EU Referendum: Race Hate Crime

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely agree. We need consistency throughout the country in how these cases are dealt with. I thank my right hon. Friend for remembering my birthday.

Many here will know or remember that on 15 February 1971 Enoch Powell stood up to speak at Carshalton and Barnstead Young Conservatives club in Surrey. It was three years since he had made his incendiary “rivers of blood” speech, and now he was returning to the subject of immigration. Mass immigration, Powell claimed, led to the native British seeing their towns

“changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation.”

Three members of the shadow Cabinet threatened to resign unless Mr Powell was sacked. Mr Heath dismissed him.

I, like many other Members, was horrified by the return of such language during the recent referendum. I felt revulsion—I am sure many others did too—on seeing the image of Mr Farage proudly unveiling his “breaking point” poster, featuring Syrian refugees, a week before the referendum. It was the visual equivalent of the “rivers of blood” speech. The poster shows a crowd flowing towards us—face after face, an apparently unending human tide. The nearest faces are in sharp focus, the furthest a blur of strangers. Even though they are human beings, they seem to be aliens.

Nigel Farage and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) frequently made false claims that immigration, not austerity, is the reason that health, social care and schools are under pressure, fostering the myth that immigrants drain our resources rather than enhance them.

That is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form. The leave campaign played on people’s genuine fears about poverty, unemployment and deprivation, especially in areas facing generational unemployment that have long been neglected for the past 20 to 30 years. Immigration is not the cause of social inequality, and such scaremongering does not and will not address the root causes of the problems faced by so many. It is successive Governments who have failed to deal with the issue of social and economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is now even bigger, and five families in the United Kingdom own some 20% of the UK’s wealth. The issues that need to be addressed—such as eradicating poverty and providing equal opportunities—are not being tackled. Immigrants are accused of being the cause of all that and they are used as a natural target—that is what Vote Leave campaigners campaigned on.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As one of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave, I totally and wholeheartedly condemn the attacks. Immigrants who come to my constituency of Strangford get employment and jobs, and they get married and buy houses. I acknowledge the valuable contribution they make. Whatever hate crimes have been carried out, they have not been carried out in my name or in those of the 17.4 million people who voted leave.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is why I said when I started my speech that this is not about leaving or about people who voted to leave; as I said, many of them had very good reasons for doing so. I am talking about some of the people who led the campaign.

Mr Powell foresaw an unchecked inflow of black immigrants creating civil war. The UKIP poster told us absolutely the same thing about the people headed our way, it claimed, “across borderless Europe”. The tide of faces sums up exactly the same image as the swarms and rivers and hordes of otherness and racial difference that Powell spoke against in 1968 and that so many others—the National Front and the British National party among them—have tried to evoke over the years. I do not think that the creators of the UKIP poster would be insulted by that Enoch Powell comparison. They assume that we all share their unease with racial diversity. It was no wonder that the poster was reported to the police for inciting racial hatred.

The referendum was one of the ugliest political campaigns that I have witnessed in my life. Leave campaigners could have talked about the need for reform, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, economic considerations and a whole host of other things. Instead, they chose to make the debate about the mythical “other”—the immigrant who is stealing our jobs and resources and taking our homes. They seemed to cry, “If only we could close the door, then Britain will be great again and all our problems will be gone.” I am afraid to say that the tone taken on immigration by some of the leave campaigners has made racism socially acceptable again.