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In 2003, London’s Daily Star ran a sensational story headlined Asylum Seekers Eat Our Donkeys.
The story was about how nine donkeys had been stolen from a local park in Greenwich, where they were used for children’s rides.
The belief among the Greenwich community was that they had been stolen by Somali immigrants.
The paper quoted a police source as saying: “One of the main lines of inquiry is that they may have been taken by immigrants who like eating donkey meat as a delicacy. It is no secret that we have a large African immigrant community here.”
Local residents said they were “sad” and “sickened” by the theft and the idea that people were going to eat the donkeys.
“It makes my blood boil when I hear that asylum seekers have stolen them to eat,” said one.
Just to cover their bases in case the Somali angle did not hold up, the Daily Star hinted that the culprits could also have been donkey-meat loving Slovaks, Romanians and Albanians.
Around the same time, other tabloid newspapers ran stories about east Europeans hunting and eating swans, which in British tradition are considered royal property.
The Sun, in particular, carried a story about immigrants who had been caught “red-handed, about to cook a pair of royal swans” that had been taken from a small local lake.
“The discovery last weekend confirmed fears that immigrants are regularly scoffing the Queen’s bird,” went the story.
There were many such bizarre tales circulating in British society in the past two decades as the immigrant population surged. Most remained in the realm of pub talk and afternoon tea chitchat – where they belonged – but some, unfortunately, made it into the tabloids.
These types of bizarre stories and beliefs will have provided fertile ground for the fear campaign that those advocating a withdrawal from the European Union (EU) have been running for years, culminating in last week’s landmark Brexit vote.
This is what British Prime Minister David Cameron was up against as he battled the anti-Europe tide. Defeating the Eurosceptics, or caving in to them, was always going to be a defining feature of his premiership.
A more serious and credible story doing the rounds in the week of the Brexit referendum was that the idea of asking Britons whether or not they wanted to stay in the EU was born in a Chicago pizzeria in 2012.
Apparently, Cameron, along with his chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and his then foreign secretary William Hague, were munching pizzas at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport while waiting for their flight back home (yes, he flies on ordinary planes, not special ones), when the subject came up. They had just concluded a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit and were refocusing their attention on matters domestic.
Just two years into his first term, Cameron was already eyeing re-election in 2015. But there was a problem. The Tories were in turmoil, with the primary point of division being the clamour in the back benches and the general membership for a decision on exiting the EU.
And so it came to be that at that pizzeria Cameron and his consiglieri devised a trick that would silence the Eurosceptics forever: put the matter to the British people and let the Eurosceptics be defeated by the electorate. It was a foolish gamble. Cameron had obviously not been spending enough time listening to pub talk about dirty, thieving foreigners with funny eating habits who were taking away jobs and burdening social services.
He totally misread the mood. He had surmised that, armed with the right information and perspective, UK citizens would make the intelligent decision.
Wiser heads in the Conservative Party warned him otherwise. But Cameron would hear nothing.
He genuinely believed that promising a referendum by the end of 2017 was what would win him the re-election, unite the Tories behind him, beat off the stalking right-wing parties – and even win over some anti-EU elements from Labour.
History records that he won the 2015 re-election, securing one of the biggest Tory majorities in recent history. History also records that he lost the big war – and that he was naive to believe that reason would triumph over raw emotion when it came to the EU.
No amount of bombarding people with facts about the benefits of their country being part of an interconnected world was going to triumph over emotional scaremongering.
Cameron should have foreseen that a referendum on EU membership would become a referendum on immigration. A politician with his brains should have known that primitive nationalism would take over and cause Brits to take a big backward step.
Alas, he had fallen victim to the politician’s disease of short-termism at that pizzeria.
The outcome of Cameron’s blunder should set off our own alarm bells about the dangers of unthinking nationalism. There is a thin line between nationalism/patriotism and xenophobia.
The violent xenophobic episodes that this country has experienced have been driven by nationalistic sentiments that caused us to reject those we deemed not part of us. They caused us to turn legitimate concerns about economic hardship, inequality and access to resources into reasons to hate.
We too have our myths and beliefs about foreigners. We have stories about the food they eat, the size of their genitalia, their rituals and many other things to confirm our general suspicions and distrust of them.
In the UK, they chose to sabotage their economy in the mistaken belief that this would protect them from these strange strangers who eat donkeys and braai swans. They were allowed to do so by a leadership that abrogated its responsibilities to an emotion-charged populace.
This is a point that we will hopefully never reach.
