Tag Archives: anti-immigrant sentiment

Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain

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Residents of a care home in Surrey were sent Valentine’s cards–red heart, pink bow, all the traditional stuff—from that most caring of senders, a local funeral home. A spokesperson for the care home said residents were thrilled to get the cards, and doesn’t the involvement of a local business go to show how deeply embedded the care home is in the community? Read the quotes and you can hear “Look on the Sunny Side” playing between the lines.

Residents’ families, on the other hand–at least those who were quoted–said things like “appalling” and “insensitive.”

The funeral home itself said, “Oops” (that’s a rough summary), followed by some verbiage about “unintended distress,” and it’s that “unintended” that makes this a particularly British story. Because tossing in screamingly unnecessary adverbs is a very British thing. My favorite is when newsreaders tell  us that someone “sadly died.”

As far as I’ve been able to figure out—and I’ve lived here for almost 18 years now—you can’t die in this country without doing it sadly. You can’t die absurdly, or with a sense of relief, or even unnecessarily. Above all, you can’t die unadorned. The word died isn’t allowed out in public until it’s fully dressed and the correct adjective has been buttoned up to the neck.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom. Indoors.

 

Immigration and the search for an enemy

Ten years ago, when Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe was still searching for a group of people frightening enough to rile up the populace, the Home Office discovered foreign students and offered them up as a target for some of the free-floating hate that drifts across the island with the rains that blow in from the Atlantic.

Why foreign students? The better question might be, Why not foreign students? They needed someone. The Home Office was led at the time by Theresa May, and she was working to establish her right-wing credentials by declaring a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, which ended up creating a hostile environment for legal ones. A hefty number of them were deported, but it’s never enough to satisfy the anti-immigrant lobby, so lucky Terri, Santa Claus brought her the off-season gift of a BBC documentary about cheating on the English-language competency tests that foreign students had to pass before they could renew their visas. The documentary focused on just a few test centers, but Terri turned off the TV and said, “Right. We’ll cancel the visas on 35,000 of them.” Or to put that another way, 97% of the people who took the test.

Is it even vaguely credible that 97% of the people who took the test cheated and, until Terri turned off that fateful TV program, got away with it?

Who cared? It played well with the anti-immigrant lobby, who by then had left the lobby and were occupying seats in the House of Commons.

Cue dawn raids, students held in detention centers for months, lost degrees, lost careers, lost reputations, and deportations before anyone had a chance to appeal or prove that their English was just fine, thanks. What the hell, they were a bunch of foreigners. Of course they cheated. Give them a chance to appeal and they’ll tie this mess up in red tape forever. Give them a chance to demonstrate their competence and they’ll only make us look silly.

Foreigners are sneaky like that.

So here we are, ten years late. Some 3,000 former students have won appeals and a new group is starting what sounds like a mass appeal. And since a TV series dramatizing a post office scandal drove politicians of all parties to make noise about compensating some deeply wronged sub-postmasters, a group of the former students are working on a TV script about what happened to them. To date, noise is all that’s come of the political agreement about the sub-postmasters, but still, if you can’t get justice, the illusion of it is comforting.

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Lest you should be silly enough to expect consistency from the Home Office, lately it’s been closing its eyes and flinging work visas in what sound like some dodgy directions. Not because it now loves immigrants. It’s at least as anti-immigrant as it was under Theresa May, although it’s found a new boogey man: refugees who cross the Channel in small boats. They make for scarier headlines than foreign students.

The current crop of visas are meant for people to work in the care sector, which is understaffed and underpaid and relies heavily on immigrant workers. But the visas don’t go to individual care workers, they go through care providers, who get licenses to sponsor immigrant workers, and those providers are popping, mushroom-like, out of the soggy ground of our political bog. Or of our overdone metaphor.

One company that was granted 275 visas didn’t exist; 268 companies have never been inspected and some aren’t registered with the watchdog that’s supposed to do the inspecting. Some don’t have addresses, only post office boxes. Some have been formed so recently that they’ve never filed company accounts. One has a website with reviews from clients named John Doe and Jane Smith.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you. And myself.

