nativism

The Conservative and Unionist Party

of Great Britain – aka The Tories,

from the Irish for ‘robbers’, ‘marauders’ –

is the longest surviving political

organisation in the known world.

It not only parks its tanks on its

opponents’ lawns, but commandeers

the greensward and the house it belongs to.

It reinvents itself by reversing

policies without embarrassment – viz.

welcoming East African Asian

refugees, hoping to send (mostly Muslim)

refugees to Rwanda; selling off

council houses under Margaret Thatcher,

homes that were built under Winston Churchill.

 

And Churchill is perhaps their greatest hero,

and an icon for all seasons – a romantic,

soldier, writer, painter, orator,

brick-layer, alcoholic, racist –

whose views and traits have been edited.

It was he who described Hindus as ‘foul’,

and Muslims as ‘warriors’, and predicted

that if the British ever left India

the Muslims would take over the Raj, and run it

as if the British had never gone home.

 

So what would he have made of a Hindu,

and a teetotaller, at the dispatch box,

albeit a babu, a Wykehamist,

an Oxford man, a multi-millionaire?

What would he, as the Home Secretary

overseeing the so-called Battle

for Stepney, the Siege of Sydney Street –

that shoot-out with Russian émigrés –

have made of the occupation of so much

of Belgravia by Russian oligarchs?

As one of the Council of Europe’s

begetters, and its human rights convention,

what would he have made of the Tories’

long suicide note called Brexit, and their

obsession with rigid inflatables

steering for Dover, with fascist scapegoats?

 

Perhaps nativism would triumph –

that, whatever your colour, as long as

you are born here, and speak the lingo

with more or less the right accent, and have

a hierarchy of people to despise,

then you are one of them?