IMMIGRATION laws were often key to the promotion of racism in the UK. Developed to target those seen as “alien” to our apparent culture, these laws helped to encourage a sense of difference between white British people and those seen as problematic, as “other”. Socialists, often rightly, recognised that racism was, at least in part, something that was used to divide the working class, setting white and black workers against one another.

Today, the question of class has changed almost beyond recognition and with it immigration and the use and abuse of immigration laws has become very different. The old, class-based establishment has been replaced by a new elite that sees itself as more enlightened, global and cosmopolitan. In a strange twist of fate, it is no longer the black immigrant but the white racist Brit that has become the dangerous other.

In this new morality tale the once denoted “illegal immigrant” has been recast as a trafficked slave, a one-sidedly subjectless victim upon whom we signal our virtue. In popular culture, in British or European police dramas, for example, the trope of trafficking is relentlessly used to give a new sense of good and evil. The depravity of man is no longer embodied in the outsider but comes from within.

Expressing a sense of Western self-loathing, the modern political and cultural elites posit themselves as saviours of these faceless slaves who need to be protected from the indigenous white population and so develop laws and policies and awareness campaigns to stem the imagined tide of racism.

Demonstrating their historical illiteracy and limited understanding of how people have changed and how racism has declined as an outlook or force in society, behind closed doors, our elites talk about the “return to the 1930s”, seeing any expression of concern about immigration as a sign that the pitchforks are being sharpened and torches made ready to set alight.

Just as racism in the past was rarely expressed openly by the upper classes, today’s contempt for the masses is often veiled in talk of the “tabloid reader” or of “white van man”. In 2010 it was Gordon Brown, whose mask slipped, when he called life long Labour voter Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” behind her back, after she raised a question about immigration. Since the Brexit vote, this elitist sentiment has bubbled more noticeably to the surface.

Wrapped in the Emperor’s New Clothes of difference and diversity the moralising new elite refuse to engage with practical concerns people raise about immigration. Their apparent love of the immigrant reflects, in reality, a modern form of bigotry, a disconnected, elitist sense of fear and loathing of its own national population.