How quietly moral leadership has helped save Scotland from far-right riots

Why have there been no far-right riots in Scotland, while dozens of towns and cities across England have seen serious outbreaks of anti-immigration violence? The answers to this question will be complex, but there is an obvious factor that is worthy of considerable scrutiny: the role of political leaders.

Among the commonest chants shouted by rioters were “enough is enough”, “save our kids”, and “stop the boats” – the latter being a campaign slogan promoted by the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak and which was also used by the right-wing Australian politician Tony Abbott in his successful 2013 general election campaign.

Sunak has, of course, denounced the violence and is not responsible for it. However, the shouting of his favourite slogan by the rioters should at least give him pause for thought. And he is far from the only politician who has focussed on immigration as a cause of society’s ills.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman infamously spoke of an “invasion”. Last year, the then immigration minister Robert Jenrick ordered Mickey Mouse and Jungle Book cartoon murals on an asylum seeker reception centre to be painted over – why make things nicer for scared, vulnerable children if they are ‘immigrants’? And, of course, Nigel Farage clearly thinks the presence of too many ‘foreigners’ is the UK’s biggest problem.

This kind of rhetoric has been building up for years. It reached a crescendo with Brexit and the subsequent high levels of immigration, despite leaving the EU, have clearly inflamed passions further. But when passions run high, reason tends to take a back seat.

Most migrants invited to UK

In January this year, a YouGov poll found 45 per cent of respondents thought “many more” or “some more” migrants come to the UK illegally than arrive by legal routes, compared to 34 per cent who thought the opposite was true.

The reality is that about 96 per cent of migrants are invited to come to the UK. So migrants arriving by ‘illegal’ routes represent a tiny minority. Furthermore, about three-quarters of those who cross the English Channel in small boats are granted refugee status or another form of permission to stay. So most of them are, ultimately, legally allowed to be in this country.

It has to be likely that this false perception has been driven at least in part by the over-emphasis on "stopping the boats". With so many people wrongly believing most migrants are here illegally, it makes it easier for the far-right to then portray them as criminals.

Migration is ‘good news’

The contrast in the language used by some politicians down south and politicians of all parties in Scotland is just as stark as the lack of far-right violence.

For example, Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, a fellow Scotsman columnist, wrote in 2019 that “Conservatives should not be afraid of highlighting the real benefits that migrant workers can bring, both economically and socially”. And last year he described “a substantial increase in non-EU migrants” as “good news for our higher education sector... [and] our economy”.

The SNP leadership has also shunned the tendencies of some nationalists to demonise outsiders, although ironically this sometimes comes across as part of their endless attempts to create wedge issues to split Scotland from the UK – “Scotland good, England bad”, that sort of thing.

However, there is nothing inherently more or less moral about ‘the people’ of any nation. It is as ridiculous and wrong to think this as it is to imagine that the actions of one migrant say anything at all about the character of other people born outside this country. We are all individuals and each deserve to be treated as one.

Wave of violence

Of course, the language used by politicians in Scotland about immigration is not widely known and it doesn’t really make waves in society. However, it does provide a quiet, low-key dampening down of tensions.

Its much stronger effect is in the absence of the wave of anti-immigration rhetoric that is currently driving the wave of violence south of the Border. If MSPs had been rambling on about “invasions”, if immigration had been a major issue between the parties at Holyrood for years, things would be very different on the streets today.

It feels like some right-wing politicians have looked at the role played by anti-migrant sentiment in the Brexit referendum result and decided that it represents an easy route to power. Perhaps they underestimated their own influence, the potential effects of their words, but what political leaders say really does matter. Politics is not a game.

‘When hate gets out of control’

In a recent video for the American Veterans Center, Colonel Frank Cohn, 98, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and who served in the US Army during the Second World War, spoke about why he volunteers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“I think it’s important to understand what happens when hate gets out of control,” he said. “And that’s what happened in Germany, hate got completely out of control and people who never would have thought about killing others ended up in concentration camps guarding people who were going to be executed and were able to associate themselves with the people who were the executioners and it didn’t seem so out of the ordinary at all...

“All that came out of hate and we need to tell people what hate does to people, so that it has to be avoided, it has to be squashed.”

As the current violent riots continue, there are clear signs that hatred risks getting out of control. All politicians need to realise the very real dangers of where this could be heading and that it is their duty to squash it.