Opinion Editorial October, 2024: Change Begins
Hotel Rwanda is a highly-acclaimed documentary/drama film from 2004 that depicts the genocide from ten years previously in that country. The actual hotel on which the film is based has one thing in common with the hotel in this month's photo — it was once used to house refugees.
Neither hotel houses refugees today. But in the case of this Holiday Inn Express in the small, former coal-industry community of Manvers in northern England, the reason is not the end of a civil war.
Change began at the hotel on August 4, 2024. On that day, it was besieged by anti-immigration protesters. Some clearly crossed the line between peaceful protest and criminal conduct.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer reacted immediately by labeling them (as well as protesters and rioters at other locations around the United Kingdom) far-right fascists. In the case of the local parliamentary constituency, Rotherham, voters had, one month previously, returned a Labour (Starmer's political party) candidate by a 15% majority. Rotherham, like many constituencies in that region of the UK, is historically a Labour stronghold of working-class voters. They tend to be politically left of center.
Starmer later changed his mind and decided they were terrorists. Many have since been brought to trial and sentenced. None has been charged with a terrorism offense. Starmer is out of touch with the people he governs. More importantly, he is guilty of the same kind of disinformation that helped ignite the situation in the first place.
Researching this month's op-ed, I spent a few days in the area during which I interviewed a few people who each personally knew someone who had protested at this hotel in August. Their portrayals were not of far-right fascists or terrorists. Instead, they described disenchanted and disenfranchised people whose perception of their country is one of economic and social decline. Their perception of refugees is one of people behaving antisocially and making no attempt to integrate into British society. If recent, online reviews of this hotel can be believed, their perception is reality.
This is hardly surprising. Travel enough and you will observe a propensity of some people to behave antisocially when they are outside their own country. The UK government has obligations to genuine asylum seekers under international law. Unfortunately, those obligations stop short of education around cultural integration. Given that some of the UK's present asylum seekers are likely from indigenous communities, such education is even more important.
On learning that repair work had recently started at this hotel, I decided to take some photographs for editorial archive. Having attached a telephoto lens to my camera, I was very careful not to trespass onto hotel property. Nonetheless, after a few minutes I was accosted by a hotel security guard. He demanded to know my identity and the reason why I was taking photographs. I was very clearly nowhere near the hotel's property nor posing any threat to the hotel's security. Yet he was accusing me of the "crime" of possession and use of a camera. His mandate for such gross overreach in the discharge of his duty surely comes from the highest level of the UK government.
"Change begins" was the motto of last week's Labour Party Conference. In fact, change began politically in the UK on August 4, 2024. But it is not the kind of change that voters had in mind when they elected Starmer as their prime minister a month before. That he knows the tools of totalitarianism is to be expected. That his alias, "two-tier Keir," would use them against his own citizens is not.
Starmer's domestic popularity is tanking in the latest polls. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau survived a no-confidence vote last week. If Starmer continues to steer the UK toward becoming a police state, I predict that he will face but not survive such a vote within the first year of his tenure.
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