Have you signed the petition yet?” the nurse asked me. I am generally a type of person who signs a lot of petitions whilst being cynical that they do anything at all for anyone, including the person who signs them, so I didn’t know what particular one she was referring to. “The one to get rid of Starmer!” she replied. I hadn’t heard of that one and replied that Starmer was hardly likely to listen to it anyway.
Which one of a multitude of potential reasons had inspired this petition? Another nurse, clearly exasperated at my lack of knowledge of the latest Facebook zeitgeist chimed in: “The migrants! The illegals! They’re running all over the park assaulting our kids!”
Well, this was news to me. Parks in Swansea? Yes! When did this happen? The video is on Facebook, didn’t I see it?! I’m not on Facebook. I didn’t see it on the news? Wouldn’t something like that be on the actual news? In the paper at least? A roll of their eyes meant that I clearly had been taken in by mainstream media and presumably fake news. No, the real news is all on social media, you see.
I’m not good at letting these things drop so I replied that the boats crisis they were so concerned about was caused by Brexit and the dropping of the Dublin agreement (as well as many other sensible things) and I was incensed that Farage and Reform, the people that got us into this mess in the first place, were now being held up as some sort of heroes that would sort it all out. I was clearly on the wrong side now; I could see it in their eyes. “How would you fix it then?” a third person asked me. By rejoining the EU and (I just couldn’t help it) and maybe publicly punishing Farage in order to show the EU that we were truly serious about behaving ourselves this time? Although I felt better, I know I’d persuaded nobody, so I felt worse. A sort of sickness of the soul.
On the way back from work there were two demonstrations on bridges that day. One next to the university where the national flag, the Dragon, flew alongside Palestinian flags to protest the ongoing genocide. A mile down the road, on a different bridge, the Dragon also flew alongside English flags as well as homemade flags with slogans such as ‘God Save our Kids!’ There was clearly something odd in the air.
As the week progressed, a mini roundabout nearby was spray painted with a St George’s Cross and up and down prominent roads both Welsh and British flags were being placed (sometimes the wrong way round or upside down) on various bits of random street furniture. “Isn’t it great!” a technician told me in clinic the next day. I am a proud Welshman and a patriot but this did not feel like patriotism as I understood it. Why was it great? What does it mean? “Well that we’re getting our country back of course!” he said. So, you now support national self-determination for the Welsh nation, independence? “Uh... no. That’s a terrible idea. It’s about standing up to Starmer! Telling him he can’t dump migrants here anymore!” There are no asylum hotels in Swansea though. “Oh, there are! You can’t believe what they say!”
It felt like it did right before the Brexit referendum when common sense and trust in authority went right out the window with mad conspiracy theory, gnashing of teeth and good old-fashioned xenophobia tempting us toward the brink of an awful disaster. There were even dark mutterings by otherwise sensible people of some sort of ‘race war’ that was on the verge of happening. Why does this sort of hysteria take place?
"If we relied on purely Welsh consultants to run the eyecare service I’d be the only one left to do the work"
Healthcare workers are overwhelmingly from an ethnic minority background. In our own department, if we relied on purely Welsh consultants to run the eyecare service I’d be the only one left to do the work. By and large the non-white people you meet on the streets of Swansea are likely to work in the NHS. Looking after us. Am I missing something that other people are getting or is the world actually just a seething cauldron of random illogical hate that I should just live with?
“I don’t feel safe at the moment” a colleague confessed, regarding the flags. My registrar, who’d joined me on a march from Swansea to Cardiff to protest the so-called ‘war’ in Gaza, chipped in: “I’m leaving and taking my family with me if this gets worse.” But where would you go? England seems worse than Wales with this and with Trump on the throne ruling as Emperor in America, where would be preferable? There was a sad acceptance of this and a resignation that perhaps going back to their home country would be preferable, which paradoxically is what the bridge-and-flag people seem to want.
What do we want our flag to stand for? A symbol of peace and hope that stands up for downtrodden people being killed in their own land and that fights for justice and love? Or a symbol of societal decay, division, a weird UK type of MAGAness and generalised hate? This does seem to be a crucial time to decide. The UK is stagnating, ironically in part due to the massive act of self-harm that was Brexit, and when people are poorer, longstanding divisions in society come to the fore. The eye department is a microcosm of all this. Now is the time to stand with colleagues and oppose this madness infecting our society! Happily, the St George’s Cross was scrubbed out quickly enough. Let’s do the same to deranged Facebook-inspired race war conspiracy theories. Let’s fight them wherever we see them; the beaches, the landing grounds, etc. (to paraphrase). Only then can we avoid a Reformageddon, an even worse disaster than Brexit.
