Was it just the woman on the tram, or is Britain afraid of foreigners?
Posted in Social on November 28th, 2011 by Leo – 1 CommentThe appalled reaction to the racism of the woman on the Croydon tram (presumably today’s equivalent of the Clapham omnibus) suggests that such attitudes are no longer accepted in Britain. But then that reaction was expressed first and most prominently on Twitter, which is hardly representative of wider society.
Indeed it’s barely 18 months since the Mail on Sunday printed one of the most xenophobic headlines of recent years: “His wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and his spin doctor German. Is there ANYTHING British about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg?”.
The calculation was that voters wouldn’t support a leader who was tainted with foreignness. After all, this is the land where memories of the war are so prominent that a German leader’s speech to the Bundestag makes our national headlines when it taps into our fears of bellicose foreign enemies.
But two recent YouGov polls suggest that most Brits are far less suspicious of foreigners than the Mail on Sunday’s headline writers would have us believe.
A poll for Demos did find lower levels of trust for foreigners than for Brits, but overall very little outright distrust:
So while there’s more agnosticism about foreigners’ trustworthiness compared with Brits’, only 1 in 50 feel strongly that they are generally not trustworthy.
And when we look at attitudes to people in specific countries, there are very few grounds for lazy assumptions that Brits still detest Germans. In fact, more people think Germans are very trustworthy than think the same about our special transatlantic friends. Even suspicion of French people is the view of a minority: