When Lee Anderson is quoted saying people can “fuck off back to France” we are right to be angry, but maybe not for the reasons some have given, suggests Sue Lukes. 

Why did he do it? Not necessarily because he wants to be seen as ‘working class’: we know that swearing is not the preserve of the working class, and, indeed, most working class people are understandably fairly careful about what they say in public.  Mick Lynch, one of the few working class people we see often on TV news, has too much respect for his members and his public to talk like that. 

To get attention? Almost certainly. We all remember Jess Phillips proudly alleging she told Diane Abbott to “fuck off”, although Diane herself never heard it.  Wise parents know it’s best to ignore them when they swear to get attention.

But what sort of attention and why?  Anderson is part of the cabal of far right Tories around GB News and associated groups, and although we may find so much of what they say laughable, appalling or just lies, there is a strategy here.  When an MP, the Deputy Chair of a supposedly mainstream party uses the language of street fights, surely he is encouraging exactly that?  Upping the ante, telling those already invading migrant hotels, assaulting lawyers and threatening more attacks that that may be what he wants them to do.  Anderson’s “salty language” is a signal to create more mayhem.  Why?

First, this sort of disorder creates demands for more clampdowns and authoritarian moves. Look, for example, at the Metropolitan police response to the “Oxford Street TikTok” non-riots which seem to have been a prank bigged up by the media and politicians. Police baton-charged youth,  Home Secretary Suella Braverman called for the so-called ringleaders to be “hunted down” – and no-one was arrested for shoplifting.

Second, those targeted can be blamed as the cause of the trouble: if there were no migrants there would be no violence. Of course, this is not true: migrants are just unfortunate enough to be first in the queue. But all of us who defend democracy and human rights, especially those who need those rights to survive, are in that queue.

Third, while majority public opinion is for fair treatment of migrants and asylum seekers, the media coverage of these outbursts creates the impression that there is an anti-migrant groundswell. There is not, but it does frighten those who think of showing their support openly.

Anderson’s attack was shamelessly defended by Downing Street and Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, who claimed “Anderson expresses the righteous indignation of the British people.” Of course he doesn’t.  Most people recognise these desperate attempts to use divisive rhetoric to distract people from the multiple economic, health and environmental disasters 13 years of Tory government have inflicted on the country. And when Tory talk show hosts feign mock outrage that asylum seekers are better fed than people living in poverty, who miss meals so their hungry children can eat, we should remind ourselves which government deliberately inflicted such shameful misery on the poor.

We should also remember that the majority of people seeking asylum in the UK end up living on £5.66 per day to cover almost all their needs, including food, clothing, transport and medicine. This places them more than 70% below the poverty line, with many forced to choose between food and medicines.

Anderson’s outburst is neither an authentic British nor an authentic working class articulation. It does, however, say a lot about him. He is the man who let the cat out of the bag earlier this year, when he said his party would fight the next election around “culture war issues”.

This is why Energy Secretary Grant Shapps called Labour the political wing of Just Stop Oil and demanded Labour stop members of Greenpeace from standing as election candidates for the Party. It’s important that Labour reject the Tory framing of these debates, although, sadly, when Keir Starmer describes Just Stop Oil as “contemptible”, he shows every sign of falling into the government’s trap.

Of course we don’t fall for these desperate tactics, including the notion that the ‘working class are crude’. We know we need to stay strong and united both to force a reckoning on the Tories for the calamitous damage they have wrought and to impose the radical solutions necessary to start fixing it.

But what Anderson did when he told people to fuck off went beyond this, and beyond the stoking of the “culture war”, and we must recognise and call out what he did and why.  He is whistling up the thugs.

It’s not a new tactic.  I’ll leave Gary Lineker to remind us about 1930s Germany (thank you, Gary).

Sue Lukes was an Islington Labour Councillor from 2018 to 2022 and is a writer and consultant on migration issues.

Image:  Lee Anderson MP. Source: https://members-api.parliament.uk/api/Members/4743/Portrait?cropType=ThreeFour. Author: David Woolfall, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.