Interwoven

I was in the supermarket when I had one of those moments where the sheer reality of globalisation struck me. I was in Mozambique, selecting a packet of Afghan sultanas, two men talking in Arabic on one side, a father speaking to his son in French on the other. I’d just bought a new pair of Havaiana flip flops from Brazil and on the sound system the Backstreet Boys blared up, music imported from America.

We live in such a border free world in so many ways, or when it suits us to get access to whatever product we want, or do any trip we fancy. At the same time there is such a toxic debate about asylum seekers and refugees arriving on UK shores and whether they should be permitted entry.

Based on wealth and the global share of resources, the only moral response to this is yes. This is even without the fact that for centuries and decades the UK has been directly implicated in the destabilising of societies and regimes all over the world. The same people who are so proud of the UK’s role in world power and dominance are often the same ones who deny the responsibility the country has to help deal with the impacts of that dominance. This view doesn’t reflect well on British ‘nationalism’.

It feels like it would take a lifetime’s work to convince some people that asylum seekers are totally desperate, not deciding to uproot absolutely everything and face extreme danger, at the drop of a hat.

The British government, if it hasn’t already achieved this, is close to painting the nation as ignorant, narrow-sighted and cruel. What a sorry state of affairs.

My next deadline is approaching on Tuesday so the evening was spent getting the document to a useful stage, and then relaxing with Netflix. In the supermarket run, for reasons that are unclear, I had chosen a box of ‘sugar-free pineapple cream cookies’. They were not half bad.