We chuck them out at our peril.

   

Subject: We chuck them out at our peril.

As the effects of Brexit begin to gather pace, the dividing line between the right wing and the rest is brought into focus. The issue today is whether EU citizens, (which currently include ourselves), living in the UK and carrying an EU passport, would they retain common rights in the U.K., such as UK citizens currently living in Europe have reciprocal rights as a German or an Italian if they live in Germany or Italy, when we leave the EU.
As we break the ties with Europe these rights are up for negotiation. Its the governments view that we keep the 'rights issue' of people living here as a bargaining chip towards obtaining a quid pro quo for Brits currently living on the continent.
Listening the debate in the Lords one is struck by the dilemma of well minded people who grapple with their conscience, on the one hand saying that it is a fundamental measure of who we are as a nation not to allow people's lives be deemed a bargaining chip, no matter what the leverage and others who are more pragmatic.
As we descend into the dog bating Pit, setting one against the other, apparently irreconcilable in our constituent beliefs of right or wrong we reveal all the antipathy of our up upbringing. It's fair to say that the House was divided in the debate between the Liberals/Labour who were secure in their belief in the old philosophical values and the Conservatives who wished to negotiate.

Families who had come from Poland after the war, families established in this culture of ours from all corners of Europe, families of mixed nationality, children born here, are all in danger of being thrown into this bargaining pot. As a consequence it has unleashed in a small minority, that xenophobia of extreme hatred of a "them and us" emotion with people with accents and clear foreign characteristics being called out and slandered in the street.

Civilised society must never be taken for granted, it can be tipped as Germany was in the 1930s and whilst our prejudice is fine as a viewpoint we must never forget the fact that the world has changed and we are all so much more interdependent these days.
So much of our industry, our hospitals and care homes are peopled from other countries and because we have ourselves morphed into a self centred, rights centred, consumerist people, forgetting our old skills of self sufficiency and our ability to turn our hand to what ever is required, because we have come to differentiate ourselves from what others do and consider money and prestige above all else, we have become unfit to do the work of these immigrant families and we chuck them out at our peril.