I believe Britain is sleepwalking into a very dark place. All the elements are in place. Soon it may be too late to push back. As with fascism, it begins with a moral panic about stranger danger.  

Last Sunday, protestors – most of them white – turned up in Gosport, Hampshire, to express boiling hatred against people on boats and dinghies crossing over from France. Earlier, in September, a child with a megaphone shouted “let them drown” and adults joined in. How has it come to this?

Week after week, people gather in various coastal towns to shout and rage against these incomers. Places they are temporarily housed in also draw crowds full of ire. The targets remain unseen, unheard and unknown. Many of the instigators of citizen furies are far-right nationalists. Those supporting them – including a small number from minority communities – have been persuaded that boat people are terrorist invaders or worse.  

Stoic RNLI volunteers who come out to ensure the safety of those on board are abused. In Gosport, the crowd became dangerously volatile. A police officer and an emergency worker were assaulted. Police said racially aggravated offences were committed. A dozen people were arrested. That will, I fear, lead to more “patriotic” uprisings.

Meanwhile, two men, one in his thirties, the other in his forties, died while crossing overnight in a small boat. And two women were taken to hospital with burns all over their bodies. On 28 September, two women in their thirties and a 10-year-old child were believed to have been crushed to death in an overcrowded dinghy which had just left northern France. Why did they leave their own lands and take such risks? Are they now, I wonder, forever sea ghosts, unable ever to find peace? Or a place?  

Angela Rayner has spoken out with feeling about the tragedies and absence of pity in our migration “debate”.

“How can we get to the point where we dehumanise like this? Yes, we can have an argument about the criminals putting people on these boats, the legitimacy of someone’s claim. But when you’ve got a human being at risk of death, do we let them drown?”

That this question even needs asking is chilling. That some protesters have already answered “yes” is worse.

Other public figures focus on the truly evil traffickers who tempt and cheat desperate, gullible people. And then, unfortunately, demonise those who end up on dangerous journeys to nowhere.     

Shabana Mahmood, of Pakistani heritage, has carved out a reputation for herself as the hardest of Home Secretaries . At the Labour Party Conference, to placate members angry about her draconian immigration rules, she announced the reopening of a capped refugee resettlement scheme, with around a quarter of arrivals expected to be Afghan women and girls or Palestinians. But announcing a route to safety does not remove the serious obstacles facing people trying to escape Afghanistan or Gaza. How many vulnerable people will it actually help?

On The Rest is Politics podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, Mahmood claimed without providing evidence that nearly all women who arrive in the UK via small boats from northern France have been raped. She was criticising the exploitative gangs of people traffickers. But you do not get from her much understanding for the sufferings of those desperately seeking safety and life chances.

Meanwhile, far-right provocateurs roaming our streets claim men on the boats are a rape peril to “their” women and girls. Incidentally, on the website of the charity End Violence Against Women, we learn that “one in five people arrested during the 2024 anti-migrant riots have since been reported to police for domestic abuse, adding to earlier findings that two in five had already been reported for domestic abuse before the disorder took place”.

Yet those claiming to defend women and girls should confront these figures. Instead, migrants remain the target of their anger. If they have sad, bad lives, they don’t hold governments responsible. The blame falls on undocumented migrants as well as legal settlers.  

You can believe strongly that these isles are overcrowded or that the asylum system is being abused, or even that too many people of colour have been allowed to settle here. But to smear all those arriving on our shores as criminals or rapists is abominable.

Mo Farah was illegally trafficked to the UK from Djibouti. The highly respected barrister and author Hashi Mohamed came over as an unaccompanied child refugee. A lesbian from Uganda, whom I have befriended, is a foster carer, totally trusted by the local authority. The last time we met at her house, one child she had fostered came for tea with her baby. My friend was a uni student who overstayed and, thanks to a good lawyer, was saved from deportation.  

On the European Centre for Populism Studies website there is a sobering definition of neofascism. It lists authoritarianism, xenophobia and opposition to liberal democracy among its features. That is where I am terrified we are heading.

Many of those drawn to this credo are people whose old livelihoods no longer exist or who are discombobulated by globalisation. Today’s “enemies of the people” are immigrants, Muslims, progressives, feminists, educated metropolitans and cosmopolitans.

We rightly remember the Second World War, when fascism was defeated. But remembrance must mean recognising the danger of dehumanisation today. A child shouting “let them drown” should horrify us. It should also make us ask what we are becoming.