A Week of Joy, A Week of Warning
From the beaches of Sitges to the streets of Belfast, two very different visions of society were on display.
I am officially on my last day of holiday.
As I wrote last week, we decided to come to Spain, very specifically to Sitges, during Pride week. I didn’t actually know it was Pride week when we booked it, it was sort of semi-coincidentally booked, but God, what a week it turned out to be. Just the gayest, most fabulous, most queer, lovely, friendly week I have experienced in a long time, and it made me genuinely happy and genuinely unanxious to be at Pride in a way I really needed.
I love London Pride. My husband and I had a fabulous time there last year, as ever, but what always strikes me about London Pride is just how incredibly big and almost impersonal it is. It’s also gotten a little bit corporatised, whereas Sitges felt like a true community. There was just a genuine sense of pure happiness and joy. A lot of very, very, very bad music, I will say that. But overall, absolutely fabulous.
In between, I have had my little hotel decompression sessions, this being one of them, where I’ve sequestered myself for an hour or two away from human beings. I have come to accept that my capacity for humanity, especially in the heat and the noise, is limited to no more than three and a half hours at a time, at which point I need to urgently walk into an air-conditioned quiet space for at least an hour to reset while making plans on how I’m going to manage to get Carlos the Hotel Cat on an EasyJet flight back to London.
That is what’s happening right now, which is also why I decided to sit down and do a little update for you all.
Because even though I didn’t really want to, I have been keeping an eye on the news.
The big thing that’s jumped out over the last couple of days has been Belfast, which was absolutely horrifying. I can’t help but describe it as a pogrom, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I’m truly horrified at the images that came out, and I am genuinely worried about what’s coming as we move into the summer months. We know that the right-wing voices are going to take advantage not only of the febrile nature of the immigration debate in the United Kingdom, but the high temperatures of summer as well.
These riots, and that is what they are, not protests, riots, pogroms, blatant attacks on brown people, on immigrants, on people of different faiths, they do get worse in summer. The likes of Farage know that. Tommy Robinson, also known by approximately ten other names, knows that too. I’m genuinely worried about the next couple of months.
While last year there wasn’t the expected outbreaks of violence that were so hoped for by the voices on the far-right, I can’t help but feel that this season they’re back and more intent than ever to see the world burn.
This goes a little bit hand in hand with what’s happening in Makerfield.
I have a very strong suspicion that we’ve seen Farage tilt significantly further right than he has in a while, and I think it’s at least partly because of Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe has gone full racist. I’m aware that’s a strong thing to say, but he has gone well and truly, fully racist, and you can see that in his presence on X. Not that I’m on X, but I do get the occasional screenshot on Bluesky of whatever the man has said, and it is something.
What Lowe is doing is pushing Farage to the right, as terrifying as that is to believe. My read is that Farage has come out in the last few weeks to send a message to Makerfield voters: don’t worry, don’t vote for Restore, we can be just as appalling as they are. And we’ve seen that in the policy announcements.
Farage apparently published a five thousand word essay on Substack the other day.
(And no, I’m not abandoning Substack just because Nigel Farage is on it. I’m done evacuating spaces because right-wing voices join them. Ceding that ground is not a strategy, it’s a gift. But I digress.)
In this essay, the headline policy is that foreign nationals would be evicted from social housing. There are just so many issues with that particular policy. A foreign national might be married to a British person. They might have British children. There are all sorts of ways one can be a foreign national or foreign-born in the United Kingdom. And this is just the latest demonstration that Reform are in no way ready to govern anything beyond a parish council, and even then, I’d have concerns, given how spectacularly poorly it’s going for them in the councils they already control.
The problem, though, is the normalisation it creates.
The further normalisation of othering foreign nationals, othering immigrants.
It’s worth bearing in mind that if a foreign national is living in social housing, they will have been here for a minimum of five years. They will have indefinite leave to remain or citizenship. They are, by any meaningful definition, a permanent part of this country.
And then there’s the second part of the policy: that even someone like me, who holds a British passport, would still be classified as foreign-born, and would be placed onto a different benefit structure. Regardless of the fact that I have spent the last ten years in the United Kingdom paying taxes, paying frankly absurd amounts in visa fees and immigration health surcharges. All of that contribution falls away because of where I was born.
And I find it incredibly, incredibly telling that Nigel Farage, the great self-appointed arbiter of the two-tier society, is absolutely dead set on building one.
I don’t want to sound hopeless at the tail end of my holiday and in my first proper post back. But it does feel like things are regressing very quickly. The Telegraph article this week telling us we need to start acknowledging that some immigrants are better than others. All of it is becoming increasingly segregationist. And what we need to do, what we really need to do, is push the current Labour government to seriously move away from the messaging around migration, which has done absolutely nothing to help and has only inflamed things further, while also normalising overt discrimination against migrants.
Because I’ll be very frank on this, the immigration policy that is actively being shaped by our Home Secretary smacks itself of setting up a two tier system, even if their particular ideas are more along the lines of wealth and affluence than necessarily country of origin, even though these two factors do influence each other to a significant degree.
Beyond that, we need to be thinking about what we can do in the next two or three years before the next general election to actually turn this around.
That is going to take civil society. It is going to take protest. And feeling energised as I am after this week, I am absolutely ready to join a few as they happen. I did see that there was a recent anti-racism, anti-fascism protest where, unsurprisingly, the anti-racists and anti-fascists outnumbered the racists and fascists by quite some margin. Which gives me some hope. There is still a sense that the majority of the United Kingdom is progressive, forward-looking, and welcoming to migrants. And as long as we can mobilise, as long as we can work together, we can stem the tide of the vile racism and xenophobia that has been seeping into our lives through Farage, GB News, the Telegraph, and the absolute cesspit that is X.
All hope is not lost.
Makerfield will be its own test. If Burnham comes in, there could be a change. I’m a little less hopeful on that than I was, but maybe we’ll be surprised. Maybe he sorts some of this out. Maybe Labour starts to seriously reckon with the ways its own choices have contributed to this moment. Let’s hope the change coming is a positive one, because the status quo is not working, and the Overton window drifting ever rightward is going to do real damage.
On that note, I am going to spend my last couple of hours in the sunshine, fully sunscreened, because I am a very sensible bear in that regard at least. Back to London tomorrow.
As ever, thanks for reading, and I’ll chat with you all very soon.
Please forgive any formatting weirdness in this post, this has been published on my trusty iPad balanced precariously on a hotel bed pillow.
The ugliness growing in British socirty atm is sickening to watch. I just have to keep reminding myself that despite appearances it is just the 20% of truly racist xenophobes that have always been here getting louder.
The reference to what it means to be a foreign national has such strong echoes of Brexshite and consequences for EU nationals... I too would be classified as foreign-born, despite my very expensive British passport, and would be placed onto a different benefit structure... But it's not just a different structure. It's exposing oneself to being considered different and thus to othering and all the nasty stuff that comes with that. Yep, some immigrants are deemed better than others, until they're not, until they get rejected and metaphorically (to start with) thrown out with the latest xenophobic hatred of the day pile of rubbish.
As for Andy B., I only have lukewarm hope in him. He needs to firmly set his sail to fair, and progressive, and decent, not in the end do more of the current same.
PS: A pic of Carlos the hotel cat would be much appreciated. Meow!