Like everyone, Colin wants to point the finger of blame, partly to chase self-reproach away but also to find the story of his own life. Stories make up who we are as humans; they are the fabric of our souls and Colin wants that narrative thread to make sense of the chaos and fortunately for him, but also cataclysmically for the peace of our nation, there is a story-teller on hand to tell him why life has spiralled. “It’s all these Eastern Europeans,” he claims. It’s a simple story and the simplest stories are the easiest to cling to. He’s been told the story by the tabloids and politicians and then the story has avalanched into social media, charging through nuance, complexity, objections, compassion and truth.
You see, I don’t believe that Colin’s convictions are true and the simple scapegoat of the “other” is a dangerous and scary thing. I want to offer an alternative narrative, one that will still be too simple to really unpick all the challenges of the average worker’s life, but will start to tie together the defining moments of our nation in the last twelve years and expose the purpose of the scapegoat story.
Back in 2008, the Western world faced financial crisis and it is a common consensus that the banks’ risk-taking meant that they were financially unprepared to take the hit that was coming their way. Bonuses and profits had eroded the stability that they could have had and when disaster loomed on the horizon, it was the governments with taxpayers’ money that would have to bail them out. Gordon Brown commented privately, “If you can’t buy food or petrol, or medicine for your kids, people will just start breaking windows and helping themselves… it’ll be anarchy.” The government had to step in for there to be any sense of normality and the Labour government have been blamed for their actions ever since.
It’s overly simplistic to blame the bankers alone, but it makes a lot more sense than blaming Eastern Europeans. So, why did Colin come to the conclusion he came to? Simply, this is the story he was sold. As the months and years rolled by, the bankers were forgotten and the front pages of the tabloids were flooded with sensationalised scare stories about the threat of immigration. Lines were blurred between immigrants, asylum seekers and people that had anything “other” about them and an atmosphere of suspicion, fear and hostility grew, fanned into flame by reckless politicians and bigoted newspapers. Conspiracy theorists would group the wealthy owners or newspapers with the politicians and the bankers and claim that this narrative is concocted to preserve the wealth of the elite and garner votes from the public. I’m not convinced that in a dingy room in an exclusive club, the narrative of the nation is being concocted by the rich and powerful, but I do think that a narrative that shifts blame to a silent minority suits the people with power. The person it doesn’t suit though is Colin, but the second reason that Colin accepted this story is because it satisfies his need for a story that puts him in the position of victim.
With the story cemented into a position of widespread acceptance, the next step was to seek a political solution to this problem of “other” people coming over here and nicking our jobs and Nigel Farage’s moment had come. The solution was Brexit and here’s a beer-drinking man of the people to lead us back to prosperity. There is a massive flaw in that our economy has not been crippled by Eastern Europeans and this is actually going to put us in an increasingly precarious position, but the story’s too good - it’s simple and the more the argument is simplified, the greater the appeal. There are many reasons people voted for Brexit and many are legitimate - for instance, the disintegration of former colonial powers, but it seems fairly clear that if you’re partial to a bit of racism, the ‘Leave’ vote is going to be more appealing to you and the language and imagery used legitimised racism in a new and toxic way in Britain. Race-hate crime had been at a steady level of 40,000 crimes per year, but in the run-up to the Brexit vote and shortly after, numbers rose to around 70,000. If you voted to Leave, this doesn’t in any way mean that you represent this attitude, but it’s no random statistic that racism rose at a time when the “other” was depicted as a danger. If you take the deeply flawed narrative to heart, your violence makes you a hero within this horrible, horrible fictional story.
So, where next? Brexit has approached like a slug on the horizon and meanwhile, the people who don’t tick the simple ‘White British’ on a form have endured the toxicity and injustice that is not just twelve years old, but reaches way back to slavery, oppression, violence, abuse and injustice. They have their own narrative and the elements of Brexit that have given fresh energy to racism have trampled all over that pain once again. There’s a volcano of frustration ready to erupt, but it simmers and simmers, waiting for the right moment. George Floyd’s death was that moment and of course, the frustration is far bigger than Brexit, but this story that we’ve been sold where people that are not like us are to blame is huge in how it has shaped our culture. I don’t blame Colin in any way for believing the story he has been told, but it’s time now to recognise what’s happened here: how the financial crash led many to face lives of hardship, but that it is simplistic and dangerous to point the finger at the “others,” that the believing of the mythical story has led us to build barriers between races and that we can start to knock those barriers down by recognising that black lives matter and they have to start to matter in practical, meaningful and genuine ways.
