Tory Hostility, the Holocaust Survivor and the Home Secretary

Last Friday, an 82-year-old woman wrapped up warm and set off on a 200-mile round trip for a meeting that she half suspected wouldn’t even let her in. As you read this, the film of her speaking that evening has been viewed more than five million times. Which is odd, because it’s not much to look at: a wobbly side-view of a woman with white hair, intense closeups of grey cardigan. Bridgerton this is not.

But it’s the words that count. Joan Salter has got herself down to Hampshire for a public meeting with the home secretary, and now it is her turn to ask a question. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, she hears Suella Braverman demean and dehumanise refugees and it is a reminder of how the Nazis justified murdering Jews like her. So why do it?

Even as the words come out, Braverman’s face freezes. The evening so far has been a Tory activists’ love-in, which, Salter tells me later, made her nervous about being the sole dissenter. But then the home secretary responds, “I won’t apologise for the language I’ve used” – and a disturbing truth is exposed about what Britain has become.

Braverman labels those seeking sanctuary in Britain an “invasion”. Quite the word, invasion. It strips people of their humanity and pretends they are instead a hostile army, sent to maraud our borders. Her junior minister Robert Jenrick once begged colleagues not to “demonise” migrants; now he stars in videos almost licking his jowls over “the Albanians” forced on to a flight to Tirana. Salter is right to say such attitudes from the top fuel and license extremists on the ground. We saw it after the toxic Brexit campaign, when Polish-origin schoolchildren in Huntingdon were called “vermin” on cards left outside their school gates, as race and religious hate crimes soared that summer.

Today, the air is once again poisonous. Far-right groups have been visiting accommodation for asylum seekers, trying to terrify those inside – many of whom have fled terror to come here – often before sharing their videos on social media. The anti-fascist campaigners Hope Not Hate recorded 182 such jaunts last year alone, culminating in a petrol bomb tossed at an asylum centre in Dover by a man with links to far-right groups and who would post about how “all Muslims are guilty of grooming … they only rape non-Muslims”.

Unlike those big men in their big boots frightening innocent people, Salter isn’t chasing social media clout. The grandmother wants to warn us not to return to the times that sent her, at the age of three, running with her parents across Europe in search of sanctuary. She does make a mistake in yoking the home secretary to the term “swarms”. As far as I can see, this figurehead for the new Tory extremism has yet to use that vile word. But I can think of a Tory prime minister who has used that word: David Cameron, the Old Etonian never shy of blowing on a dog whistle, who made a speech denouncing multiculturalism even as Tommy Robinson’s troops marched on Luton. And Margaret Thatcher talked of how the British felt “rather swamped” by immigrants. In those venerable names from the party’s past lies the big picture about the Conservatives’ chronic addiction to racist politics.

Because racism is not what polite people do – and yet Tories keep on doing it, commentators will often put it behind some behavioural cordon. It’s a few rotten apples, you’ll be told, after some councillor dons a blackshirt or moans about the new Doctor Who. Or: they need to fend off the effect of Nigel Farage. Or even, as one Times commentator wrote in 2019, Boris Johnson says it but he “barely believes a word” of it. Such clairvoyance! But that’s the thing about power: other people trot behind with a dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess you keep making.

Yet there was no Ukip when Benjamin Disraeli declared that the Irish “hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character.” It was no rotten apple but Winston Churchill, the Tory idol, who as prime minister pronounced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” The Bengal famine of 1943 is widely estimated to have killed about 2 million people.

I draw these quotes from a new book, Racism and the Tory Party, by the sociologist Mike Cole. Far from being a mere slip of the tongue, racism, he argues, “has saturated the party from the beginning of the 19th century to the second decade of the 21st”. From Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” to Theresa May’s hostile environment, it courses through Tory history. And it is not just words. In its online safety bill, the government wants this week to make illegal any online video of people in small boats that shows such Channel crossing in a “positive light”. Braverman still grinds on with her plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, to stay in hostels with 12 toilets and five showers for 100 inmates.

For the Tories, racism is a fire that they just love to play with. The heat it throws off can be electorally useful. But it is always someone else who gets burned. The targets change – two centuries ago it was the Irish, today it is Albanians – but the strategy is always the same: pick the group, render them inhuman, then chuck them out. The mystery is why a party with such a long and inglorious history can still be lauded by the press for sprinkling a few non-white people along its frontbench.