The assumption is that the companies are selling the visas. I’ve seen reports of immigrant workers in the care sector paying as much as £15,000 for visas and once they get here being “housed in sub-standard accommodation and even forced to share beds.with colleagues.

“Some have been paid for just a fraction of the hours they have worked or [been] subjected to racist remarks, harassment, and intimidation if they complain about the treatment of the people they care for.

“Others have worked for several months without being paid by their employers, who claim this is to recoup fees towards the cost of the migrant workers’ training or accommodation.”

The number of companies with the power to sponsor visas more than doubled between 2022 (41,621) and 2023 (84,730).

 

How much for that Mao in the window?

A London auction house was selling artifacts–that’s a fancy word meaning stuff–from China’s Cultural Revolution, and a rare early edition of Mao Tes-Tung’s Little Red Book was expected to sell for more than £30,000.

What’s wrong with this picture? So much that I have no idea where to start, so I’ll leave you with the picture and save my adjectives for the time when, sadly, I have to report a death.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a free stuffed toy . . .

. . . I can tell you how to get one.

This didn’t happen in Britain, but with a little work it could’ve, since it could happen any place where attractive nuisances entice people to trade coins for a chance to pick up stuffed toys with a mechanical claw and drop them down a chute so their kids can take them home and love them for ten minutes or so. Or not drop them down a chute, because no matter how simple it looks the machine never gives you quite enough time to get the toy where it needs to be.

In Australia, a three-year-old found a better way to get what he wanted. In the half-second when his father got distracted, he climbed up the chute and materialized inside the machine, standing upright among all the stuffed toys any kid could dream of.

Since using the claw to drop him back down the chute didn’t seem like a good idea, the father called the claw machine company, which asked helpful questions like, “How much money did you put in the machine?”

The only thing stuck in the machine was his son, he said, and he’d like to have him back.

The person on the other end of the line wasn’t programed to deal with that and the police ended up smashing the glass and extracting the kid. The media is (sadly) silent on the all-important question of whether the boy got to take a toy home.

 

From the Department of Historical Preservation

In an effort to polish Britain’s reputation for eccentricity and historical hoo-ha’s, the owner of a pub in Staffordshire, The Crooked House, has been ordered to rebuild it, brick by brick. It was built in 1765 and sank into the ground either because of mining in the area or a nearby water wheel (no, I don’t understand that last one either), until it sat at a 15-degree angle. It had been propped up in various ways over the years and was doing just fine until it was sold and–oops–mysteriously caught fire.

Then, just to make sure of things, the new owner had the shell bulldozed.

Local people got up in arms. Or up in containers, which they used to store 23,000 bricks that they salvaged from the rubble, and the new owner’s been ordered to put them back where they were, and at the pre-fire angle. Unless the owner appeals, they have three years, but they may be too distracted to bother, since the fire’s being treated as arson.

How to get a license for your goldfish, and other news from Britain 

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We all know how romantic Britain is, right? Ruined castles, foggy moors, illegal waste disposal. Yes, folks, we’ve got it all. 

Back in–hang on. How long has this article been kicking around my coffee table? Back in December 2020–in fact, just in time for Christmas–a Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, got exercised about criminal networks working in waste disposal, and (what with being criminals and all) dumping and burning large amounts of the stuff they were supposed to dispose of in the approved (if not necessarily planet-friendly) way. 

Some of it, he wrote, is hazardous.  

How could that be allowed to happen? 

He set out to demonstrate that the government has lost control of the licensing process so thoroughly that anyone can get licensed to dispose of waste. And they can use false information if they want, because it won’t be checked. 

To demonstrate, he registered his long-dead goldfish as an upper-tier carrier, broker, and dealer in waste. The fish appeared on the form as Algernon Goldfish of 49 Fishtank Close, Ohlooka Castle, Derby. 

A month later, Algernon had his license. Or to be entirely accurate, Monbiot had Algernon’s license. Algernon never opened his own mail, even when he was alive. 

