Of Flags and Families

The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for the Spectator) that she has a ‘natural affinity for the faith, flag and family element of Blue Labour’. Her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, now foreign secretary, told Times Radio last week that she has Union Jack bunting hanging up in her garden shed. ‘People should be coming together around our flags,’ she said. When asked if people should be putting them up on motorway gantries, she replied: ‘I would put them up anywhere.’ The flags that have been appearing on motorway gantries, lampposts and roundabouts across the country are part of a campaign, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, organised by known far-right extremists. The BBC asked Keir Starmer if this was racist or patriotic. ‘I’m a supporter of flags,’ the prime minister said.

Flags are prominently displayed at the demonstrations outside hotels in which asylum seekers are being housed by the private companies Serco, Clearsprings and Mears, along with signs declaring ‘protect our girls’, ‘protect children from rape gangs’ and ‘we stand together for our children’.

Mahmoud is said to be considering using military barracks to house asylum seekers. Starmer told the BBC last week that he intends to ‘empty’ asylum hotels. When asked if he would be comfortable with his daughter having to ‘walk past’ a hotel, he responded that he ‘completely’ understands people’s ‘concerns’.

Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister, joined crowds outside a hotel in Epping in July, announcing his belief that his daughters, aged ten, twelve and fourteen, were at risk from ‘men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally’. This fear, he went on to suggest, is easily ‘sneered at by the metropolitan elite, safely ensconced in their ivory towers’ (Jenrick was privately educated and studied at the universities of Cambridge and Pennsylvania before embarking on a pre-politics career as a corporate lawyer and a director of Christie’s auction house). Nigel Farage has repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that a rise in reported sexual assault is linked to immigration.

Invoking ‘our girls’ is a familiar tactic. Childhood is a canvas onto which fantasies of vulnerability, goodness and citizenship are easily projected; daughterhood allows these fantasies to be gendered, too. Fatherhood assumes a kind of virtue by association: I must be right, because I’m trying to protect these innocent girls. ‘As the father of a daughter …’ is a familiar refrain from men in positions of power. Starmer’s evasive response endorses the narrative that the mere presence of asylum-seeker hotels in a community endangers women and children. According to this account, racially motivated violence, both at the hands of the state and of the kind that characterised last summer’s riots, can be committed without being named as harm, since it claims to be a defensive – and therefore morally defensible – act. Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has criticised politicians for stoking ‘a climate of increasing tension and polarity’.

All this has little to do with the realities of the sexual exploitation of children or with violence against women and girls. ‘There is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence,’ as a recent open letter from Women against the Far Right points out. ‘Many are themselves survivors of violence, war and persecution. Blaming them distracts from tackling the deep-rooted causes of abuse and from holding those truly responsible to account.’ A Guardian investigation published in July, on the other hand, found that two-fifths of those arrested after taking part in last summer’s anti-immigration riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse.

The protesters’ claims also have little to do with the realities of life in the asylum hotels, where many women and children are housed. The conditions in the hotels are very bad: most residents share rooms with complete strangers, have no laundry or cooking facilities, no choice about when or what they eat, with any visits strictly policed by security. (The companies responsible for these conditions turn a tidy profit from public money: £383 million between them over five years. In 2019, Serco had its contract renewed by the Home Office despite having been fined £6.8 million for its various failings in housing asylum seekers).

In Glasgow, where I live, I volunteer as a birth companion, which involves spending time in these hotels. I have accompanied new mothers, often recovering from major abdominal surgery, when they leave hospital with their babies to return to small, hot rooms that haven’t been cleaned, windows that can’t be fully opened, with no fridge, no kettle, no microwave, no capacity to sterilise bottles, nowhere to unpack, nowhere to put the baby bath. Organisations such as Amma Birth Companions (the charity I work with), the Scottish Refugee Council and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland have been saying for years that housing mothers and babies in such unsuitable conditions breaches their human rights, including the right to adequate housing: the right, in other words, to safety.

One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George’s Cross, is ‘Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners’. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and ‘foreign’ women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted.

The figure of the single man, meanwhile, is demonised. As Starmer was joining the chorus of concerned fathers, Cooper announced the suspension of all new family reunion applications for refugees. Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, condemned this punitive measure, pointing out – as Cooper herself has said in the past – that ‘these changes will only push more desperate people into the arms of smugglers.’ In response to the ‘concerns’ about young men crossing the channel and entering the country without the allegedly ameliorating influence of a family, the government has removed the possibility of these men, who often undertake the dangerous journey alone, being reunited with their loved ones, including their own daughters.