The snarl of fear of the unknown

On Any Questions, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather said that to look good in the polls, politicians have talked tough and manufactured the problem of EU migrants coming to Britain to claim benefits and are now desperately searching for solutions to that issue.  The EU is entirely right in that the UK will come across as a nasty country if it continues down this route.  But we are missing one big point - the right-wing press.
Since the Leveson report, the tabloids in particular have been a bit more careful in their targeting of celebrities and to compensate have piled all their fury into faceless agglomerations like 'immigrants' and the largely faceless EU.  If ever there was a case of tabloids running the country, this is it and the nation, inevitably, is going to hell in a handcart, not despite the tabloids but because of them.  They lie and the misrepresent and they pick one example of a miscreant and blow it out of all proportion to account for that entire swathe of population.  Of course, The Daily Mail has form in this regard as it used the same techniques against Jews before World War Two.  Fear of the outsider and anger at a complacent establishment are its stock in trade.  I wouldn't be surprised if the current owner was a descendant of Titus Oates, the inveterate maligner of Roman Catholics.
To wish to leave the European Union is not an honourable intellectual position as apologists on the right claim.  Not that it could never be such, but in the current hyperbolic 'debate' (where the exaggeration comes almost wholesale from the anti-EU brigade - Lord Dobbs, the Tory piloting the referendum bill through the Upper House called the EU "a pestilence."), it is a xenophobic-inflected form of madness that has been simmering away for twenty years when the Danes rejected Maastricht, prompting a Tory rebellion against Prime Minister John Major.  Tony Blair's government treated the EU with contempt domestically, repeatedly outlining its 'red lines' as if defending Britannia from a rapacious land across the Channel.  Only once did Blair lose his rag and give a devastatingly eloquent rebuttal to a member of UKIP who questioned why British money was repairing Hungarian drains (basically developing the infrastructure of weaker European economies will raise the prosperity of all).  Other than that Blair, a moral coward unless backed by a US president or the right-wing press, implicitly bashed the EU (if outwardly giving it his support).  Gordon Brown was an EU-sceptic from the outset when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer but one in the genuine sense of the phrase, rather than the current EU-phobes who masquerade as sceptics.  David Cameron was drawn from the same stock as Brown rather than Blair in this matter but has been dragged ever rightwards by those who want to return to the boondocks.  His failure to win a general election has hamstrung him in terms of respect but even a marginal victory would have left him as hostage to rebels as was Major (some of the right-wing press hoped this would be the case). 
So Cameron tossed his troops the red-meat of a referendum.  The cant about 'giving the people their say' is incredible.  The duplicity of the Tory politicians and press who merely see the referendum as a mechanism for exiting the EU but claim 'the primacy of democracy' is unparalleled in extent if not significance (even surpassing the Iraqi WMD claims in its wildness).  But of course, you can only temporarily silence a rabid beast.  The EU-phobes in his party and in the press wanted more.  Hence the bashing of EU migrants.
Tories are so discombobulated they can't even get their facts straight - Chris Grayling on Any Questions said that back in 2004, the UK was only one of two countries to relax their borders.  I'd love to know which one of Ireland and Sweden he was thinking of as 'the only other' country.  It may seem a small slip if you're discussing it with friends but it assumes a different proportion if you're the Justice Secretary - such facts should be ingrained into you.  And the laughable thing is, Britain was the keenest proponent of expansion to the East to 'dilute' the ever closer Union that France and Germany had in mind.  Now, the Germans and the French are viewed as valuable migrants and those populations to the East that we welcomed in are seen as supressing wages at best and scroungers at worst (and most commonest).
When politicians and commentators argue that they want a 'proper discussion on immigration', it has so abused by ulterior motives that it like the little boy who cried wolf - I am inclined to be distrustful of such discourse.  Covert Conservative Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, produced a programme on immigration last Tuesday.  It was very informative about public delusions (and therefore the unspoken dubious value of referendums, where people vote with their prejudices and their myths, if their voting is correlated to the subject matter at all).  A majority of British people thought that immigrants (of all description) made up a third or more of the British population when actually it is one-eighth and a majority also believed that immigrants took more out of the economy than they put in when the reverse is the case overwhelmingly.  It is getting to the stage where the teaching of history will be subject to restrictions (fine with the revisionist demagoguery of the Mail and the Express) because the past is a foreign country (as L. P. Hartley had it).
Professor Sir Paul Collier, an economist with the World Bank, recently wrote a book, Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century.  His argument can be distilled in his conclusion: "History is not sanguine about the capacity of ethnic groups or religions to overcome their differences."  Despite defining himself as part of the liberal-left elite, his 'bravery' in 'speaking out against the consensus', makes him as much liberal-left as Bjørn Lomborg is an environmentalist (subtracting the 'environ-' would be a closer approximation of Lomborg).  Collier's iron law of history in fact makes him sound like a neo-realist rather than a neo-liberal. 
Collier was also disparaging about the role of diasporas in prolonging conflict in their home country, completely ignoring the positive effect they can have in ending conflict (such as Irish-Americans from 1993 onwards), preferring to attack such 'faceless' groups (where have I heard that before) rather than prominent corporations that facilitate the conflict-begetting contributions.  Rupert Edis, in reviewing Exodus, sounds like Enoch Powell in citing the Balkans and Rwanda as the direction of travel for Britain currently.  Edis also trembles at the recollection of the 2011 census that showed that London's "white British" population had dropped to 45% of the total, a joke observation given that it means "white British" comfortably outnumbers any other ethnic group and also ignorant of knowing that London would have died as a city long ago if it had not been for immigration.  Collier gives Edis free reign to do this, criticising "diasporas attached to dysfunctional social models." (Collier really hates diasporas).  Such models bring with them honour violence, Islamic extremism, abuses of women and homophobia in Collier's world view i.e. there is nothing positive about immigration culturally (he also states that stripping out the 'highly skilled', however so defined, means the economic impact is neutral).  That Collier can get away with such flawed methodology and prejudiced garbage is because the atmosphere is so febrile (the two Romanians arriving at Luton Airport on New Year's Day putting the lie to racist language of 'floods' and 'hordes' and incidentally they already had jobs here because of their skills).
Multiculturalism does not encourage and celebrate cultural separation - a clue is in the name: many cultures.  Multiculturalism fails where people misapply it.  Saying that a requirement of foreign immigrants to learn workable English is an infringement of their human rights belongs in the Swiftian echelons of satire rather than serious debate, yet it has been said.  A Malaysian classmate of mine at university told me of an Indian friend of his, who, though born in the UK, had an arranged marriage with a woman from the sub-continent.  Not only did this woman come over here to live, but she brought her parents and several further of her relatives as well - neither his bride, nor any of her family could speak English.  Yet, because they were part of the Commonwealth, there was not a problem about their settlement.  My Malaysian friend (incidentally part of British immigration figures - the kind of highly talented people this country wants to attract not alienate) said this would not be allowed in his country.  I agree with him and one can see how communities can become segregated through such loopholes in the visa system, though of course this was also an isolated incidence and neither is correlation the same as causation.  Bradford, often a test case for those hostile to immigration and their view of multiculturalism, has been augmented by immigrants for a thousand years from Normans, to Irish, to Germans, to Jews, something often overlooked.  Citing negatives from the other side does not prove your own argument - if anything it points to the weakness of your argument.  Yes, there needs to be a 'proper debate on immigration' and on the EU for that as well but fat chance we'll get beyond meaningless platitudes and hostility.