From Theresa May to Priti Patel – a decade of cruelty. By Kamila Shamsie
In 2001, the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah published By the Sea, the story of Saleh Omar, a man who arrives at Gatwick airport as a refugee. The border official he speaks to says his parents also came to Britain as refugees, “But my parents are European, they have a right, they’re part of the family.” He goes on to say, “You don’t belong here … and we don’t want you here. We’ll make life hard on you, make you suffer indignities, perhaps even commit violence on you.”
Omar is far from unaffected, but he carries within him an important piece of knowledge: he knows that by the British government’s own rules he is entitled to asylum, and though the official might spew racist language he will have no option in the end but to stamp Omar’s passport and allow him through. As indeed he does. I have read the novel twice, 20 years apart. The behaviour of the official becomes no less appalling but, even so, I read the Gatwick scene very differently the second time around. In Priti Patel’s Britain, I was struck by how fortunate Omar was to encounter laws that are better than the people whose work it is to enforce them.....
Omar is far from unaffected, but he carries within him an important piece of knowledge: he knows that by the British government’s own rules he is entitled to asylum, and though the official might spew racist language he will have no option in the end but to stamp Omar’s passport and allow him through. As indeed he does. I have read the novel twice, 20 years apart. The behaviour of the official becomes no less appalling but, even so, I read the Gatwick scene very differently the second time around. In Priti Patel’s Britain, I was struck by how fortunate Omar was to encounter laws that are better than the people whose work it is to enforce them.....
The rotting carcass of English conservatism
(+ the certifiable lunacy of the American variety)
Mauritius formally challenges Britain’s ownership of Chagos Islands
The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell
Guantanamo
Bay- Obama's shame: The forgotten prisoners of America's own Gulag
Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the
coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up
Mohammed Hanif: The
rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise
Donald Trump's gift
to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG
