Alf Dubs came to the UK on the Kindertransport, aged six, as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia; he later served as an Labour MP, minister and peer. On Thursday night another former refugee – Sagal Abdi-Wali, who fled the Somali civil war aged seven – was elected the Labour MP for Holborn. Other refugees Rita Ora (Kosovo) and M.I.A. (Sri Lanka) went on to top the charts; Ncuti Gatwa (Rwanda) played Doctor Who.
I begin with this not to make the point that refugees can go on to do great things. That’s true, but professional achievement should not be the entry price for dignity. Rather, I do so because attaching familiar names and faces to the abstract concept like “asylum” is the easiest way to emphasise that people who come to this country under horrific circumstances are, first and foremost, people. Those desperate enough to risk their lives by getting in small boats across the Channel – in large part because of reductions in safe, legal asylum routes – are frequently dehumanised using dog whistles such as “horde”, “invasion” or “fighting-aged men”. But they are human beings, with hopes and fears and ambitions. In other universes, they could be you and I.
Consider what it means, then, for a man who hopes to be chancellor of the exchequer – who would like, let’s be honest, to rise even higher – to go on television and announce he’d happily order someone to kill them. “What we are going to do, and we’re the only political party that has the courage to say this,” Reform’s Robert Jenrick told Talk TV on Monday, “is deploy the Royal Marines into the Channel. If they need to use lethal force, then they’ll be able to do so.”
This, he went on to stress, was “obviously not what we want to see happen”: what he wants is to see these people safely returned to France. How generous. If the British military were to start shooting, though, he added, “I think the problem would come to an end very, very quickly.” You brought this on yourself. Look what you made me do.
It’s worth noting that Nigel Farage today said that Jenrick was being “utterly misconstrued”, suggesting force would only be used if soldiers were fired at. “Anybody wearing British military uniform who gets fired at has the right to respond. That’s what he was saying,” Farage said.
But in any case, Jenrick’s comments have been roundly condemned: Labour chair Bridget Phillipson described the proposal as “disgusting and illegal”, adding that Reform were “dragging their own reputations and credibility into the gutter by suggesting it”. Dubs himself, frequently called upon to discuss such things, called the “horrific” proposals “totally wrong”, and noted they were against international law. (Reform, of course, does not hold with such things.)
But the most insightful response came from Louise Calvey, of charity Asylum Matters: “This meaningless clickbait is nothing new.” In a world where social media algorithms reward rhetorical violence, and even supposedly progressive parties agree that Something Must Be Done About The Crisis In The Channel, Reform has had to take ever more extreme positions to keep winning headlines. As horrific as Jenrick’s comments are, they should be understood less as a policy proposal than as the political equivalent of a toddler acting out for attention.
Even so, it is worth tracing Jenrick’s own journey in search of clues for how to prevent such radicalisation happening again. Having entered Parliament as a Conservative centrist and Remainer, he was given a job in the Home Office by his friend Rishi Sunak in 2022, ostensibly to act as a check on the more extreme Suella Braverman. There were already signs this strategy had backfired the following summer, when he ordered an asylum centre in Kent to paint over murals of cartoon characters, thus implying he thought children were fleeing to this country because it offered slightly off paintings of Goofy. That December, he quit the government altogether, on the grounds its policy on sending asylum seekers to Rwanda did not go far enough.
And last January, he was thrown out of the Tories altogether, after word reached the leadership that he was planning to defect to Reform. Speeches at last weekend’s Conservative conference made him a reliable punchline; its “Birmingham tapestry” portrayed him as a crying midget. The social media algorithm can be one path to radicalisation. But so can a career in the Home Office, and ostracisation by your former friends.
The most telling word in Jenrick’s quote, I think, is “courage”. We’re all thinking this, he seems to say. I’m just the only one with the balls to say it. But no, we are not all thinking this. It is not our lack of guts that stops us threatening to kill unarmed men for the crime of being on a boat. It is Jenrick’s lack of humanity that means he can.