The woman who is today Joan Salter was in 1943 a three-year-old girl called Fanny Zimetbaum. As Polish-origin Jews, her family were not granted sanctuary in Britain from the Nazis marching into their home of France. Instead, her parents had to scramble through Europe, while Joan was shipped across the Atlantic to an orphanage in America. Only years later, through much wrangling, were the family reunited in London. By then, she remembers her parents as “thoroughly broken”.

When she was in her 70s and studying for a master’s, Salter went through the archives. She read a parliamentary debate from 1943, concerning 2,000 Jewish children in France refused British visas and who were then deported to Hitler’s Germany. She read foreign secretary Anthony Eden claiming “no knowledge” of the matter. Then she read the minutes and memos that proved he was lying: he was in the war cabinet meeting where the issue was discussed. Still the children were abandoned, just as her family were left to their fate.

From her own life, this remarkable woman knows that fascism is not just a one-off and racism never a mere faux pas. They are forces of evil that lurk on the political perimeter and threaten to consume our society wholesale. Joan Salter bears a warning. The rest of us should listen.

This is the piece that Joan Salter wrote about the incident for the Guardian “Comment Is Free”

I confronted Suella Braverman because as a Holocaust survivor I know what words of hate can do | Joan Salter | The Guardian

By demonising refugees, the home secretary causes divisions that can lead to tragedy. We must not forget the lessons of the past

At 83 years old, my going viral on the internet is the last thing I would have expected, but a video of me confronting the UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, at an event on Friday has so far been viewed more than 5m times. For a long time, I have listened in horror to the language used by many politicians to demonise certain groups in this country. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, I had to speak out.

Let me tell you why. Next week, on 27 January, we commemorate one of the worst atrocities committed in human history. The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “ordinary people”. This might seem a strange choice; after all, most of us would assume that it would require a population of inhuman monsters to enact a genocide. But in reality, these horrific acts were carried out by one group of ordinary people against another.

The Holocaust began in a country where Jews and non-Jews had lived together in peace for generations. The small Jewish population – less than 1% – was so integrated into German culture that the majority looked upon themselves as Germans, with a variety of degrees of adherence to Jewish culture and traditions. So how did this relative harmony turn to hatred in such a short period of time? Through the use of language. The language of hate and division.

This was the method used by the Nazis to turn ordinary people, who went home each night to their wives and children, into the monsters capable of marching millions of Jews and other minorities – people just like them – into the gas chambers. It is what enabled ordinary soldiers to return to their wives and children, satisfied that they were protecting their country from social problems caused by people whom their government had convinced them were less than human.

I am an educator, not a political activist. I speak about my family’s experiences during the Holocaust to remind the world how easily propaganda and words of division can create such hatred that ordinary people can then turn on their neighbours.

So when I hear the kind of rhetoric being used by our politicians against desperate refugees trying to make their way to safety here because they see the UK as a welcoming place for them to settle and bring up their children, I am concerned by how quickly we have forgotten the lessons of the past.

During the event on Friday in Braverman’s constituency, she spoke eloquently about the role of the Home Office in keeping this country safe. Her audience listened attentively as she told them that so many problems facing our country, from housing shortages to NHS waiting times, were caused by illegal migrants. It was up to her government, she claimed, to resolve this by deporting the problem.

Whether Braverman believes this to be the only solution, I cannot say, but it was obvious from questions asked by those listening that this was the message they had absorbed. Comments criticising the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving these desperate boat people, instead of leaving them to drown, were shared openly and to applause from others in the audience. Is it really less than a year since hundreds of thousands of Britons opened their homes to those fleeing the violence in Ukraine? Such is the power of words; such is the fragility of civilisation.

This is why I challenged Braverman about her use of language. I am not naive enough to think there are simple answers to the social and financial problems we are experiencing, and I can understand why the ordinary people of this country – often having to face a choice between food and heat – hope for a simple solution.

But I feel strongly that there are alternative reasons for the difficulties being endured beyond the 100,000 or so refugees waiting to be processed before they can rebuild their lives. I also believe that it is important to remind the government of the wise words commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some people all the time and you can fool all people some of the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time.”

So, Ms Braverman, stop your dangerous rhetoric and find other solutions, or history will not forgive you – and the ordinary people who have swallowed your words will eventually regret it.

Joan Salter is an educator and Holocaust survivor