The word “vermin” appears
The Guardian reports on the hideous fallout of the Brexit vote:
People have been reporting incidents of racism believed to be fuelled by the result of the EU referendum, including alleged racist graffiti and cards reading “no more Polish vermin” posted through letterboxes.
Suspected racist graffiti was found on the front entrance of the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in Hammersmith, west London, early on Sunday morning.
…
The incident comes as Cambridgeshire police are investigating reports of racist laminated cards being distributed in Huntingdon on Friday in the hours after the leave result was announced.
According to reports from the Cambridge News, a number of cards saying “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin” in both English and Polish were found outside St Peter’s school by teaching assistants and students, including an 11-year-old Polish child, who reported they made him feel “really sad”.
Cards bearing the same message were posted around a number of properties, police confirmed.
Baroness Warsi, the former chairwoman of the Conservative party, has warned that since the referendum result was announced immigrants are being stopped in the street and told to leave the country.
“I’ve spent most of the weekend talking to organisations, individuals and activists who work in the area of race hate crime, who monitor hate crime, and they have shown some really disturbing early results from people being stopped in the street and saying look, we voted Leave, it’s time for you to leave,” Warsi told Sky News.
“And they are saying this to individuals and families who have been here for three, four, five generations. The atmosphere on the street is not good.”
I’m hearing the same thing from friends in the UK. It’s as if the vote had been Racism and Xenophobia, yes or no? and the yes vote won.
In Gloucester, Max Fras said he was in a Tesco supermarket on Friday night with his young son when a white man became agitated in the queue for the checkout and began yelling: “This is England now, foreigners have 48 hours to fuck right off. Who is foreign here? Anyone foreign?”
Fras said the man began quizzing people in the queue about where they were from. “He pointed at another gentleman in front of him and said: ‘Where are you from, are you Spanish? Are you Italian? Are you Romanian?’ And he said ‘No, I’m English’,” said Fras.
Lucky for him. Max Fras on the other hand is Polish. The Guardian doesn’t say if he and his young son were ordered to disclose their place of origin.
Other reports of racist incidents believed to be fuelled by the Brexit result, were posted on social media, including one from Heaven Crawley, a research professor at Coventry University, about an incident allegedly witnessed by her daughter in Birmingham.
“This evening my daughter left work in Birmingham and saw [a] group of lads corner a Muslim girl shouting ‘Get out, we voted leave’,” she posted on Twitter.
Welsh businesswoman and remain campaigner Shazia Awan was told by Warren Faulkner to pack her bags and go home after she expressed disappointment in the leave result. Awan, who was born in the UK, tweeted a reply that in her view the “campaign was vile and racist” and had “ruined [the] country forever”.
Earlier that day, Faulkner had celebrated the referendum result as a “major victory for the right wing, adding: “Oi Muslims pack your bags”.
Many of the reports of incidents seem to show the mistaken belief that EU citizens living in the UK will be forced to leave the country as a result of the referendum result, with instances reported of a Polish woman being told to get off a bus and “get packing”, of a Polish man being told at an airport that he “shouldn’t still be here, that we had voted to be rid of people like him”, of a Polish coffee shop worker being jeered at and told “you’re going home now” and of Polish children at a primary school crying because they were scared of getting deported from Britain.
They include a tweeted photo:
A guy in a T shirt that reads: YES! WE WON! NOW SEND THEM BACK
Channel 4 journalist Ciaran Jenkins said that while reporting from Barnsley on Friday in the hours after the referendum results were announced, he overheard three different people shout “send them home” in five minutes.
A man wrote on Twitter that he had experienced two “racialised altercations” in the 10 hours after the referendum result, which he believed were connected to it. One alleged incident involved men chanting “Out, out, out” at Muslim women and in another he said a man at King’s Cross station “yells ‘Brexit’ in my south Asian friend’s face”.
And on and on.
I wonder when Kristallnacht will be.
