Cameron’s Holocaust Memorial Shame

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we in the UK remember the millions who died in the Holocaust. It is the date when the then USSR’s armed forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945, one of several such liberations in the last days of World War 2 that showed the world just what had been done by those serving the Third Reich. Such events seared themselves on the consciences of entire nations.

I say, you Labour cheppies over thyah! You be jolly good plebs and let one tell a load of porkies about you! Jolly good sheow!!

What, so many asked themselves after seeing the scale of the deprivation, the callous disregard for life, the genocidal wiping out of so many millions of lives, the sheer horror of what had gone on, might have been changed for the better if they had only taken in many more of those who wanted to flee the twisted ideology of the Nazis? Could some of those deaths have been prevented? Why didn’t they realise earlier?

Many of those shamed by the discovery of camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau worked in the press: during the 1930s, the Daily Mail made a name for itself promoting Adolf Hitler and spreading panic among its readers about the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain. The Mail’s incendiary headlines were typified by “German Jews Pouring Into This Country”, to which it seems, even then, no hack was willing to put his or her name.

So when the British Prime Minster stood before the Commons today, only a few minutes after leading the House in recognition of Holocaust Memorial Day, and described those living in despair and squalor in refugee camps near Calais as “a bunch of migrants”, it was not just opposition politicians thinking Cameron might have stopped and thought first.

Indeed, Jonathan Freedland observed in a Comment Is Free piece that “No one is suggesting that the plight of those at Calais is comparable to the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. But the common thread is this. One of the lessons of the Shoah – one tirelessly urged by, for example, the Holocaust Education Trust, an organisation praised today by Cameron – is that it is all too easy to dehumanise other people, to turn them from human beings with lives and needs and hopes into a problem to be repelled”.

And it gets worse: Cameron’s use of the “bunch of migrants” phrase was not some spontaneous, off-the-cuff gesture. It had been devised deliberately, as what the Tories’ election guru Lynton Crosby terms a “dead cat”, to deflect attention from the expected furore over his next-door neighbour’s apparently unduly lenient tax deal with Google. Worse, the remark had been trialled with several Tory MPs - who liked it.

The Tories knew that today was Holocaust Memorial Day. Cameron is not stupid: he is well aware of the sensitivities involved. Yet he and his team had no compunction in using the occasion to deliberately dehumanise thousands of desperate people for a cheap laugh - and so they could sling their dead cat on the table at PMQs.

On top of that, Cameron then claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had said they should all be let into the UK regardless, which he did not. So he’s a liar as well as a shit. But he’s in power, and for the Tories, that, it seems, is all that matters.