Scotland needs to escape the Tories' hostility to immigration and asylum seekers

My mother, a coalminer’s daughter, came north from England after her family migrated from County Down. I’m married into a family that fled from the ethnic troubles in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula – although my wife’s father was a Malay Tamil who was born in Kuala Lumpur and returned to Jaffna to inherit the family post office.

That’s a fairly decent hand when it comes to playing immigration bingo – famine, civil war, ethnic tensions, economic necessity, chance and pure unadulterated love. In fact, it’s a Booker Prize-winning novel if I could shake off the weekly obligations to Scottish football.

It is no great secret that I believe in the power and the emancipation of immigration and see it as a challenging but proven response to a stalled economy and to the long-term demographics of a nation.

READ MORE: The Spectator under fire for 'vile' migrant cartoon following Dover terrorist attack

I slightly tire of hearing the meek appeals for control over the levers of power that arrive as nightly mantras from the Scottish government. We need to be more assertive, demanding and angry about the corner we have been boxed into.

Immigration is a fundamental global truth – and it seems that only Scotland and a few scattered provinces around the world need the permission of a recalcitrant next-door neighbour before we are allowed to open the door.

I am very clear in my mind who shoulders the blame for this untenable situation. It is not the SNP who have inherited the compromised status quo, nor is it the Alba Party demanding greater pace to independence, nor is it the Labour Party who negotiated Glasgow as an asylum dispersal zone and brought refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the embattled Kurdish homelands to Scotland.

The problem lies with the Westminster Conservative government and the way that they manipulated Brexit by playing up to the basest racist values, stigmatising immigrants into the UK, and turning every social phenomenon from Polish plumbers to the moral panic around grooming gangs into a national anxiety.

The petrol bombing of a Dover Asylum Centre by the far-right activist Andrew Leak, a virulent racist and conspiracy theorist from High Wycombe, underlines the dark ideologies that anti-immigration politics have unlocked in the UK. The Tories must own this and not be allowed to scuttle away into history.

It gets worse. We have a Home Secretary dreaming of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda and responsible for the chaotic planning at Manston, which only last week led to a group of 11 asylum seekers being forgotten about, dumped at Victoria Station, and left to wander the streets of London in a lost and disorientated state.

Even in the midst of the blowback of the worst economic forecasts in a generation, attitudes to immigration are measurably different in Scotland compared to southern towns and cities and to the beleaguered coastal towns of the east of England.

Last week, Owen Winter, co-director of Make Votes Matter and a quantitative methods analyst at Bristol University, published a fascinating data map of attitudes to immigration across the UK. It demonstrated that, across the board, Britain is becoming more liberal about immigration, “although sceptics still outnumber enthusiasts”.

Beneath the bonnet of the data, it is clear that there is still a majority in favour of clear controls on immigration, but in Scotland and in central London, there is distinct evidence of shifting attitudes. Some values are driven by humanitarian instinct but in large parts are due to the economics of immigration, especially in areas like tourism and food processing which have been hit hard since Brexit.

As an emotionally degrading week unfolded and opponents of the Westminster government assembled in George Square, I was reminded of the righteous anger of the late Iain Banks in his last published interview as he contemplated death. “I won’t miss waiting for the next financial disaster,” he said. “Because we haven’t dealt with the underlying causes of the last one.

“Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that’s rearing its grisly head right now.”

Banks refused to go gently into that good night and in his own informal way, raged against the dying of the light.

“It’s the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, let’s blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don’t even have the vote. Yeah, it must be their fucking fault.”

More and more voices are refusing to stay silent in the face of a hostile environment. In a week when Suella Braverman described immigrant activity on the south coast as an “invasion,” Asda chair Stuart Rose told BBC Question Time: “I think we should get away from this playground talk.

“Immigration has been around for thousands of years,” he said. “Mostly, it’s economic migration because people who have got no food, no water, no education, no prospects for their children and no way to bettering themselves want to come to a better place.”

Rose said both of his parents were immigrants who came to Britain, but “they probably wouldn’t” get in today.

But righteous anger alone does not get us far. Scotland dearly needs a response at the worst possible time, when we are trapped in a constitutional straitjacket and unable to disentangle immigration from the Union.

We do not have the luxury of spectatorship, watching the unfolding chaos in the south and nodding at how better it would be if we were in charge. All of this human abomination is happening now, but it has the capacity and reach to impact Scotland for 30 years to come.

To bring the next generation of asylum seekers to Scotland in the cold winds of economic hardship will not be without its challenges. We will need a public housing strategy at the very point when resources are stretched to breaking point, committed local council leadership when the cupboard is bare, and tolerance of housing schemes at a time when our own indigenous communities are so challenged.

Nor is it realistic to imagine that independence, even on a fast turnaround, would be able to mitigate austerity and the deeply entrenched issues that a stubborn and embattled asylum process has thrown up – overcrowded centres, risks to mental well-being and concentrations of desperate people willing to take dangerous risks.

Suella Braverman pursued any rung on the Tory ladder to lift herself to a position of national visibility

Into all of this, flying in a war-like Chinook helicopter, comes the Home Secretary drifting in like a Megachiropterbat, sinister in stiletto heels and unwilling to deviate from a callous right-wing reaction to foreigners.

How do we make sense of Suella Fernandes Braverman? Named after the cynical manipulator Sue Ellen in Dallas, an immigrant herself and someone who has been privileged by education and opportunity, she has an astonishing disregard for the welfare of others.

Conniving as a student and daughter, she pursued any rung on the Tory ladder to lift herself to a position of national visibility. Sensing the winds of opportunistic change, she threw her ideological lot in with the European Research Group (ERG) – the Tory cabal that has driven Brexit like a reckless bus through British politics.

Scotland is the bystander watching as an out-of-control vehicle lurches dangerously out of control. For our own self-preservation, it’s time to get out of the way.