In the darkness of Calais, as the British government looks on, refugee children huddle in blankets on the ground. More than 1,000 remain in shipping containers, stranded in the demolished camp that billows with smoke. At night, volunteers had to watch over the children as people traffickers and men who exploit girls for sex stalked the site.
But are they genuine? That’s the real issue. As Conservative MP David Davies put it: “I don’t want to vilify anyone, and I would like to see genuine children being brought in, but I think we have got a right to raise this question.” We are now firmly in the politics of “the genuine”: the political and media narrative that says some people who ask for help are real and others – the vast majority – are fakes. This implication is not confined to one instance, but rather is increasingly how Britain responds to any group in need: from foreign children begging for refuge to disabled people struggling without benefits.
It showed itself back when the Conservatives began to roll out sweeping disability cuts in 2012 as government ministers and the rightwing press combined faux concern for the “vulnerable” with the claim the welfare bill was riddled with fraud and abuse. The Daily Mail reported in June how “thousands are driving off in vehicles paid for by YOU”, peddling the myth that huge numbers are faking disability in order to milk a car from the state – while declaring the scheme is meant for “genuine” disabled people.
How we tell the genuine from the fakes varies: sometimes it’s proposed dental exams or x-rays to check children’s bone density, other times it’s medical tick-box assessments to test how far the disabled can walk. But when suspicion is the default setting, the goalposts are ever shifting. A teenager can meet the requirements necessary to be approved for refugee status by the British authorities, but one look at a photo and the Sun can declare he’s “35 if he’s a day”. A disabled person can be judged as eligible for social security for life only to be retested and have it removed.
At its most manipulative, the genuine v fakes narrative can be deployed to stigmatise whole groups of individuals under the guise of trying to help them. Critics can not only introduce invasive, harmful fit-for-work testing regimes out of apparent necessity but promote obscenely callous acts – be it leaving lone children to sleep outside or sanctioning disabled people’s benefits – with the reassurance that they aren’t, of course, talking about the genuine. On the contrary, it’s all been done to ensure support goes to those who truly need it.
In reality, this line of thinking not only suggests that the people who are not genuine – say, 19-year-old refugees – don’t deserve help, it also creates a excuse to not help anyone at all. “I’d support a benefit system for real disabled people but all the scroungers make it impossible,” goes the argument. Or “I’d obviously help a refugee child, but how can we if we can’t tell who’s actually a child?”
What it is doing fundamentally is setting us against each other, introducing a poisonous paranoia into daily discourse that says we should look with suspicion at anyone who asks for help. It starts to eradicate empathy, as it is based on the premise that compassion – here, a limited good – will be saved for the few real people in need, and society has no reason or duty to care about the rest.
The consequence is that this country can now sit by comfortably as fellow human beings suffer. Crying refugee children, paraplegics, cancer patients. The first question becomes not “how can I help?” but “are they genuine?”. It is not a coincidence that the people who are being abandoned happen to be the most vulnerable: those who in any other circumstance a so-called civilised society would be the first to give help to. But rather, it’s a symptom of how rotten things have become. In the politics of the genuine, ultimately, no one is worthy of help.
