EU Enlargement: the human cost of our paranoia

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Whilst there are millions of people in this country who would disagree, Britain is far from being the fair and free country of our collective self-perception – the liberal democratic beacon shining on the rest of the world. In accepting the official arguments surrounding increasingly draconian anti-terror legislation and in ignoring the Labour government’s neglect of progressive values, our treatment of immigrants—both asylum seekers and non-Western economic migrants alike—has been little short of barbaric.

This national disgrace, far from being condemned as an outrage, has been actively encouraged by our national press. Perhaps with the limited exception of The Independent and The Guardian—two of the leas-read UK-wide daily newspapers—the general cultural mentality of “all foreigners are bad” has been perniciously forged.

Not content with proactively encouraging racism, which is dangerous enough in itself, the supposed guardians-of-democracy, the hallowed Fourth Estate, have pressurised successive governments into passing legislation that is damaging to the lives of countless thousands of the most vulnerable people in our society. Those desperately trying to escape genocide, famine and war are locked up for months, even years, on end while others are dragged out of their beds in the dead of night for the crime of coming to the UK without a visa. These blatant human rights abuses are overlooked in favour of spuriously researched and outrageously inaccurate articles on “how they come over here and steal our jobs.”

This ingrained, xenophobic distrust of non-white, non-British members of society extends to our attitude towards EU enlargement.

Since 2004, the EU has swelled enormously: not only has the total number of member-states jumped from 15 to 27, but the total population of the Union has ballooned from approximately 383 million to over 495 million. The rationale behind EU membership has been the same since its ideological inception in 1953: to act as a democratising force that facilitates economic and political cooperation in Europe. In this it has been enormously successful, and one of, if not the most important factors in “Westernising” former Soviet bloc and formerly totalitarian nations such as Portugal, Greece and Spain – not to mention bringing huge economic benefits and growth to all its member-states.

Tellingly though, British attitudes to expansion have largely been negative. The traditional arguments about national sovereignty have been augmented by fears of a “Polish invasion” which, when coupled with the widespread anti-constitutional sentiment, can be seen as a motivating factor for the government to push for "red lines" in the accession of Romania and Bulgaria. Citizens of either country, thanks to the famously foreigner-intolerant John Reid, are unable to work in this country on pain of a £1000 fine. The Guardian accused the government at the time of “bowing to tabloid xenophobia” and Geoff Hoon, the Europe Minister, denounced his own party as acting contrary to the free market principles of the EU and ignoring the needs of the UK labour market. He warned that the legislation would potentially leave tens of thousands working in Britain’s black labour market.

As has been illustrated in this edition of The Journal, Mr Hoon was right. Discriminatory legislation does not prevent people from coming to the country, but forces them underground. They cannot get the jobs that businesses need doing, because the government has pandered to the illogical prejudices created by a few newspaper proprietors and Britain’s ultra-conservative right. Their quality of life is, in their own words, miserable, with up to twelve people - including young babies, forced to live in a single room in a flat shared by fifty people while being at the mercy of criminals and gang-masters. To put this in perspective, the moral outcry at such squalid conditions was greater in the 19th century than it is today.

These economic and political decisions, while seeming tediously academic, have real-world effects on real-life people. Our ingrained, irrational distrust of Johnny Foreigner is not harmless, indeed, it causes untold damage to the potentially hardworking families whose contribution to society is worth billions of pounds each year – the type of families that both David Cameron and Gordon Brown claim to champion.

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