The current protests, the flags and the Unite the Kingdom rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson earlier this month – which noticed 26 cops injured when round 150,000 individuals marched by means of central London – introduced again reminiscences of occasions in my native space 20 years in the past.
Within the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s Labour authorities proposed three giant lodging centres for asylum seekers together with one in Lee-on-the-Solent, a seaside city in Hampshire. The plan was to make use of a former naval base to accommodate 400 males for as much as six weeks at a time. It met with sturdy opposition from native residents, together with protests and a petition to Downing Road signed by 32,000 individuals.
On the time Dispatches aired a documentary, Maintain Them Out, which revealed the worry, ignorance and bigotry that fueled the marketing campaign. In a single scene, an area trainer who led the group’s “analysis unit” confirmed off a big binder of newspaper cuttings that described asylum seekers as potential terrorists and “spongers”, and warned that the “migrant inflow” posed an “Aids risk”.
“You’ve got the worry of rape,” she mentioned. “You’ve acquired the worry of HIV and Aids, you’ve acquired a worry of a variety of sexually transmitted ailments, haven’t you. If only one younger woman within the space ended up with Aids, that may be nasty. Very nasty.”
In one other scene, a protester merely says of the asylum seekers: “Kill them. Kill all of them. Shoot them.”
Lee-on-the-Solent has a excessive proportion of retirement houses and the marketing campaign towards the processing centre was made up largely of the city’s older residents. Like this summer time’s protesters they raised flags and banners, with dozens lining the partitions and wire fences of the naval base. “Welcome to Lee-on-the-Solent, twinned with Baghdad,” learn one. “Each communities below risk of international invasion”. One other requested: “Human rights? What about ours?”