Irrelevant photo: a lily

But let’s be even more than entirely accurate: Algernon may not have been male. To the casual human observer, male and female goldfish look nonbinary, which is to say, we can’t tell the difference. But the culture being what it is, most people will decide their fish is male. 

I know. But a female goldfish applying for a license might have snagged some official’s attention the way a male goldfish wouldn’t, after which they might have asked Lord Google where Ohlooka Castle is, and the whole thing would’ve fallen apart. So it was important that Algernon stay putatively male. 

As the cynical among us used to say in the–was it the seventies? Or as I think of it, last week? Yeah, it probably was. We said, “Make sexism work for you.”

It never did, really, but it sometimes kept us from throwing things.

 

What else makes Britain romantic?

Well, tea, of course. Or if it doesn’t make the place romantic, at least it makes up a huge part of people’s image of Britain. Which is a problem, because the British are buying less tea than they used to. And if they’re buying less, it follows as the night the day that they’re drinking less. 

What’s going on? 

The world’s ending, that’s what. 

On top of which Britons are switching to coffee, herbal tea, iced tea, energy drinks, and for all I know cocaine. 

Not everything on that list is available from your local supermarket, but with the exception of herbal tea all of it will wake you up.

According to Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey, which is based on conversations with at least three people who still speak to me, the British consider coffee fancier than tea. 

To be clear: I’m not talking about instant coffee here, and maybe not about the stuff I learned to drink in the U.S. as a young adult, at great cost to my taste buds and ability to sleep. I’m talking about the kind you buy at a coffee shop. The kind that comes from a machine the size of a Volkswagen. Or the kind people make at home using a non-recyclable pod that they slot into a machine the size of a small short-haired dog.

Semi-relevantly, people don’t talk about having coffee here, they talk about having a coffee, as in “I stopped in for a coffee.” I’ve lived outside the U.S. too long to remember what Americans would say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that. A cup of coffee? Probably. But I do remember that tea’s the fancier drink in the U.S.. Or at least the one that marks you as a bit of a weirdo.  

To prove that tea isn’t the fancier drink in Britain, some whole category of people talk about builder’s tea, meaning the tea people who work in the building trades drink to fuel themselves through the damp and the wind and the hard work. I’m not sure how to describe that category of people who say call it builder’s tea, but I seem to have joined it. They didn’t do a background check before accepting me and I didn’t ask what I was signing up to. 

If that isn’t proof enough of tea’s un-fancyness–and I can’t think why it would be–there’s this: 96% of the tea that Britons slug down is made with a teabag, not from the more up-market leaf teas. 

How did they measure that 96%? By the cuppa, a non-standardized metric that can be found, in spite of the slow shift away from tea, in pretty much every household. The language has preserved a place for the question, “Would you like a cuppa?”

Or maybe that’s, “Do you want a cuppa?” I don’t really speak British. I speak something that’s vaguely related but it doesn’t allow me to write convincing dialogue. 

All comments and corrections and explanations of British English are welcome. Also all marginally appropriate mockery.

 

What else can we learn about British culture?

Why, we can learn what people leave behind at hotels. The Travelodge chain reported on that very topic, because they understand its cultural importance. The past year’s finds include:

  • A pair of feathered angel wings, six feet across
  • A dog named Beyoncé 
  • A dress made out of postcards
  • A horsebox, with the horse inside
  • A drum kit
  • A Jimmy Choo Cinderella shoe 
  • A suitcase full of Blackpool rock

Okay, a couple of those items need explanations. Blackpool rock doesn’t mean stones. Rock’s a stick-shaped hard candy with, in this case, the word Blackpool written all the way through the center. I can understand forgetting it. What I can’t understand is having a suitcase of it, but never mind, the human race is far stranger than any one mind can take in.

As for the shoe, all I can tell you is that Jimmy Choo shoes are ridiculously expensive and that Cinderella’s known for losing a shoe, so pouring that kind of money into two of them seems like a bad investment. But what do I know? I wear running shoes.

