 This summer, just like the last, the Tory government and mainstream media have put together a joint effort to generate a moral panic about asylum seekers crossing the channel. Of course, the main victims of this campaign, all based on disinformation. We've talked about that enough on this show, are migrants. But of late, there's also been another target coming under attack, the people rescuing them. In particular, Nigel Farage, now a host on GB News, has taken aim at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, whose job it is to rescue people at sea. He recently tweeted, this is the Ramsgate Lifeboat today, rammed full. Sadly, the wonderful RNILI in Kent has become a taxi service for illegal immigration to the dismay of all involved. What a state of affairs. Unsurprisingly, tweets like these have been followed by abuse, hurled at lifeboat volunteers, both online and offline. That included last week, when police were called to the charity's tower station at Waterloo Bridge in London, where a crew was verbally assaulted while reporting for duty. In response to this harassment campaign, the RNILI have released a video defending their work. Let's take a look. Baby. Two childs. Two childs. Okay. Okay, they're going home. Children. Come on, guys. Okay, watch your hands. Watch your hands. Children first. No. Back out. Don't touch. Don't touch. No. We do not judge what we're doing. We're there to save lives. We're there to help people in distress. And I think when you have witnessed that distress firsthand, it then makes you realise that you are doing the right thing. That's it. That's it. Okay. That's it. Okay, quickly. Quickly. This is CC. Okay. I'm going to lift you up. We're going to take you up there. Okay? It's okay. It's okay. Nice and slowly. That's it. Hold on. Careful. The reaction we generally get from the migrants is of relief. It's not jubilation. It's relief. Just have them on the lifeboat deck, actually praying, because they're so thankful. Just feel sick. The first job I went to that involved a channel crossing, we rescued this little girl, she was five years old, about the same size as my daughter. She was very scared and obviously exhausted, very cold, hungry. I now can't look at my daughter in her life jacket without thinking about that little girl. Living lives at sea is what the RNIs here to do and we will continue doing it. If we didn't go out to the migrant boats, would there be fatalities? Yes, there would, without a doubt. Whole families have drowned in the channel, trying to make it from France to England. It's an incredibly dangerous stretch of water and if the RNLI was not rescuing people who have made unsuccessful crossings, then many, many more people would have drowned. Alongside that video that RNLI said, we're proud of the lifesaving work our volunteers do in the channel. We make no apology for it. Those we rescue are vulnerable people in danger and distress. Each of them is someone's father, mother, son or daughter. Every life is precious. This is why we launch. The Guardian also reports that responding to accusations from Nigel Farage that it is facilitating illegal immigration. The volunteer lifeboat charity said it was very proud of its humanitarian work and it would continue to respond to Coast Guard call-outs to rescue at-risk channel migrants in line with its legal duty under international maritime law. Imagine being out of sight of land, running out of fuel, coming across incredibly busy shipping lanes when you're frightened and you don't know which direction you're going in. That is by anyone's standards distress. Our role in this is incredibly important simply to respond to a need to save lives. That was Mark Dowey, the chief executive of the RNLI. What does it say about our culture that lifeboat volunteers, people who go out into the sea to rescue people at risk of drowning, volunteers are having to actively defend themselves against harassment when all they're doing is trying to save lives. What does that tell us about Britain? It doesn't say anything good, does it? It says that the outcome of decades and decades of dehumanisation of migrants that has been part of the inherent political fabric of this country from Powell to Patel, it's been a central pillar of how the British state produces and justifies and asserts its power. Can we be surprised that after decades of that kind of ideological production that it manifests in these ways, that the fish rots from the head down and I think that, first there's two things that strike me. The fact that, I think Nigel Farage said something about that these lifeboats are being used as a taxi service for illegal immigrants. It's not relevant, but actually there's no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. But also being an undocumented person also doesn't mean that you shouldn't be cared for and shouldn't be looked after. So I don't think that that's, but it's just a kind of functional point there. But it's just their job is to save lives, but what happens when those lives are not seen as lives worth saving and I think that that is why we get to this point. And the idea is that if you are, let's face it, a black or brown person, because we aren't seeing this happening to white Australians or white Canadians. If you are black or brown and you're seen to be from outside of Britain, your life is expendable. It's to be used as a scapegoat or as cheap labor. And your assertion of your right to things like family life, like healthcare, like safe housing is not seen as an inalienable right. It's seen as a burden and a nuisance that we want to get rid of. And that logic is literally coded into our immigration system. Our legislation is literally called a hostile environment. You can't promote an immigration system that is called an immigration policy that is called a hostile environment and then be surprised when your citizens create a hostile environment for the people that you've told them is an enemy of your way of life. And I think that the fact that obviously we know that people who come to this country who are racialized outside of Britishness, we know that they receive abuse. The abuse of people who are seen to be helping them is also part and parcel of the far-right ideology, a far-right ideology that is bleeding into mainstream right wing, mainstream right and centre-right discourses. Let's not forget Theresa May having that suspicion of people who aren't deeply invested in bordering around Britain's resources, saying that if you're not a citizen of somewhere, you're a citizen of nowhere, which is a dog whistle that's actually a klaxon, basically. Let's not forget why Joe Cox was killed. It was because she was seen to care too much for refugees. And in a context where migrants and refugees are being conceptualized as enemies of the nation, then caring for those people, being sympathetic towards those people, being generous and inclusive and welcoming to those people is seen as aiding and abetting an enemy of the nation. So I think obviously it's easy to look at Nigel Farage and to look at these tweets and think, oh, my goodness, isn't it so bad that some people are so unsympathetic? But when you put it in context, you realise that this is the logical outcome of the ideological work that has been done from the top level of the British states, from the top levels of our media for decades now, it's simply just unravelling. And I think that we need to confront it head-on.