AS part of a work project, I’ve been researching Italian immigrants in the UK and particularly their experiences between the wars.
In World War I, Italy was an ally and many UK-based Italian citizens, who had arrived here towards the end of the 19th Century or the beginning of the 20th, served either in our armed services or that of Italy.
That they were fully integrated into British society is probably an overstatement. If there hadn’t been a low-level “othering”, it would have been harder for Mussolini to exploit their craving for a sense of national identity through the network of fasci clubs his government funded.
Still, their cafes and fish and chip shops were popular and, if some of them seemed dazzled by Italy’s strongman Prime Minister, so too was Winston Churchill, at least until the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.
In the late 1930s into 1940, though, as the homeland they had left decades before began to ally itself with Germany, the narrative shifted. Suddenly, these men and women who had lived peaceably alongside their neighbours – whose businesses were a mainstay of their communities – found themselves portrayed – by politicians, by newspapers – as shady characters: potential fifth columnists, exploiting their adopted country’s goodwill.
Here is an excerpt from the Daily Mirror in April 1940 which shows how racism was being fomented against people who, until then, had posed no problem whatsoever.
“The London Italian is an indigestible unit of population,” the journalist wrote. “He often avoids employing British labour. It is much cheaper to bring a few relations into England from the hometown. And so the boats unload all kinds of brown-eyed Francescas and Marias, beetle-browed Ginos and Titos and Marios. Every Italian colony in Great Britain and America is a seething cauldron of smoking Italian politics.”
According to writer and academic Maria Serena Balestracci, these fears were not at – at this point anyway – shared by the British public, only one in a hundred of whom, when questioned, agreed with the mass internment of aliens, which was already happening to UK-based Germans and Austrians.
And yet, such was the strength of the messaging that when Mussolini declared war, many of those cafes and fish and chip shops were stoned and looted by people who, just weeks before, had been frequenting them.
Thousands of (mostly) men were rounded up and sent, without judicial tribunal, to internment camps in the UK and abroad.
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One of the ships carrying them there — the Arandora Star — was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank not long after it left Liverpool for the US, with more than 800 of the 1,600 on board drowning, 446 of them Italians.
Some newspapers carried claims, later debunked, that the large number of deaths was due, not to the overcrowding, or to the barbed wire that had been strung along the railings, but to the Italians’ unseemly stampede to the lifeboats.
Of course, the context was very different then. The UK was at war and in a heightened state of alert. Some of those on board were members of fasci (although their allegiance was still to the UK and lots of them had sons who would go on to serve in the British Army).
Nevertheless, the rhetoric and especially the tropes – the boats spewing out their unwelcome cargo, the swarthiness of the incomers’ skins, their tendency to stick with their own – are startlingly similar.
Other newspaper stories I came across referred to the predominance of single men, who travelled to the UK ahead of their wives and children and sent their salaries home.
It is clear Nigel Farage’s scapegoating of immigrants is not an innovation, but an ugly leitmotif of history. We already know how it ends: with flag-waving protesters outside asylum seeker hotels; with ordinary people so dehumanised that their mass imprisonment and deportation is seen as their just deserts for daring to take up space on British soil.
All of which makes the Labour Party’s willingness to take on the role of Reform’s ventriloquist dummy terrifying. Every week more garbled invective spouts from mouths you can hardly believe are forming the words.
But this was a mere prelude to the black-hearted policy-making to come. As part of its plan to mend the “broken” asylum system, Cooper told us, Labour planned to suspend the reunion scheme which allows male asylum seekers to bring their families over once they have secured refugee status. Cue more women and children being bundled into the smugglers’ boats.
She also arranged for tens of thousands of foreign students to be texted and pre-emptively warned they would be deported if they overstayed their visas. Imagine having spent years studying to qualify as a doctor or a lawyer and receiving a “righto, you can f*** off now” message as a reward.
Again and again sections of the media connive in this process, allowing Farage to set new benchmarks of depravity without challenge. Thus they presented his “plan” to rip up the country’s human rights commitments and pay despotic regimes, such as the Taliban, to take asylum seekers back, as if we were in the middle of a general election campaign and this was a real, deliverable proposal as opposed to something he jotted down in the middle of the night.
With Labour apparently in the grip of some external force that precludes them from following their own principles, they are instead following Farage’s descent into Hell. They are doing this despite the fact it is demonstrably not in their own interests. They are doing it despite plummeting approval ratings. They are doing it despite the fact most people don’t actually hate their asylum seeker neighbours. They are doing it despite the likelihood that, unless they change tack, they will hand the next election straight to Reform.
They are doing it because we have allowed the pendulum to swing so far that standing up in Parliament and saying: “Actually, migration can be a force for good” has become unthinkable.
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One of the most shocking things about the Arandora Star tragedy was that many of the survivors were patched up and sent to Australia on a ship called the Dunera. One of those tasked with escorting them was a soldier called Merlin Scott who wrote a letter home condemning their treatment: “Many valuable men, I think, have been packed off,” he said.
Scott’s father was an assistant under-secretary at the Foreign Office who showed the letter to colleagues. Though concerns had already been raised by MPs, Scott’s intervention marked a turning point. By August 1940, Churchill was admitting the government should be more discerning. But by then 19,000 people of different nationalities had been interned as enemy aliens, 7,350 had been deported and hundreds had died.
After the war, most Italian internees returned to their homes and picked up the threads of their former lives. Though they carried their trauma with them, they reintegrated quickly. It is hard to bear a grudge against foreigners who are serving up the food you most want to eat. British-Italians went on to make a huge contribution to civic life.
It’s cool to be Italian now. Today’s finger of blame is pointed at other swarthy incomers, also written off as a threat both to our women and children and to the security of the country as a whole. The question is how far will the politicians go before anyone with the power to change things has the courage to say: “Enough”?
Do we have to wait until Farage is Prime Minister, and trading asylum seekers like bitcoins with the despots they fled, before anyone takes a stand?
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