Liberals can be bigots too.

It’s true to say that we have to consider the legitimate complaints that fuel xenophobia. Just as I would argue the same for other types of extremism. There is usually a logical basis somewhere- at some place inside the spectrum - and that is not often the one that resonates so elegantly on Twitter, chimes so seamlessly on Facebook or with the gatherers of instant comment and speculation. That logical basis takes a very skilled caricaturist to depict- not always because of its complexity, but because they anything not already in the mainstream is harder to drive home through instant symbols and quick puns.

The world is opening up in many, but certainly not all, ways. This opening up is by no means egalitarian. The urban hotspots see an influx of people for whom place can be temporary- and identity is aligned with the global culture of consumption. Who view communicating through this culture of consumption as the most straightforward option. It’s called global, but in true imperial style, it also has many elements that are intrinsically British, like immediate resort to complaint, like sponging off guilt when it comes to food and anxieties about body shape.

Many of the passengers of this process have had their entrance preordained by the most hierarchical process they have ever had to endure, that being the immigration process. Who have had to swallow the fact that the only way in is through payment and for whom remaining an obedient consumer is a natural phase of integration. 

This global culture of consumption replaces languages and networks, communities and many other things many people consider key to their humanity. Surely I am not vamping something disingenuous up when I claim that British xenophobia is partly a rejection and revulsion at the migrant experience rather than the migrant his or herself. A repulsion at the context into which people come, and are forced to exist in, when they become migrants. 

Everyone is a stranger in many parts of rural Britain. The more visibly different that stranger is, or the less likely he or she is to clutch on to those one or two remaining vestiges of communal, inherited (probably under documented) culture, the easier he or she is to blame. There is a culture of limbo and there are very few chances left to experience, let alone share, anything communal. The hypermarket development under the flyover has replaced the town centre. The car the bus. The x-box the cinema, Boots the apothecary. The only acceptable things to do in public now are drink or gamble. Usually in brightly lit, carpet-less and music-free surroundings with overloaded with procedures to safeguard physical security but without any regard to spiritual security. In fact, to take it even further, the spirit has become completely defunct. Its very essence is regarded as backward. 

Prejudice and mistrust are the best currencies when you’re worried about your window being smashed in by teenagers who are slowly being turned delinquents by a repetitive, derivative culture which encourages us to mimic rather than to feel or produce. 

Where glass and slate works once stood, a grinding tourism industry is all that remains. Factories are just static structures crumbling in the foreground, removed only to pave over new carparks for shopping centres. For some, remittances come from the South – as brothers and sisters climb corporate ladders which sometimes short circuit, ejecting their apostles down metal poles like fire fighters retreating from burning buildings, when they say the wrong things about the wrong people. 

No reason is given. Not anymore. It’s about work ethic and attitude- those unquantifiable tenets which pass the uninitiated right by in the void in which sound can only be sound. Was it actually about accent or clothes? As Chomsky says – companies are the most anti-democratic institutions of our age. They’re mini Soviet Unions with central planning. The sad thing is that these are the same ills being suffered by immigrants too- just in different places and during different work hours.

And then a person supposes the establishment cannot be trusted and it is time for a u-turn. Who would blame them for putting their trust in a newspaper tycoon and a couple of renegades? Well, here, if we are to approach this issue as adults, some blame is due. The responsibility does, to some extent, lie with the governed. But this isn’t all about minds being too narrow on one side. It’s about power and agency- and although the governed are only the governed because they consent – we would be wrong to underestimate power. The power is with the strangers who decide. It isn’t just about money either. Those characters making daily appearances in the living room are just that – they are not figures close to everyone’s hearts. In the stagnant post-Thatcher haze, the ones telling us to keep the supposed privileges we already have are those who have stripped us of our culture. 

It’s in that void that we see other cultures assert themselves. Our hatred is the most frustrated kind. It’s a pining. A nostalgia. Even a resentment at the bright futures of the hard working, purposeful, per-chance upwardly mobile, immigrant with the solid family and the clear approach. Not those crumpled scribbles of English people who are left to eat from tins – having been stripped of a culture which appreciates any kind of tangible subtlety in favour of one encouraged to spout out words before they have even been understood. The subtleties that one individual can experience, and yet share, simultaneously. Who took those away? Was it Cameron’s ghostly fore bearers? The owners of capital both secret,  un-place-able and so stark that questioning it is a futile process? Those whose game is to put their stores and stores of fodder to use. But now, the trump is their illusive quality. Accusing parody of cliché and confrontation of archaism. And they win. It is easier to blame the weak and the downtrodden, who are nevertheless separate from oneself. Even where that separation is as fickle as dress or skin colour, even where that separation is manufactured by the printing press. They are, after all, battling a new context too, but one which is different – at least racism ensures it is portrayed so. 

There’s a strong argument that the Daily Mail is neither racist nor Islamophobic. It’s just elitist. And somehow, that elitism has been able to mobilise racial sentiment among the non-elites. It would be a stretch to say it is mobilising either religious or secular sentiment among them too. I think tabloid Islamophobia has far more to do with race than religion. But it has even more to do with money. Don’t forget that. The cute Dubai prince who shakes hands with the Queen is miles away from the bad Syrian freedom fighter who has to scrape around for food.