Monday 20 June 2016

Leave Campaign "small minded, xenophobic and inward-looking" ------- Lady Warsi

BelperStuff has been very interested in the response to the UKIP "Breaking Point" poster, one consequence being that this was a breaking point for Sayeeda Warsi who today left the Leave campaign and now supports Remain. It's not often that this blog experiences a degree of fellow feeling with a prominent Tory but the EU Referendum campaign has created some strange alliances so why should this blog be any different.
Link to Guardian article and subsequent discussion
Sayeedi Warsi - former Tory party chairperson
Leave campaign "small minded, xenophobic and inward-looking"
Lady Warsi said she hoped that the “pause” in the campaign after the killing of the MP Jo Cox would have shifted the debate to a “more measured tone .......... but when I turned on the television on Sunday morning and saw Nigel Farage defending the indefensible and Michael Gove continue to peddle lies about Turkey’s accession to the EU, that for me was a step too far,” she said, arguing that the leave campaign had become “small-minded, xenophobic and inward-looking”.
“If that is the message you run on then that is the Britain you create afterwards,” she said. Warsi cited a posted unveiled by Farage ahead of Cox’s death with the words “breaking point” over an image of hundreds of fleeing refugees, but said she was also alarmed by the rhetoric of Tory colleagues. 
In the course of this being discussed by Guardian readers this caught the eye:

We often see discussions that focus on fact checking, and those around Farage’s poster were no exception.


Farage a proud man with his poster and one brave Stronger IN demonstrator

User avatar for AjdaXX
she (Warsi) said: How is that poster even defensible? … It is perpetuating lies about who those people are.
I am from Slovenia and unlike Farage, I worked for several months with the refugees shown on the evil poster.
As far as I could find out, the photo on the UKIP poster comes from Rigonce (in Slovenia) and was shot on 25 October 2015.
Some people pointed out that there are only men on the poster, implying that a vast majority of the refugees are single men. Well, single men walk faster than women and children, hence they were always in front of the line. People with children also tend to prefer to be in less exposed places for safety reasons.
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This is the PHOTO used by UKIP.

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Here are some more photos shot in Rigonce at the same time as Farage's poster:
THIS PHOTO shows how families with children walk at the back of the line. Note the front of the line in the distance, led by police on horses.
THIS PHOTO shows quite many children also in the middle of the line.
THIS PHOTO is a close-up of some walking refugees. Not quite as scary as Farage's poster, is it.
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Evil dangerous divisive extremist demagoguery coming from Farage.
After Hungary closed its borders to the refugees, Slovenia was the first country on the Balkan route which systematically registered all refugees crossing its borders.
There were more than 400,000 refugees, of which
45% Syrians
30% Afghans
17% Iraqis
49% men
51% women and children (under 18)
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I should also add that being in front of the line made no difference. Slovenia adopted a policy to first allow families with children and vulnerable people across the border so that we could first take care of them, while single men were left to wait.

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