“Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown!”, a small girl was encouraged to chant through a megaphone in an anti-migrant protest in Gosport this week. It will be a nice thing for her to look back on at her 18th birthday, or at her wedding, when family and friends screen the footage of the moments that have defined her life, and made her the person she is today.
Perhaps her parents could further entertain the family and their party guests by projecting film of the dead body of the two-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015, and prompted a lot of soul-searching that seems now to belong to a different and more sentimental age. Today, the images of his dead body would doubtless provoke delight, and the warm and satisfying feeling that justice has been done.
But the shocking sight of children chanting “Let them drown!”, with the encouragement of their proud parents, will still spark anxious feelings in all right-thinking liberal Nerve readers and north London intellectual elitists, and marks a turning point in the changing social attitudes of post-Brexit Britain. The scenes are shocking not least because they have been largely unremarked upon by the rightwing press, or “the press” as I call it.
Apparently, the phrase “Let them drown”, rather than being an incitement to murder, merely represents what politicians all across the increasingly monochromatic spectrum of Westminster opinion are calling ordinary people’s “legitimate concerns”. I don’t know how we come back from this moral cliff-edge. But maybe we don’t need to. Maybe we need, like Thelma and Louise at the end of the rather marvellous Thelma and Louise musical your news-satirist-about-town was lucky enough to see at the Young Vic this week, to just slam down the accelerator and, in the interests of creating a socially cohesive society, drive off it.
It’s probably too late to regulate and counteract the unfettered social media misinformation and Russian bot propaganda that has created the climate in which children chanting “Let them drown”, and wishing a watery death on people they don’t know, coagulates into a popular meme. But what can we extract from the situation that might be remotely useful to our society? Every cloud, I believe, has a silver lining.
The RNLI have come under fire from anti-migrant activists for saving people from dying in the sea, perhaps rightly. But the RNLI remains broadly a British boon; most of the people its heroic volunteers save are British citizens, the majority of them white. Is there some way of monetising this awkward situation to benefit Britain? Perhaps, rather than saving drowning migrants outright, the RNLI should offer ordinary British people, for a fee, the opportunity to be taken out to sea on an RNLI launch to watch the migrants drown, while the RNLI heroes fail to intervene, and perhaps poke the desperate with billhooks.
Perhaps the RNLI should offer ordinary British people the opportunity to be taken out to sea to watch the migrants drown, while RNLI heroes poke the desperate with billhooks?
It is already exciting and fun to chant “Let them drown!” on land. How much more fun would it be, and how much more exciting would it feel, to see your legitimate concerns addressed by being able to chant “Let them drown!” into the wet faces of dying migrants as they actually drown in front of you? An onboard champagne breakfast option for wealthier ordinary people with legitimate concerns about immigration could help raise further funds for the RNLI to use in rescues of indigenous people pre-approved by local Reform councillors. And the money accumulated could also be ploughed back into projects to benefit the white community, such as a series of communal walk-in refrigerators where unwanted processed breakfast meats could be exchanged for vapes. Or gated-off areas of grass near the shops where dogs can just shit at will and you don’t have to pick it up. Or lunches of Guinness and oysters in private members’ clubs, for social balance.
But would it be fair that the opportunity to enjoy migrant death is disproportionately offered only to those with legitimate concerns who live near the sea? In Ancient Rome, a classical civilisation from which we still take many of our ideas about law and philosophy and orgies, the opportunity to witness the death of enemies of Roman society as a form of entertainment was offered to any citizen who could make the trip to their local arena, and this communal sense of seeing justice done doubtless helped to bind Roman society together.
All around the UK there are the abandoned ruins of Roman theatres, at Caerleon, St Albans and Chichester for example, and in the Sadler’s Wells pleasure ground in north London in the early 1800s, a vast tank was constructed that enabled ordinary people, doubtless with legitimate concerns, to witness “aquatic dramas” featuring real dolphins and faux mermen at low low prices. Would it beyond the wit of man for the RNLI to catch a selective sample of migrants in nets, and transport them to large specially built water tanks in repurposed Roman amphitheatres all round Britain, to enable those with legitimate concerns living inland to also enjoy the thrill of making children chant “Let them drown!” as migrants die in front of them; perhaps while Katie Hopkins does an alluring dance on a podium and mouthy women are beaten with crutches by disabled pensioners.
These suggestions may seem brutal to tofu-munching Nerve readers, but perhaps, if ordinary people with legitimate concerns felt those legitimate concerns were being legitimately addressed, in a way that is both spectacular and fun, we can head off a far worse fracturing of society. The only alternative is an organised effort to counter disinformation, stop malign foreign influence stirring up trouble and funding violence, and to draw a line in the sand about language and attitudes that we consider unacceptable in a civilised society. But I think it may be too late for that. So fill up the tanks, round up the migrants and let’s party! All together now! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October, and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October