This is scaring the hell out of me. I keep asking myself, where did this all come from? It can’t have just magically appeared in the seven years I’ve been gone. Was I really living and working alongside people who hold these kind of views bottled up inside them? All my friends back in the UK seem equally appalled and astonished. Who knew that decades of improvements reducing racism, sexism and other prejudices was nothing more than a thin veneer?
This is what I wrote on a Facebook tread discussing Sarah Childs’ album:
In my opinion these instances of xenophobia and plain racism are only going to get worse. The next step is alas very easy to predict. There is no doubt that Brexit will bring on a worsening of economic conditions, at least in the short and medium term. The right wing press will try to portray this not as a consequence of leaving the EU but as ‘retribution’ from the EU. Because, in part, it’s easier than to say ‘Er, maybe we were a tiny bit wrong about that, after all.’ but mainly because they have realised the depth of these hidden feelings and will want to carry on exploiting them. So be ready for headlines in the style of ‘Germans ready to punish Britain’, ‘Brussels declares economic war’ and so forth, further blowing on the flames. And that on top of the usual lies about asylum seekers and foreign benefits scroungers.
The arseholes have the bit between their teeth now and there is no stopping them. They have been watching Trump across the Atlantic and they have been taking notes. Yes, they are not the majority but they have realised the kind of power you can get by a) appealing to a sizeable (like it or not) lunatic fringe and b) using their control over a large part of the media to persuade ever growing numbers of people that they are under threat. The Daily Mail and Daily Express have been trying for years to import the culture wars from America. Every winter we are treated to their version of the War on Christmas (‘Winterval’, for fuck’s sake) but that was only the rehearsal. The main event has just started.
That sounds horribly plausible.
I hope people aren’t shouting at you on the Tube and in Tesco’s, Arnaud!
Arnaud:
That is spookily similar to something I just said to a friend. It worries me, too. It reminds me of the shedding of inhibitions that seems to happen when a crowd turns into a mob. Somehow, terrible behaviour is suddenly legitimised as though people were waiting for an excuse all along*.
I read that someone wrote something along the lines of “GO HOME ROMANIANS” on the back of a little girl’s coat. If it’s true, then this is a special kind of aggression. The girl must have been terrified and the message to her family was clear: we’re targeting your kids.
* I tried to work up a metaphor about looters, but it didn’t work out. Whenever you see footage of looting, someone has always stolen a toilet. They obviously already have a toilet, it’s not clear why the one they stole is better than the one they have and they’ll probably have to pay someone to plumb it in. And then, presumably, buy (or loot) a sink and a bath that match So they presumably stole it for the sake of it. To be a rebel. To be part of the looting. Because they felt entitled to loot but didn’t care very much about what they smashed and grabbed. You can see why the metaphor didn’t work out but I’m convinced there’s one rattling around in there somewhere.
@latsot #4.
That’s horrible.
Now I’m just trying to think of a way to get in a “Romanes eunt domus” joke that properly needles the fuckstain that wrote it. Something about making them perform some act of contrition 100 times before dawn or I’ll cut their balls off feels appropriate, but the words aren’t coming.
Y’know, I and my wife and children–some of whom I expect the charming bit of idiocy in the green shirt up there might easily regard as insufficiently white–have plans to be in the UK in the month to come, in various divided installments, ‘amongst other bits of _Europe_.
I expect there will be many welcoming, all the same, the clouds in the air aside. There are good people aplenty on those islands. Here’s hoping they’re who we remember best.
And y’know, we always knew there were people like the guy in the shirt about. They’re noisy, and do make it hard not to notice. Trick is, in part, to remember this: you let them suck up the oxygen and poison the world, they do…
So I figure, in part, it’s got to be: repudiate them, at every turn. Directly, by telling them where they have disappointed…
And also, less directly, by simply being _better_.
(Yes, demagogues and poisoners of wells, I can do simple, too.)
Be better. Be nicer. Be smarter (all are asking so little, given the standard set, here). Sure, tell ’em to go to hell, if that’s all they got. And keep on trying to make a better world, all the same.
I think that the Polish have no choice but to accept the blame. As the first step towards contrition, I propose to recognise the deep truth hidden in these words of Paul Danahar.
See you again in a month or so.