Swamped

Pause for a moment and consider why, amid the relentless targeting of immigrants to this country, a minister claiming that some UK towns are 'swamped' with EU immigrants is too much even for his Westminster paymasters. There is, after all, solid precedent for this kind of talk amongst leading Tories:



To say that we are swamped by something, is to imply that this thing is part of the non-human world. Flood waters swamp (note the language of floodgates that is never far behind talk of immigrants swamping). An office worker might be swamped by paperwork. That which swamps me is at once alien to me and something I want to do away with. When I say of people that they are swamping me I both 'other' them and to set them up as a legitimate target of hostility. And that - thanks to several decades of sustained anti-racist campaigning, these days so quickly dismissed as 'political correctness' - is no longer openly acceptable in their discourse of our leaders. Only irrelevant has-beens can now talk this way without censure.

Don't suppose for one moment, however, that this change in acceptable language reflects a change in heart. Those who thought that it was actually, as it were, wrong to treat immigrants as though they were so many pests to be exterminated would think twice before leaving them to die a hellish death in the Mediterranean.