Posh girls for illegal immigration

The calibre of so-called progressives coming out to bat for illegal immigration amid growing anger over migrant hotels has been of a very low quality lately. So low in fact that they are making the situation worse.

I’ve been struck by just how many of the talking heads commissioned to appear on various current-affairs shows and radio phone-ins don’t appear to understand the migrant-hotels issue or why it’s provoking so much anger. Among the many low-calibre pundits in this vein one in particular has stood out: Zoe Gardner.

On an edition of BBC Two’s Newsnight this week, there Gardner was – again. Billed as an ‘asylum and migration researcher’, she set about spinning the tired and unbelievable narrative that the tens of thousands of asylum seekers entering the UK illegally are all victims of persecution or refugees from war. She dismissed talk of protesters’ ‘legitimate concerns’ about the asylum seekers, despite the serious criminal charges hanging over some of them, as a racist trope – one she seems to think has been put about by Nigel Farage and regurgitated by an unthinking and bigoted British public. ‘I’m not affected by people in the UK arriving on small boats – and neither are you’, she said in a recent Instagram reel, but ‘it suits [Farage and Co] for morons like you to believe this is actually our problem’.

Gardner’s CV is typical for the types of experts / politicians / journalists now doing the media rounds. Since graduating from the London School of Economics, she has had ‘roles’ rather than jobs. These include stints at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Asylum Aid, the Race Equality Foundation, and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. She describes herself in one of her bylines as an ‘independent immigration-policy expert and campaigner for the rights of all migrants and refugees in the UK and across Europe’.

When she is not being an immigration-policy expert, she is a ‘grassroots activist’ – a role she has performed for the anti-Brexit group, Another Europe is Possible, and something called the Stop Trump Coalition. These campaigning groups are united by their opposition to democracy, with one objecting to the British electorate’s vote to leave the European Union and the other to American voters’ election of Donald Trump as president (not once but twice).

It seems that Ms Gardner has been living and ‘working’ (and I am using the word ‘working’ very loosely) within a very elite London network, consisting almost entirely of people who have never had a job that wasn’t entitled ‘activist’ or ‘journalist’. They exist to write op-eds for the publications of the middle-class left or to provide right-thinking views on liberal broadcast media – all of which are run by people just like them, with the same background, views and no doubt the same friends.

Perhaps it’s unfair to focus just on Gardner. There are so many upper-middle-class, privileged activists whose whole life experience is centered on the green rooms of BBC politics shows and each other’s media and campaigning outlets. Similar pieces to this could be written about countless others in her mould. There’s ‘literal communist’ Ash Sarkar, self-styled ‘Marxist’ Grace Blakeley, Green Queen Caroline Lucas and Guardian aristocrat Polly Toynbee. And that’s just the professional-activist women – there’s an even longer list of men of a similar ilk.

In some ways, there is nothing new about haute-bourgeois types going out into the world to castigate ‘the poor’, with a scented handkerchief at hand to protect their sensitive nostrils from the smell of poverty. British philanthropy was built on such self-righteous condescension, as were some of our educational institutions, such as the London School of Economics. Indeed, Britain’s establishment left has always been fuelled by a distant, pity-the-poor attitude.

Today’s bourgeois radicals are heirs to the bourgeois leftism of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. I’m thinking of figures such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes and Marie Stopes – all of whom, from positions of great privilege and comfort, thought that the best way of getting rid of poverty was by getting rid of the poor. Hence, their well-known embrace of eugenics. George Orwell warned the working class in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) that when these bourgeois progressives approach and ask how they can help, we should answer, ‘commit suicide’.

Like their predecessors, today’s so-called progressives are convinced they are on the right side of history. They view the world entirely in their own self-righteous image. Gardner and others like her have no life experience or skill that could actually help those migrants they believe to be ‘victims’.

While they have dropped the old progressives’ attachment to eugenics, they remain faintly disdainful of ordinary people. They have no understanding of the British working class, no sense of why it is that those they are long used to patronising have had enough of being ignored or silenced. These people can now be seen protesting outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and they are becoming hard to ignore.

We are living in extremely dangerous and divisive times. By dismissing the concerns of large swathes of the country, the nice left-wing ladies of London’s middle class are only sowing further division. A perfumed hankie won’t hide the smell of people’s anger for much longer.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.