MPs condemning the bullying of a young Syrian refugee should look at their own policies

Conservative Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood called it a “disgrace.” And it’s impossible to disagree. Footage of a fifteen-year-old a Syrian refugee, Jamal, being assaulted by another boy is appalling. He is dragged to the ground as his attacker tries to force water into his mouth, shouting “I’ll drown you.”

It’s not the first time something like this has happened in contemporary Britain. Last year a seventeen-year-old Kurdish Iranian boy was brutally attacked in Croydon by a gang of people after he told them he was an asylum seeker.

Just like Ellwood, then Conservative MP for the area, Gavin Barwell—who has since lost his seat in 2017 become Theresa May’s chief of staff—was appalled; he condemned the attackers as “scum.”

The responses of the two seem to make sense. But it’s much easier for them to take to Twitter with their disgust than engage in an analysis that recognises such violence is situated in a broader context; one where aggressively xenophobic, dehumanising politics and policies is the norm. A context they, as politicians, have helped create.

When Ellwood claimed—in a now-deleted tweet—that Britain is “supposed to be” a “friendly” and “welcoming country,” you have to wonder how he possibly understands his own government’s political project.

We do not know all the specific reasons or details of the attack against Jamal, which the police are investigating as a “racially aggravated-assault.” But what we do know is politicians like Ellwood have helped sustain and build a toxic climate for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. A climate where refugees and migrants are dehumanised as security threats, where the government proudly named a package of cruelly restrictive policies the “hostile environment” and where refugees are too scared to use the NHS.

For all their anger and disgust, as MPs both Ellwood and Barwell voted for stricter asylum system, which included them voting against giving people seeking asylum the right to work if a decision on their application takes over six months. Forcing people who are waiting on their applications to live on £37.75 a week, with scant access to legal support and risking destitution isn’t much of a welcome.

These individual MPs and their engagement with these acts of violence is a glimpse into what’s wrong with how the establishment talk about asylum and how they like to understand this country. Successive British governments talk about human rights and the UK’s supposedly proud history of asylum, even though—as many people know all too well—for every person who has sought refuge in the UK, there have been many others kept out by a discriminatory and punitive immigration system.

Politicians decry violence against refugees while they unpick any support systems that were in place, leaving people to live in squalid housing, run by private firms that are near impossible to hold to account and stripping away the legal provisions so this country’s complex, rabbit warren of an immigration system is nowhere near navigable. At the same time, they blame migration for low pay, NHS crises and rising house prices.

Individual acts of physical violence levelled at people just because of their immigration status are inexcusable; they shouldn’t be ignored or swept aside so they are part of the norm. But dehumanising rhetoric and insidious forms of state-led structural violence are part of everyday life in this country.

In this country’s deportation regime, four in 10 appeals are successful. But the government wants to fast-track appeals, which will make it more difficult for people to seek effective representation. Meanwhile, the UK’s sprawling detention estate is one of the largest in Europe. In the walls of so-called ‘removal centres’ are reports of state-sanctioned abuse. But they remain open.

Not everyone who risks their lives to get to the UK necessarily gets safety or security when they arrive here—and that’s not only because of individual hostility. It’s because of government policy, too.