 We've spoken on the last two shows about the disgrace that is the government and BBC following Nigel Farage's lead in pretending that 4,000 people seeking asylum in the UK constitutes a national. Crisis Britain receives a poultry number of refugees compared to our European neighbors not to mention countries in the developing world we talk about 11 on population of 7 million 1.5 million refugees Britain a population of 60 million and we're all freaking out because fall fall only 4,000 people coming over in dingy's the campaign to pretend this is some kind of crisis is nothing other than a big lie which the government are using to distract from the incredibly poor record on coronavirus the highest death toll in Europe. And I think that means the world actually and the deepest recession in the G7 which we're going to talk about next. But I suppose one of the things that's particularly upsetting I suppose when it comes to the discourse on migration is that there's very little pushback against this. So as we spoke about on Monday, all of the major channels are now doing live footage of people coming over in dingy's as if this is some sort of entertainment show reality TV. Not really going into the backgrounds of anyone there but looking at it as some kind of sport and the opposition party are also really not pushing back at all on the narrative that the people who are trying to get here from France coming from war zones. Many of them are a threat. So let's look at some of Labour's statements on this. They haven't been doing broadcasts themselves for a while. But yesterday, Sienna Rogers at Labour List got a statement from the shadow immigration minister, Holly Lynch. So asked for comment on migrant boat crossings. Labour's shadow immigration minister, Holly Lynch said that immigration minister's emergency visit today to France today shows the lack of grip and competence shown by the government on this issue. Today they have announced a new comprehensive action plan but have failed to reveal what that involves or when it will be enacted. We're calling on the government to urgently provide the detail and reveal why it has taken them this long to make any progress on a solution. This line was, I suppose, backed up this morning by deputy leader of the party, Angela Rainer. She tweeted, the UK has been tipped into the largest recession on record. We have the largest death rate of coronavirus in Europe. We have the Chancellor saying, help out the PM saying cut back on eating too much immigration ministers getting our borders muddled up. So here it's being presented that alongside what are genuine failures of the government, yet a failure to control coronavirus and because they spent so long sort of twiddling their fingers while the virus was running for our population, ending up having such a deep recession, they are genuine failures of this government. It's not really a failure of this government that they're letting some desperate people cross the channel to come to this country. I say letting. I mean, they haven't yet prevented it happening. So it does seem like the argument the Labour Party are taking here is completely accepting the premise of the overwhelming narrative would be presented by the mainstream media and by the Conservative Party, that the people who are coming over in these dinghies are a threat. The only problem is that the Tories aren't competent enough to stop them. That seems to be the line here. And one of the reasons this is so dangerous, actually, is because if there is ever an issue that needs to be pushed back on, it's this one. Because sadly, the British public do not have much sympathy towards people who are crossing in dinghies. People who, you know, to my mind, it should be pretty easy to create sympathy for. All you have to talk about is the background. You know, how did these people get here? Why would people risk their lives crossing the channel to get to this country if it weren't because they were fleeing somewhere much worse? Right. Let's look at a YouGov poll because most of the country don't agree with me, unfortunately. So almost half of Britons say they have little to no sympathy for the migrants who have been crossing the channel from France to England, breaking that down. 22% say they have little sympathy, 27% no sympathy, which adds up to 49%. You can see that on the left hand side of the graph. But, frankly, among Labour voters, 73% have a great or a fair amount of sympathy for the migrants crossing the channel. But, as I say, that that sympathy does not seem to have been yet expressed by anyone on the Labour front bench. Disappointing. This is really when we need political leadership, because as I say, there should be a fairly easy argument to win if anyone would dare to make it. This is the culmination of two things. It's the culmination of consistent dehumanisation and toxic narratives around migration in the media. The UN has had to intervene multiple times in order to, you know, the UN Commissioner on Human Rights has at multiple points said that, you know, the British tabloid media in particular, the representation of migration, the approach to reporting on migration is the worst in Europe. We have, you know, paid up columnists calling refugees cockroaches. We have a, you know, a deeply unethical approach to reporting on migration on the part of the media. And we can see that not just in I think the tabloid and the right wing press gets a lot of gets a lot of the stick. But the important thing is that we see it across the political spectrum and we see it in the BBC, where, you know, the filming of refugees trying to cross the channel on a dinghy of, you know, emptying their boat. We're using plastic bottles in order to stop it from sinking and you have a BBC presenter sort of showing their faces and just sort of like casually reporting on it. It's deeply unethical and it's deeply troubling. So it's a culmination of this incredibly toxic media that we have when it comes to migration, which is something that has existed for decades and decades. Something that, you know, we often talk about the Windrush generation as people who obviously are examples of, quote unquote, good migrants. But at the time that the Windrush generation came to this country, they were frequently the subject of incredibly toxic representation by the media. They were frequently made to scapegoats, but all of Britain's problems by the media. It's also the culmination of the complete failure for any kind of counter counter narrative. And unfortunately, we are seeing this happening right now in the portrayal of this as simply mismanagement or ineffective management rather than a massive violation of human rights. And I think also what worries me is what's going to come next, you know, at times. And I think I might have said this last last week or maybe the week before. But when the state feels that it is in a precarious position, it's being seen as weak. It's maybe not doing so well electorally. It's not being able to get the handles on the crisis. It will often recourse to the realm of race and migration and sort of stoking up hatred against the racialized minorities and migrants in order to portray itself as strong. And I worry that with, you know, the coronavirus crisis, with the upcoming climate crisis, with this recession and the fact that that is probably all going to be compacted by Brexit, that we are going to see the state and the media repeatedly go back to that well used tool in their toolbox, which is to whip up hatred and to scapegoat migrants for all of the issues that are being shipped, that are being faced and for the state to use migrants and to use racialized minorities as a kind of space where they can show their might as the government when they are failing, failing elsewhere. So and now I guess with with the with the fact that the Labour Party has somewhat abdicated responsibility for protecting racialized minorities or protecting migrants from this kind of crisis. It is going to be up to grassroots migrants rights movements and it's going to be up to the community stepping in to draw the boundaries of what around what can and cannot happen to those in our communities that come from migrant backgrounds or migrants themselves.