Keeping out Johnny Foreigner (unless he can lend us a tenner that is…)

"Are you local?"

It is important to say that the overwhelming majority of British people I have met have been welcoming and tolerant of Russian-speakers and East Europeans generally. We are not a “visible” minority and since we have many common interests and cultural ties with the West this makes our integration into British society easier than for people from other parts of the world, e.g. those who come here from Africa or the Indian sub-continent.

It is true that most of us can recall some unpleasant incidents of prejudice or abuse (I know of one Russian family locally who were abused in their own home by some teenage yobs. In the greatest of ironies these brain-dead morons had mistaken their Russian victims for Polish migrant workers…).

Indeed some Russian-speaking people in the region have experienced very serious hate crime, as in the case of Latvian citizen Sergejs Pacejs, who in 2004 was stabbed and left fighting for his life  after some youths in Salford overheard him speaking Russian in the street.  (This particularly disgusting crime prompted protests from Latvia, whose government is not normally known for standing up for the rights of Russian speakers.) However it must be said that such incidents are memorable precisely because they are the exception rather than the rule. 

Nevertheless, given the persistence of such attitudes amongst certain elements in British society, it is irksome that the media here loves nothing more than to focus on the very real problem of xenophobia in Russia – and to suggest that it is Russians who are all paranoid about foreigners or that we dislike or fear the outside world. A couple of years ago one BBC journalist, the delightfully named Rupert Wingfield Hayes (who I suspect did not grow up on a Preston council estate…) expressed this view thus: 

“Living in Moscow, you often get the feeling Russia would really prefer it if the rest of the world just went away and left Russia alone.”

(“Russia’s deep suspicion of the West”, BBC News, 15 December 2007)

As Burnley FC star Andre Bikey has described, racism is indeed a serious problem in Russian society, as it is in many, many parts of the world. However the idea popularised by the Western media that Russia and the Russian people are backward, racist and xenophobic is a nonsense which is roundly refuted in this interesting article by prominent black Briton and entrepreneur Jonathan Fianu.

“He can’t be corrupt - he’s an Englishman!”

Certainly, Russia does not have a monopoly on prejudice – and as a student of accountancy I must say that one of the funniest manifestations of British xenophobia is to be found in the anti money laundering rules, which require accountants, lawyers and other professionals here to disclose to the authorities any financial transactions involving “politically exposed persons” – a term which loosely translated means any foreign politician or even their family members. Of course, when drafting these rules, MPs in Westminster excluded from their minds the possibility that a British politician might just possibly be open to suspicion when it comes to financial impropriety (these rules pre-date the recent expenses scandal that engulfed the British political establishment in 2009). 

So, as we say in Russian “”в чужом глазу видим сучок, а в своём бревна не замечаем” (“sweep your own porch clean first”). After all, it is here in the north of England, not in Russia, that we have recently seen stunning election successes for neo-fascists, and a Prime Minister who has shamelessly bolted for that “last refuge of a scoundrel”, the open embrace of false nationalism. So, when it comes to all things “foreign”, who are really the “paranoid” ones?

Above: At the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 this English cartoon portrayed foreigners, especially black people, as cannibals. The text reads: “They go to have some refreshment. A party from the Cannibal Islands on eyeing little Johnny [a white English child] in a mysterious manner offer a price for him.”

It is also the case that nothing betrays the deep-rooted British suspicion of “Johnny Foreigner” more than the UK’s immigration system – where it seems that policy is more and more determined by the tabloid press and populist opinion polls than by government ministers (because here in England, in sharp contrast to the situation in Russia and the FSU states, politicians are largely afraid of the media, rather than the other way round…). 

The hostility of the British press to the outside world’s encroachment on this “Sceptred Isle” is a long-running one, as Robert Tressell famously pointed out when describing the newspapers commonly read in England in the years before the First World War:  

“The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of… the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed and the injury they did to British trade. These were the seeds which cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners.” – Robert Tressell’s famous description of Edwardian era xenophobia in “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”

“Welcome to England (as long as you’ve got a “bob or two” that is…)”

The increasingly cash-strapped British government’s tough new points-based visa regime aimed at non-EU citizens visiting the UK, combined with steep increases in visa fees for foreigners seeking to visit or remain in Britain, is already causing widespread controversy. Many observers suspect that the huge increases in UK visa fees in recent years are little more than a “stealth tax” – but this time aimed at foreign rather than British citizens. It certainly seems that this 21^st century variant of “taxation without representation” (the infamous grievance that caused George Washington to lead his successful rebellion against British rule in the American colonies in the 18^th century) now means that citizens of Britain’s former colonies, such as Jamaica, Hong Kong and South Africa – and indeed all non-EU citizens who want to visit Britain – are now being hit with enormous increases in the fees they must pay in order to apply to come here either as tourists or to visit family members.

Similarly, one does not know whether to laugh or cry when one reads that foreign pupils seeking to study at Britain’s elite schools are now compelled to complete a questionnaire featuring questions so breathtakingly inane they would make “Borat” blush e.g. “Are you a terrorist?”

British universities have also expressed alarm that the new rules will simply cause wealthy foreign students (a lucrative source of income) to eschew Oxford and Cambridge and other seats of learning in Britain in favour of Harvard, the Sorbonne or Yale.

In Britain, even "quality" papers like The Guardian have fuelled the fairy story that if you speak Russian then you must be rich...

“Belarusian children welcome but Ukrainian kids aren’t”

Russian Cornwall, a blog aimed at Russian-speakers in the south west of England, has long complained about the injustices faced by Russian-speaking Ukrainians seeking to visit the UK, and an article I came across recently highlighted the cruel and onerous burden that the UK’s new visa regime has placed on Ukrainian children whose health has been blighted by the Chernobyl disaster. 

Several UK charities do excellent work in bringing such children here for rest and respite,  (or, as in the case of the Lancashire-based charity Belarus Aid, in helping to improve local health facilities in Belarus). An agreement between the governments of the UK and Belarus means that such children are not required to obtain UK visas.

However no such agreement is in place for the benefit of Ukrainian children, some of whom have been just as badly affected by the enduring effects of radioactive pollution from Chernobyl. Thus when one charity in Lincolnshire recently brought a party of Ukrainian children, whose homes are just 55 km from Chernobyl, they found that they had to pay the British government a visa fee of £70 per child – which is it seems a thoroughly unjust burden to put on a charity conducting such important humanitarian work.

This unfair treatment of Ukrainian children does seem rather surprising, especially if one compares the Ukrainian government’s generally pro-Western stance with the mutual hostility that has characterised relations between Belarus and the UK in recent years.

In some ways it is good that the UK has immigration controls – such controls ought to secure the country’s borders and provide security for all those living here. However they  should not be so expensive or onerous as to simply discourage would-be migrants from any compliance with the law. Martin Luther King once said that those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent protest inevitable – and one can make a similar analogy with immigration policy: If you make lawful immigration well-nigh impossible then you run the risk of simply driving people into the arms of criminals and people-smugglers – an outcome that presumably the British government would wish to avoid….

One would have hoped that a Labour government, one which is supposed to embrace such watchwords as “equality” and “diversity” would, when formulating its policy on immigration and indeed all other matters of public importance, remember the famous words of Colonel Thomas Raineborough, one of Cromwell’s revolutionary soldiers, who in the Putney Debates of 1647 observed that:

“The poorest He that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest He.”

Realistically of course, such a bold defence of justice, democracy and egalitarianism probably sits uneasily with today’s politicians of all parties – who have so enthusiastically devoted themselves to the false religion of “business” and capitalist consumerism…

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