Strangely enough, their Home Office’s files disappeared while Theresa May was Home Secretary. In turn, this has led to the systematic and unlawful detention or deportation of at least 164 black British citizens so far – while an unknown number have lost their jobs or homes, or have been denied benefits or medical care to which they were entitled. In addition, a large number of long-term UK residents have been wrongly refused re-entry to the UK (British Library, 2020).
The Windrush scandal has become the most visible group example of the extent of xenophobia (and racism) in the Home Office. Every week, there are new stories about the department’s failures. In a recent report, Windrush Lessons Learned, Wendy Williams showed that the department’s problems are broader and deeper than just one big scandal. The review exposed the Home Office as “unfit for the society it is supposed to serve, after a series of colossal failures, rooted in a toxic internal culture and an ingrained misunderstanding of Britain’s colonial history” (in Lammy, 2020).
In an analysis of large-group dynamics, O’Toole (2018) referred to a subtle English narrative about perceiving the EU as an oppressor. This could be a way of expressing (unconsciously) an unresolved ‘transference’: the colonisers imagining themselves as the colonised, and transferring the guilt of invasion and colonisation to the immigrant. Of course, the flaw is that the EU is not a coloniser of the UK – although most European countries have an appalling history of colonising other continents.
William’s report further uncovered significant ignorance and thoughtlessness on ethnicity issues and confirmed some elements of institutional racism in the Home Office, stemming from “cultural issues” in the department. In a culture of awarding bonuses in reward for meeting quotas, officials often treat individuals as means to an end rather than as human beings. Some of the processes for people to be reunited with their families are so complex that even immigration lawyers struggle to understand them (Lammy, 2020).
In 2010, David Cameron pledged to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands”. This contributed to the creation of a ‘hostile environment’. In fact, the term was coined by Theresa May. As Home Secretary, she introduced a new immigration bill and said, literally, that it was necessary in order “to create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants” (Theresa May, 2013, in McDonald, 2018).
Indeed, one of May’s achievements was to reduce non EU-immigration from 217,000 people in December 2010 to 143,000 in December 2013, raising the income threshold for people wanting to bring spouses in and effectively banning low-skilled immigration (Goodhart, 2017: 124-125). In the face of this hostile environment, human rights barrister Adam Wagner postulated that May’s policies, which we need to remember were really popular, “created the modern immigration system” (Wagner, 2018, in McDonald, 2018) – adding much to the trauma of migrants, particularly of the more vulnerable.
Maybe, the ‘modern’ is less so than what Wagner would have liked to believe. In fact, the arrival of a few hundred people from the Caribbean in 1948 (the Windrush generation) prompted a moment of national soul-searching. Clement Attlee, British PM at the time, even considered diverting The Empire Windrush ship to East Africa (Hirsch, 2019).
Conclusion
The Brexit movement has been quite unconcerned with the European Union’s lack of solidarity and compassion in the handling of immigration, and have contributed to an inhumane hostile environment towards migrants. The worst wreck of all is that of a European political class without the courage to face the ongoing tragedy of the death of tens of thousands of migrants, on the shores of Europe. And, also, the wreckage of us all as society – reading the press or watching the TV coverage, while looking the other way.
The hostile environment towards migrants must go – and officials must recognise their primary duty should be to resolve people’s problems, not exacerbate them. In a global world, for societies to survive and grow in the long term, fostering large-group solidarity, diversity and openness is the most honest way forward. But there is a real threat from the virus of unsolidarity.
In the face of increasing interdependence, as highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic, there is no substitute for international and transnational cooperation and solidarity. Brexit can only make the uncertain road ahead bumpier. It is our personal and group responsibility to make the best out of a bad job: the pursuit of honesty is an open-ended task.
References
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Arturo Ezquerro (a consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and group analyst) is senior trainer at the Institute of Group Analysis and former Head of NHS Medical Psychotherapy Services in Brent, London. He is an honorary member of the International Attachment Network and has over 70 publications in 5 languages, including Encounters with John Bowlby. Tales of Attachment (Routledge).
arturo.ezquerro@ntlworld.com