On 11th October, Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick thought he popped off. In a stint on LBC, he almost (!) expressed regret for removing cartoon murals from a wall in a migrant reception centre. For those who haven’t been keeping up with this epic tale of woe (honestly, good for you), the murals were there to attempt to make the sterile, prison-like environment of a migrant processing centre a little less scary for refugee children, particularly those who had arrived on their own. According to Jenrick, the murals were too ‘welcoming’ to young children –who you might be forgiven for thinking deserved to be thrown this, the smallest of bones, after being displaced from their homes, embarking on a traumatising journey and arriving in Britain to an uncertain fate under indefinite detainment. Jenrick removed the murals during his stint as immigration minister in what can only be described as a comically evil move. Anyway, now that the Tory leadership contest is down to its final dynamic duo and centrist Conservatives are apparently despairing at the candidates, Jenrick has spotted an opportunity to win hearts and minds by being ever-so-slightly less rabidly cruel than Kemi Badenoch. This just in: he ‘probably’ wouldn’t do it again.

 

This is the new centre ground in British politics. It’s almost heartwarming, if you squint. At last, we have bridged the great divide between left and right – oh, my mistake! – between the centre(-right) that still wants to peddle an air of respectability and a fervent neofascism ripped straight from Farage’s playbook. Whichever way you slice it, it seems theone thing we can all agree on is that refugees deserve to be isolated, criminalised, detained indefinitely and in often-horrific conditions, simply for the crime of seeking safety. The only minor quibble left is over how cartoonishly vile we should be while they’re here.

 

Refugees and migrants are the punching bags of politics. After a decade of dousing the issue (il)liberally with gasoline, the right sure has created an incendiary affair. It was a matter of days before the murder of 3 children in Stockport was falsely pinned on a (fictional) Muslim asylum seeker, resulting in riots across the country. And in lieu of actually increasing funding for public services, what else to do but give the people what they think they want? Jenrick is running for Conservative leader on the platform of leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), effectively tearing up human rights law in the UK and preventing such pesky concerns from getting in the way of immigration officers’ ‘discretion’. This is all an attempt to outflank his fire–and–brimstone leadership rival Kemi Badenoch, who has stated that people too sympathetic to asylum seekers shouldn’t work in the Home Office. Admittedly, basic human empathy does tend to get in the way of ruthless deportations.

And it’s not just the right, either. A decade of determined scapegoating has created a race to the bottom, with both the Tories and Labour keen to process asylum claims offshore in an attempt to ‘stop the boats’… needless to say, without actually addressing why people become displaced in the first place. Stopping the boats was only ever an incomplete slogan. What they really mean is‘please, god, stop the boats coming here’.

 

 

As with all things, our city of dreaming spires is yet another battleground. Campsfield House detention centre, right by the Uni Science Park, has been embroiled in a decades-long tug-of-war. Grassroots activists won a long campaign to close the House in 2018, after 25 years of prison-like detainment in deliberately dehumanising conditions that inevitably saw hunger strikes, self-harm, and suicides. Not ones to rest on their laurels, after only 4 years the Johnsongovernment sought to reopen it – a crusade enthusiastically picked up by Labour in recent months. Again, cruelty to migrants is what spans the political divide. Meanwhile, the University continues to resist calls to divest from not only the arms, but border trades – firms whocarry out the incredibly dishonest work of surveilling, detaining and deporting refugees, all while raking in huge profits. I guess Oxford has to pay for our free Kafka copies somehow.

 

 

With spookily blunt irony, polls close in the Tory leadership contest on 31st October. It’s like X Factor, except the fate of uncountable refugees, human rights law for decades to come,and the Overton window hangs in the balance. Be sure to tunein to see exactly how far to the right our – at this rate – likely next government will lurch. Kemikaze, or good old Bob? It’s a matter of millimetres between them, but still. If I can be permitted some Simon Cowell-style snark: I don’t like it… I loathe it. ∎

 

 

Check out @oxforduni.star and @divestbordersoxford on Instagram for more.

 

 

Words by Sienna Wadhwani. Imagery Courtesy of wuppertaller via Wikimedia Commons.