But 2021 was a pandemic year. Let’s go back to 2019, before the pandemic got its claws into us, and see what people left:

  • A five-foot unicorn made of flowers
  • A gallon of water from Loch Ness
  • Two alpacas
  • The best man from a wedding party (and that was before the wedding)
  • A dissertation (topic not specified)
  • An urn with someone’s father’s ashes
  • The deed to a shop
  • An Aston Martin
  • A cat
  • A 75-inch color TV (just try finding a black and white one these days)
  • A blood pressure monitor
  • And in a come-down from 2021, a set of angel wings that are only four feet wide

 

Meanwhile in British politics

We could learn a few things here too if we try.

With the shine having gone off the prime minister, a few people in his government are appealing to the we-don’t-like foreigners strand of the culture to see if they can’t shine him back up again. Or at least shine themselves up in case his position suddenly goes vacant.

Appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly new, but it went into bold-face type earlier this year, with the home secretary, Priti Patel, calling for asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats to be forced back to France, which France insisted would put their lives at risk.

Will not, Patel said.

Will so too, France said.

Don’t care, Patel may have whispered once the microphone was turned off.

Patel introduced a bill that, until public outrage forced her to modify it, looked like it would make a criminal out of anyone saving an asylum seeker’s life at sea. 

All this activated Brexiteer Nigel Farage and some of the rightest wing of the media to accuse the Royal National Lifeboat Institution of being woke. Not woke as in having had too much fancy coffee but woke as in being someone they disagree with. 

Anything can be turned into an insult if you say it in the right tone of voice.

Why was the RNLI having the evil finger pointd at it? Because it was dedicated to saving lives at sea. Anyone’s life. Lots of ink was spilled onto newsprint, and lots of vitriol was spilled onto the internet. One group of fishermen apparently tried to block a lifeboat, presumably when it wasn’t trying to save a fisherman’s life.

So how well did that work for the anti-woke, no-caffeine campaigners? The RNLI ended 2020 on track to raise the largest amount of money in its almost 200-year history. Online donations went up 50%. 

 

 

And in economics

By 9 a.m. on January 7–the year’s fourth working day in Britain–the average head of the country’s biggest companies had made more money (if you figure it on an hourly basis, which they don’t but never mind) than the average British worker will make by the end of the year. Unless of course the spaceships land before the year ends and seriously reconfigure the economic system.

To put that a different way and for a different year, in 2020 FTSE 100 chief execs were paid an average of 86 times more than the average full-time British worker made. I wouldn’t say it adds to the romance of the country, but it does tell us a lot about the culture.

 

And in other countries…

The Dutch government has put out a warning about pendants that are supposed to protect people from frequencies 5G masts emit: The pendants are radioactive, the government says. And (in case this wasn’t obvious as soon as you hit the word radioactive), they’re dangerous. 

In Canada, cats have put out a warning that Elon Musk’s satellite dishes are nice and warm when it snows. Not very warm, but warmer than snow, because they have a self-heating feature that’s supposed to melt the snow off them. It does do that. It also attracts cats.

This was reported by a customer who said his cats have a heated house of their own but they prefer the satellite dish, at least while the sun’s up. 

The cats slow his reception way down, but hey, if kitty’s happy, everyone’s happy. Or so my cats tell me.

And finally, in the United States, an eight-year-old, Dillon Helbig, slipped a hand-drawn book onto a shelf in the children’s-book section of his local library.

“I wanted to put my book in the library center since I was five, and I always had a love for books and libraries,” he said. “I’ve been going to libraries a lot since I was a baby.”

The book is The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis, and it’s by “Dillon His Self.”  

Library staff found the book and moved it to the graphic novel section, so it can be borrowed. When last heard of, it had a waiting list of 55. The library awarded Dillon the first Whoodini Award for best young novelist. The award was named after the library’s owl mascot and the category was created for Dillon. Who’s working on a sequel.

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My thanks to Jane Whitledge for pushing me in the direction of that last story.