QUOTES

In one of the scenes in the programme, a White Van Man (Gary Scott) appears, standing in the middle of Europe's biggest Asian supermarket, in Southall. So as not to be heard amongst the turbans and bhurkhas and confused stares, he sidles up to the camera and begins to outline his views on immigration:

Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the State. Your Artifex, and craftsmen work our fate, and like the Jews, you eat us up as bread. Every merchant has three trades at least, and with your cut-throat selling you undo us all. We cannot suffer long. Our poor workers do starve and die.

In Chambers, twenty in one house will lurk, living far better then at native home. And our pore souls, are clean-thrust out of door.

Expect you therefore such a fatal day, shortly on you, and yours to ensue. We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying. As we do just vengeance on you all.
(Arthur Freeman, Marlowe, Kyd and the Dutch Church Libel, English Literary Renaissance 3, 1973.)

This nasty, threatening anti-immigration rant was written in 1593. It was an attack on the Huguenots, Protestant asylum seekers, fleeing a religious-cleansing programme in the Netherlands. As with today, this "Swarming" of foreign asylum-seekers was welcomed by "the Quality" but greeted with hostility by the lower orders, whose wages were being cut, jobs lost and rents forced up. Racially motivated killings and riots followed.

Later, huge numbers of French Protestants, driven-out by Catholic massacres, began to arrive, and by 1600, something like 25% of London's population was foreign-born – almost exactly the same proportion as in today's London.

For more on bigotry and the use of offensive language in today's culture, visit the Origination: Sticks and Stones website