“Nae hate. Nae fear. Refugees Are Welcome Here”, goes the chant of pro-immigrant demonstrators. Except that, er, sometimes they aren’t.
Asylum seekers are nae sae welcome in Glasgow right now, where Susan Aitken, the SNP council leader, is warning about the “risk to social cohesion” from folk seeking refuge in the Dear Green Place. The city is at “breaking point”, she is reported as saying in The Sunday Times. I seem to recall a certain right-wing politician standing in front of a billboard saying that ten years ago.
The SNP aren’t exactly welcoming refugees in Inverness either — at least not the 300 or so who were going to be housed in Cameron Barracks under the UK Home Office dispersal scheme. John Swinney has denounced some demonstrators opposing the barracks as “racist”. But he should have a care, since one of the leading opponents of the plan is Raymond Bremner, the SNP leader of Highland council.
Of course, he is not racist, and nor is Shirley-Anne Somerville, the social justice secretary, who has welcomed the Home Office shelving the Cameron Barracks idea. For the SNP, it is always other people who are racist; they just don’t want asylum seekers because arrangements for housing them are “unsuitable” or there is a “failure to address valid community concerns”, as Bremner put it.
Then there is the funding crisis: Glasgow’s £66 million asylum-hotel financial hole is a result of seeking to house the largest number of asylum seekers of any UK council. This has led the SNP council to threaten to “pause” future refugee arrivals in the city. But rejecting asylum seekers is not racist, Aitken insists, because it’s all Westminster’s fault. “Why don’t they house them in England?” mutter Nationalists online. But they do, or try to. The Home Office has been seeking to use Crowborough Barracks in East Sussex.
Whatever arrangements are proposed for housing asylum seekers — barracks, hotels, social housing — they seem to be unacceptable. But surely, as Swinney always says, “Scotland welcomes refugees”. Give them a civic reception, said a Highland councillor, helpfully. Then maybe they will go away.
The latest argument from the Scottish government against housing refugees in barracks is that this might attract the far right. It might induce honest Scottish chiels to start drinking the snake oil of Reform UK, support for which in England is the key reason why “social-democratic Scotland” is different to the UK, according to Swinney on St Andrew’s Day. The first minister says this north-south divide on immigration is currently the most compelling reason for Scottish independence. Scotland needs to be hermetically sealed from the contagion of Reform UK.
I don’t know if Swinney looks at the opinion polls, but those snake-oil salesmen are already here and about to get their feet under the table in Holyrood next May, according to pollsters. Concern about immigration among Scottish voters is now right up there with the cost of living and the NHS as one of the key issues in Scottish politics.
The left claim this is all because the BBC has been platforming Nigel Farage and because “racist scum” have been allowed to roam unmolested on the streets of Falkirk, Perth and Inverness. It’s not the Scottish voters, oh no. They’ve been duped.
This is nonsense. Glasgow’s sudden aversion to new asylum seekers is not because of Reform UK propaganda or Westminster parsimony but is a direct result of its own and the Scottish government’s reckless policies. Glasgow became Scotland’s only dispersal city more than 20 years ago to demonstrate its virtue and to show how nice Glaswegians are to foreigners. As indeed they are.
However, they are not quite so keen on large numbers of young undocumented men fetching up in the city demanding to be housed when the city has its own chronic homelessness problem. Yet these men, many of whom arrived on rubber boats 500 miles away, have every right to demand that the city honour its own promises to house them.
More than a decade ago Nicola Sturgeon passed a law obliging councils to give homes to all refugees irrespective of their circumstances. In England they are housed on the basis of “priority need” — in effect if they have families or health conditions. In Scotland single men have the same absolute right to a home. So unsurprisingly many hundreds of them have been trekking north to take advantage of Scotland’s open arms.
It’s no good that SNP council leaders now saying they are the wrong kind of refugees. Nor is it morally defensible to say that, och, we never really meant that we were a sanctuary city, “come all ye”. Nor can councils complain that they can’t take any more migrants because our own citizens are being crowded out of limited social housing.
These are the same arguments, in microcosm, that Reform have been making for asylum — in fact all immigration — to the UK to be “paused” pro tem. Glasgow is using Reform-lite justifications for excluding asylum seekers at the same time as calling critics of immigration racist. Of course it costs money to house the refugees of the world — that’s the whole point.
Swinney condemns some families in Inverness because they are worried about their safety when large numbers of young males from violent cultures are dumped on their doorstep. They are racists, but the SNP council is not. This isn’t just virtue signalling gone bad — it is glaring hypocrisy.
The SNP leadership has been hoisted by its own petard. It has sought to use anti-asylum racism as a casus belli for breaking up the Union. Nationalists suggest that the English are all far-right xenophobes waving flags while the Scots are full of multicultural virtue and love of migrants. They can’t cope with the reality that Scots are just as concerned for the future of their safety and their culture as people in provincial English towns.
Scots, sociologically speaking, are actually more like their counterparts in monocultural Nordic states such as Denmark and Sweden — countries that have turned militantly against immigration in the past decade. Scots have also been encouraged to value their distinct identity and culture, not least by the SNP.
The Scottish government is fooling itself if it thinks that racists have somehow hypnotised honest Scots into fearing asylum seekers. Indeed, SNP councils are doing Reform UK’s job for them. Nae fear: Scotland’s refugee crisis is entirely home-made.