When Nigel Farage pops up on the radio to chide David Cameron for his intemperate language about migrants, you may reasonably conclude that something ugly is going on. That’s what happened on the Today programme this morning, when Farage, asked for his response to the prime minister’s warning that a “swarm” of people wanted to come to the UK, said piously: “I’m not seeking to use language like that.”
Set aside the inconvenient fact that a couple of hours earlier the Ukip leader had told Good Morning Britain that more than once he had been “stuck on the motorway and surrounded by swarms of potential migrants” – Cameron should still pause over the fact that our most avowed nativist wants to accuse him of striking too provocative a tone.
This morning’s papers do little to dispel the sense that as the crisis in Calais unfolds, a shadow debate is being conducted. With those damn Frenchies proving inadequate to the task of securing the entrance to the Channel tunnel, headline writers and MPs alike have a solution: SEND IN THE ARMY. “The French are unable to guard against these infringements of our border,” said conservative MP Andrew Percy. “It is time we considered more radical options, including the use of the army.” Soldiers wear a uniform, move in unison, and arrive rapidly in large numbers, but funnily enough, no one has referred to them as a “swarm”.
The British army is not going to be deployed in Calais because it is a very bad idea. Even if any military presence were to be required, it would plainly be less incendiary and more practical to use French troops; in any case, it is not clear why men whose primary responsibility is to kill the enemies of the British state would be more appropriate an expeditionary force than a large contingent of police officers, for example. And the idea that the French should cheerfully accept such an incursion doesn’t stand up to the simple test of asking what Percy and his allies would say to the prospect of European soldiers marching around the streets of Dover.
When all of this is so obvious, we should at least be clear about the real reason that such a solution is proposed. When you invoke “swarms”, or warn that Britain is being “swamped”, you dehumanise migrants and present them as a faceless threat, driven by instinct, not reason, members of a frightening hive – the opposite of what happens when you call a lion Cecil. Similarly, when you talk about sending in the army with no real justification or logic, the principal effect is not to advance the debate but to adjust its parameters: to use the language of violence and hostility to signal exactly what we really think of these desperate people. The proponents of such an idea will claim that their intentions are orderliness and de-escalation, but as a matter of rhetoric – which is all this really is – we all intuitively know better. A soldier’s USP, after all, is his unique facility with a gun.
