We Come From The Land Of The Ice And Snow

There's an election coming up in Britain.  Any election means there's going to be a variety of campaign handouts to promote the parties' platforms.  Here's one from the left-leaning Labour Party that's been getting a lot of attention:

When you see that, a number of questions may occur to you.  Can a liberal party win over the centre successfully with a few highlighted promises? Will they lose the support of their base?

But probably, you're wondering what kind of a stupid campaign gives out mugs?  Whatever happened to pamphlets?  You'd think that if you were going to use any beverage vessel to win over xenophobic Britons, you'd go with a teacup.

As an aside, here are some of the other images that came up when I searched for the mug picture.  I don't know how Bieber got on there, though Google might just group all the embarrassing mug shots together.

As political strategy, it (the promise, not the mug) doesn't make sense. At a time when the Conservatives are facing a big vote split with the even-further-to-the-right UK Independence Party, Labour just needs to get its base to turn out in big numbers.  Instead this has really alienated them.

But more to the point, it's incredibly bad timing.  While Labour is trying to harness the fear of foreigners, Europe's migration problem has taken a turn for the tragic.  Europe and its constituent countries have scaled back patrols of illegal migration in the Mediterranean this year, and at the same time the situation in Libya and other parts of Africa and the Middle East have gotten worse.  The result has been a huge increase in deaths during attempts to cross the sea.

Something that's really bothered me about the coverage of the migration crisis is the way the recent history of it has been explained.  The usual story is that Europe cut-back on patrols in the hopes that the lack of a safety net for desperate, dangerous journeys in the Mediterranean would discourage attempts.

To put it in terms the locals will understand: Bollocks.  This wasn't some clever strategy to discourage migrants, it was European leaders doing the only thing they ever seem to do: ignoring a problem and hoping it goes away. Usually that just makes a few investors nervous, but this time a thousand people died.  With their economy still poor and far-right anti-immigrant parties making gains, spending money on illegal immigrants isn't popular, so they did the easy thing, whatever the results.

Europe is going to have to face the fact that its bigotry is dangerous.  Usually we think of the problem as caused by a small number of Neo-Nazis. I have no idea how prevalent they are, so I can't comment on the seriousness of that problem.  But the fact is that the mainstream fear of foreigners is beyond what you should see in a civilized society.  Of course, this is an issue everywhere, but the amount of social-acceptance of it, the quickness to scapegoat, and the number of politicians cashing in on it, is a serious problem with real consequences.