From the Stage pages of the Guardian, a reminder of which concerns – and by extension which citizens – simply don’t matter:
A compelling drama about refugees living in Britain could be one way to defuse the rising anger and anti-migrant sentiment in the UK, according to the award-winning actor Jonathan Pryce, who said great TV or film could “open up” the issue.
As if the issue weren’t already foremost in a great many minds, perhaps due to unhappy first-hand experience. Note, too, the conflation of migrants and refugees. As if those arriving in vast numbers, welcome or otherwise, legally or not, were some homogenous mass of human sorrow, and thus, rather conveniently, impossible to refuse.
Pryce told the Guardian that at present the British public has no idea about the day-to-day realities for people living in migrant hotels. “People aren’t aware of the facts… concerning immigrants, legal or otherwise. And so this sort of fear and anger builds up about something they don’t really know anything about,” he said.
Readers are welcome to marvel at the conceit that objections to current policy – an effectively borderless nation – can only be the result of ignorance. No other possibilities being conceivable, it seems. And so, the flow of information, of views to be considered, and any expectations of listening, seem likely to travel in one direction only.
Readers will also note the assumption that the indigenous proletariat – those low-status citizens daring to be angry at the downgrading of their home – merely need to have their objections corrected. By drama of a very particular kind. As if concerns regarding rapid demographic transformation and a loss of cultural common ground could only ever be wrong.
As if there were no substance to their fears. No basis for their anger or sense of betrayal. As if it weren’t their neighbourhoods, not those of the luvvie set, being transformed rapidly and against their will – and very often for the worse.
As if they simply have to be told in a slightly different way.
A curious definition of an issue being opened up.
“It’s an issue that does need to be opened up and explored to a greater extent, and it has to be through drama, which is often the best way to tell somebody’s emotional story.”
Whether our award-winning actor would be quite so enthusiastic about a compelling drama conveying the “emotional story” and “day-to-day realities” of someone whose home has been degraded and made alienating by the assumptions of people much like Mr Pryce remains unclear.
Though readers are welcome to guess.
Update, via the comments:
EmC adds,
They’ll try anything except listening to the voters.
Indeed. It’s not as if feelings on the matter have not been made clear, many times, quite loudly. Governments have been ousted because of this issue. And it’s not as if the consequences of ignoring those feelings are particularly difficult to foresee. Yet somehow the option of just doing as you’ve been told doesn’t appear on the form.
Mr Pryce and his peers seem to imagine that they live in a society without practical limits, or any troublesome human nature, as if the patience of those on whom these demographic fantasies are being imposed were infinite. As if no ugliness could ensue.
The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to those who would lecture us on our ignorance.
Says Rafi,
Stop noticing things. Consume fiction instead.
The disconnect – the inability to read the room – is quite something. And so very Guardian.
It scarcely needs saying that Mr Pryce, like so many of his likeminded peers, is unlikely to find his own neighbourhood enlivened by Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, a tool now fashionable in educational establishments, and I doubt that he’ll find his own doorstep literally being shat on.
And I think we can assume that Mr Pryce has no recent first-hand experience of public transport and the, shall we say, challenges it can now present.
Likewise, I think it’s safe to say that Mr Pryce has not had the experience of visiting a busy high-street optician and realising that he was the only white customer, the only one fluent in English, and the only one paying for their treatment. Now, you might think that people shouldn’t notice such things or draw any conclusions from them, because that would be beastly and mean or something.
But people will, and people do, and wishing otherwise is both immaterial and perverse.
The irony being that those like Mr Pryce, who wish to project an air of piety and kindness, of infinite caring – entirely at others’ expense and while in reality disdaining their own countrymen – are risking a society much less to their own liking. And possibly yours.
A multicultural, multiracial society very much depends on the host population not feeling too imposed upon. The natives must feel respected and secure, not – as is now the case – that the piss is being taken. If the percentage of newcomers rises too high, or too sharply, or with no regard for assimilation and cultural common ground, friction will ensue and rapidly escalate.
The rate at which new arrivals materialise, their sheer numbers, will have an effect on how well, or how poorly, those new arrivals adapt to the customs and values of the host society. Indeed, it will have an effect on whether those new arrivals feel inclined, or obliged, to make any such attempt.
And at the moment we’re way past the point at which the alarm started flashing. And the longer that friction continues, and the more that the concerns of the natives are dismissed or denounced or made taboo, the uglier the pushback is likely to be.
Again,
Stop noticing things. Consume fiction instead.
And so, we arrive at the claim that a suitably loaded drama, a fiction, about refugees “could defuse anti-migrant anger,” because “people aren’t aware of the facts and realities for people living in migrant hotels.” As if that would outweigh all of the things, seen daily, that we’re not supposed to consider. Or consider important. Things regarding which one might have an opinion.
As Rmok and others note in the comments, what Mr Pryce advocates does seem very much about putting a thumb on the scale. As revealed by the implied disregard for indigenous objections – the assumption that objections to being swamped with the flotsam of the world, or suddenly being reduced to a racial and cultural minority in one’s own neighbourhood or village, one’s own home, is something to be educated out of you.
By your betters and their stories.
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