When Will We See Advertising Vans Telling the Tories to F**k Off Back to Eton?

There is just no escaping a fascistic element to such a campaign. Poor immigrants, many of them having arrived looking for sanctuary from absolute poverty, despair, and oppression at home, are victims of their circumstances, they are not the cause.

Is there no limit to which this Tory-led coalition government will stoop in its war on the poor, disabled, low waged, public sector, NHS, unemployed, and immigrants?

The latest - and up to now most vicious - wheeze from the clutch of Eton millionaires currently governing the country is the rolling out of anti immigration vans in London, exhorting those who might be in the country illegally to go home or else face arrest and deportation. These vans have been circulating in parts of the capital populated by ethnic minorities, evidence of the way immigration has become synonymous with race in Britain.

Where, for example, is the campaign to send white Australian, South African, American illegal immigrants home? There is none.

The increase in attacks on immigrants by the government with the rolling out of its recent poster campaign in conjunction with what many consider to be racist anti-immigrant vans is not only vicious, it is dangerous in that it will give added weight and impetus to the far right and inevitably blurs the line between legal and illegal immigration.

Indeed following this campaign to its logical conclusion, the next step is to fill these vans with gangs of racist thugs and have them jump out and physically attack those deemed untermenschen. If it could be shown to be a vote winner in a country where social attitudes towards the aforementioned groups that have come under assault under the rubric of austerity are increasingly shaped by the Daily Mail, who would bet against it?

Imagine if a similar campaign was conducted against British immigrants in the US, where Europeans constitute the largest constituency of illegal immigrants after Latin and Central American? People in this country would rightly be exercised by it.

There is just no escaping a fascistic element to such a campaign. Poor immigrants, many of them having arrived looking for sanctuary from absolute poverty, despair, and oppression at home, are victims of their circumstances, they are not the cause. And those circumstances - global inequality, war, and social upheaval - have been partly and actively shaped by Britain's role as a bastion of free market economic anarchy, injustice, and the projection of imperial power.

In other words, the reason they are here is because we were there and in many cases still are there. The notion that participating in the fomenting of chaos in the Global South - whether through the use of soft or hard power - will not result in a corresponding impact at home in the form of increased migration to these shores, can only be the product of ignorance.

The mass migration from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere is a direct consequence of the gross imbalance that exists between the extreme poverty of the former at the hands of the latter. Indeed a condition of the wealth of the developed world is the immiseration of the developing world. One could and would not exist without the latter.

This brutal circular relationship exists on a smaller scale within Britain itself, where for a small minority - the very demographic in whose interests the current government exists to represent, no less - austerity and recession are words belonging to a foreign language, even though it was their untrammelled greed which resulted in the near collapse of the economy in the first place.

Truly, we are living in an upside down world.

Only when we see advertising vans driving around Chelsea and Hampstead advising Tories to f**k off back to Eton or face the wrath of the people will we know that justice and sanity has returned.

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