“I’m not convinced it is all climate change,” Kay grumbled. “Or even primarily climate change. Africa and the Middle East are mostly desert, and they’ve always been desert. Those climates were abysmal even when I was a little girl. There’ve always been droughts there, and crop failures, locusts, and famines, because it’s not a part of the world that’s ever been equipped to sustain billions of people!”
“You sound as if you’ve been poisoned by the podcasts of that bitter lunatic Calvin Piper. I don’t say this about many people, but that demographer is evil.”
“I concede the codger is unsavoury, but he may have a point. As for this knee-jerk mea culpa of yours, which means we’re supposed to just sit here whilst our country is overrun—”
“Watch your language!” Cyril said.
“What am I supposed to say? ‘Whilst our country attracts an unusual number of visitors’?”
“All right. That’s better.”
“What is our fault is curing all the diseases that once kept population growth in those parts under control.”
“Enough! You’re a nurse. What’s got into you?”
“I’ll tell you what’s got into me. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are encampments and no-go areas. You can’t walk along the South Bank for all the families huddled in blankets with cups out. And it’s not only here. In Paris, they’re all along the Seine, on the bridges, around the Eiffel Tower and clumped around the pyramid of the Louvre—whose panes they’ve all smashed. In Italy, they’ve set up tents in the Roman ruins and turned the Coliseum into a homeless shelter. There’s hardly a solvent government in Europe aside from Sweden, and Sweden only barely, because they have more visitors per capita than anybody. Even you and I can barely afford one miserable sausage between us. What’s this country supposed to do with them all?”
“You don’t talk about ‘them’ as if they’re real people,” Cyril admonished.
“They’re real as sin! But just because they’re ‘people’ doesn’t mean I’m required to like having them here!”
“I’m ashamed of you. I’ve never known you to be so selfish.” Cyril had always been one of those types—why was it always men?—who was big-hearted in relation to strangers, but often pitiless with people he knew.
“Biologically, we have to be selfish to survive,” Kay said. “Blindly altruistic cultures would die out. And what’s the purpose of a country if not to protect its people? To put the interest of citizens above the interest of outsiders? Otherwise citizenship is meaningless. If the rights of inhabitants are put on a par with the rights of everyone else in the world, there is no country.”
“The purpose of a country,” Cyril said, eyes narrowed, “especially this country, is to preserve a set of values. To which the beggar-thy-neighbour policies you’re advocating are anathema.”
“So to save Britain—which according to you means rescuing our sucker values—we have to destroy it.”
“I would rather die with integrity than thrive as a savage.”
Kay arose from the table so quickly that her chair fell backwards. “You are barking! That’s the kind of empty armchair aphorism which . . . which . . . which is fatuous, and amounts to a kind of preening. What’s going on right now all over Europe is real, not a page torn from a book of lofty political philosophy, and your response is to flatter yourself. Because we’re both over a hundred bleeding years old, and it’s getting dangerous out there!”
“Understandably. Many of these asylum seekers are desperate, and they’ll do anything to feed their children.”
“Uh-huh. And what if they thumped me over the head? To feed their children?”
“I would be sorry,” Cyril said with elaborate condescension, “but I would still be able to contextualize your misfortune.”
“I ask you: is there any limit? In your mind, is there any limit to the number of visitors this country should let in—five million, ten million, fifty million? Or is it all the-more-the-merrier to you?”
“The numbers have been grossly exaggerated,” Cyril said coldly. “I cannot emphasize my concern strongly enough. I fear you’ve been contaminated by ugly, bigoted propaganda, and that’s what’s dangerous.”
* * *
Cyril was quite right about the rise of prejudice. To the horror of most Britons, who in truth had always cared more for fairness and decency than for disciplined supermarket lines, vigilante groups multiplied. From fishing vessels, these ruffians took pot-shots at overloaded dinghies in the Channel. They beat up the undefended with cricket bats and set fire to tented encampments. When not explaining why the sudden deluge of migration was all the audience’s fault, the BBC spent the abundance of its coverage of “The Great Flood” bewailing these hideous far-right attacks in ghastly detail. What few minutes remained to Newsnight thereafter were lavished on poignant stories of individual suffering and persecution amongst the new arrivals. They were gay, from countries where homosexuality was illegal. They were transgender and denied transition surgery. They were fleeing mandatory conscription, or they’d dared voice opposition to totalitarian regimes and had narrowly survived attempts on their lives. They had escaped from endless, vicious territorial wars. Most commonly, of course, they had trekked from villages that had no water and no food, having often lost family members to starvation and poor health care. The portraits were unfailingly sympathetic, and every single one of the supplicants the corporation interviewed seemed deserving of what any human being should rightly expect: safety, sustenance, and shelter. Obviously, anyone who argued that these lovely people should be turned away was a monster.
Unencumbered by this high regard for civility amongst the British mainstream, in the end the newcomers had the advantage over the violent outliers on the home team, first due to the ruthlessness of their determination to find “a better life,” and soon due to their sheer numbers—whatever those were, as the Home Office had long ago stopped even pretending to keep track, and the Home Secretary had abandoned her cabinet post and absconded, it was rumoured, to the Hebrides. For despite repeated reports that the surge had peaked, massive caravans of pedestrians, bicycles, burrows, camels, jalopies, and overloaded coaches continued to form to
