Page - 80 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

80 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis David Cameron has been at the forefront of promoting ‘British values’ and the Lear- ning Centre of his Holocaust Commission will be part of this enterprise. Certainly part of modern British history has been a strong strain of xenopho- bia tinged with many different forms of racism. Indeed, Hop- kins, The Sun and Cameron have their historical precedents. In 1903, the leading anti-alien, William Evans-Gordon, quo- ted with approval the Bishop of Stepney who blamed the poverty of East London on ‘foreigners coming in like an army of locusts’.87 Two years later, as the Aliens Bill was being fiercely debated, Robert Sherard, a journalist obsessed with the threat posed by the Jewish white slave trade to British manhood, warned readers of The Standard about the diseased and useless Jewish immigrants who ‘swarm over to England’.88 The British case is important for no other country possesses such a strong belief in its own tolerance and decency - past and present. In this respect, the rebuke of the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for fuelling ‘a xenophobic climate in Britain’, by Nils Muiznieks, the Coun- cil of Europe’s human rights commissioner, is especially pertinent. Muiznieks criticised the language of these leading politicians, especially Cameron’s use of the term ‘illegal immigrant’ with its connotations of criminality. ‘People are not illegal’, he noted, their ‘legal status may be irregular, but that does not render them beyond humanity’.89 Similarly, Booker Prize author, Richard Flanagan, when visiting Syrian refugees in Leba- nese, Serbian and Greek camps, and on the move at the Croatian border, concludes ‘It felt like history and I suppose it was history and is history, and you realise why anyone who has experi- enced history hates it so’.90 Flanagan admonishes “Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and the damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now.” 91 87 William Evans Gordon, The Alien Immigrant (London: Heinemann, 1903), 12. 88 ‘The Home of the Alien’, The Standard, 5 January 1905. 89 Alan Travis, ‘Human rights official attacks PM’s rhetoric on migrants’, Guardian, 24 March 2016. 90 Richard Flanagan, ‘Old Testament in its stories, epic in its scale: this is the great exodus of our age’, Guardian, 5 March 2016. 91 Ibid. Fig. 13: Porto M, Photo: Tony Kushner