• MY letter of January 27 queried: “Chairman of Conservatives. Chairman of BBC. Nothing to Hide? Just Go Away?” Where are they? Surely not invited to the coronation.

For visitors to London in the past week, I hope they celebrated a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, inter-faith city.

Marginalise the riff that refugees are “cannibalising the compassion of the British people” (Robert Jenrick) and the police arresting over 50 people who hadn’t yet expressed their democratic right to protest. London owns a proud history of welcome.

One of the greatest novelists, Joseph Conrad, arrived in London in 1878. He witnessed the largest city on Earth, with its 4.5 million, “setting into its own greatness, a spider in a worldwide web of somewheres… There were no restrictions on who could come into the country: no passports or visas required, no need to prove that you had means of support…

“Nobody could be jailed merely for saying or writing something against the Establishment.

“Nobody got extradited on political grounds. Freedom turned London into Europe’s beachcomber, collecting refugees washed up by waves of political change: Poles from the insurrection of 1830-31, Germans and Hungarians from 1848, Italians who’d fought alongside Garibaldi, French radicals from the Paris Commune of 1871… patriotic pride in the country’s role as ‘an asylum of nations’, a beacon of liberty.”*

Note that Conrad’s novels are replete with people we would recognise today – xenophobic nativists, social justice activists, liberal interventionists, radical terrorists, free trade champions and anti-globalisation protesters; people struggle with displacement, alienation and opportunities in multi-ethnic environments, coping with disruptions wrought by technological changes. How to behave when old rule books are becoming obsolete? He remarked to a Polish friend: “In a free and hospitable land even the most persecuted of our race may find relative peace and a certain amount of happiness.”

This is the liberal, welcoming UK that should be promoted today, when our refugee is more likely to be a doctor than a so-called ‘scrounger’.

*Maya Jasanoff: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad In a Global World (2017).

MIKE BOR
St George’s Fields, W2