The Guardian view on the legends of asylum: When you lose the truth, a scapegoat dominates migrants in Britain | Editorial
INumbers rarely talk about themselves. It must be framing and interpreted. It is often armed. In Britain’s increasingly toxic debate about asylum and migration, the question is not only the number of asylum seekers who reach small boats. This is what these numbers represent – and why opinion polls indicate a large percentage of the audience now you think things are simply incorrect.
YVette Cooper, Minister of Interior, charged her political credibility to restore the feeling of asylum -arresting system: reducing accumulation by treating cases, and acceleration return Among those who do not have a legal claim to survive and release “one in one, one, one outside” returns with France. In the balance of operational realism with symbolic reassurance, Mrs. Cooper walks the edge of a knife between politics and perception.
The issue of small boats is no longer just shortcomings. It is a cultural storm – and is increasingly nourishing it by facts, but by misleading. According to a new Yougov votingNearly half of the British mistakenly believe that illegal immigrants are legally exceeding the number of people here. 72 % amazing of those who support collective deportations have this belief – although official estimates show that legal immigration exceeds irregular immigration by at least 10 to 1. This gap between belief and reality is not accidental. It is the result of years of distortion by the populist and politicians who are mixed with asylum, and the validity. Verses like Nigel Faraj and Robert Jenrik This charge led, using selected statistics of cherry and cute story to enhance a country under siege. Hotels Housing asylum seekers have become flash points for extremist right -wing protest. It seems that the riots last summer, in a frightening way, are not a coincidence. It looks like a pilot operation.
Mrs. Cooper’s strategy to counter this with better data and work system, on paper, completely rational. She wants to reaffirm the difference between political theater and politics. But the data alone cannot win a cultural war. The spread of citizenship or the state of migration to the perpetrators, even in the name of transparency, may only enhance the belief that “the outside” explains the crime – especially when the public dominant narration is already deviant. Amnesty International’s warning that detecting the risk of race for the suspects becomes a “lightning penis” for racist feelings is based on a good basis. The ministers of the Moderate Conservative Party have truly cautiously urged, and they called for accurate data and cooler heads. Neil Basso, a former anti -terrorist head, is right to compare the Varrajiya with Trump: both depend on lies about migrants who exceed the truth to win the vote.
The real problem is not the number of small boats, but the increasing number of Britons who see all immigration is a threat to identity and safety. Yougov finds that a large percentage of the public does not only support the observation of the borders, but the mass removal operations of the migrants who have already settled here. This is a policy without a precedent in the prevailing policy Since 1971. And what is concerned now Public debate.
The work inherited the broken asylum system. But he also inherited a The poisoning political environment. The danger is that by trying to neutralize extremism through additional reform and data groups, it gives legitimacy to the deeper narration: that the immigrant is, in the root, the problem. Britain plays fire, not only because its systems fail, but because the public’s confidence in those systems was Curricula erosion. This is difficult to fix. And much more dangerous to ignore.