Author Michael Rosen has echoed Gary Lineker’s statement about the perceived parallels between the language used around government immigration policies and Nazi Germany, while speaking on stage outside Downing Street.
The former children’s laureate quoted Lineker during a speech condemning the illegal migration bill and Suella Braverman’s rhetoric to hundreds of protesters who had marched on Whitehall.
Rosen, 76, addressed the crowd after a speech by former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who now sits as an independent MP after losing the whip.
The author of Let’s Go Bear Hunt said: “Suella Braverman stood in the House (of Commons) and talked vaguely about the connections of the people who come on the small boats and drug offences.
“Notice also Braverman’s use of the word ‘obsession’: he said he had an ‘obsession’ with planes leaving for Rwanda.
“That is precisely to soften us all to the idea that importing people into another country is legitimate, it is legal and someone in the highest office in the country, if they can have this obsession, it must be correct, legal and sane. , when in fact it is irrational.
“People have wondered, as we know, with Gary Lineker, is it the language of Germany in the 1930s?
“He used the words ‘not different,’ he didn’t say it was identical.
“There was talk then that people were inevitably or habitually criminals who had to be got rid of.”
Speaking to the Palestinian Authority news agency shortly afterward, Rosen said he attended the protest because he felt it was “very important” to show that we “support refugees” by opposing the Illegal Migration Bill.
He said: “I think this government is playing a very dangerous game, they are stoking people’s fears, particularly the fears of the outsider.
“This is a very old game of scapegoating and blaming people, vulnerable people, and saying to poor people and unhappy people: ‘The cause of your poverty and the cause of your unhappiness are these people who come in small boats’.
“This is what the government does to shore up power, they are very, very nervous that they are going to lose power.
“It was a game that was played during the 1940s, there was a word that was going around among fascists in the 1930s, a German word, ‘fremdmoral’, which means alien morality.”
In a tweet shared on March 7, Lineker, 62, described the immigration bill as “an immeasurably cruel policy targeting the most vulnerable people in language not unlike that used by Germany in the 1930s.”
The BBC temporarily took it off the air in a subsequent dispute over its fairness, but it returned to the screens on Saturday for coverage of an FA Cup match between Manchester City and Burnley.
The Illegal Migration Bill, introduced last week, states that asylum claims by refugees who arrive in the UK by unauthorized means, such as crossing the English Channel by boat, will be deemed inadmissible.