If you lay down with dogs, you get fleas.

"If you lay down with dogs, you get fleas."

That's what David Lammy said to Amber Rudd in Parliament yesterday and it has haunted me overnight. I keep hearing that sentence on a loop in Lammy's own powerful voice. It was an incredible speech and I really urge everyone to watch it - just two minutes long, but astoundingly on point and emotionally compelling.

But back to those dogs and those fleas. The dogs he referred to are the figures of the far-right and the fleas are their disgusting policies, in this case, specifically, racism and immigration-centric exclusion and hatred.

You have to hear it in his voice to get the emotional power. He's a big man yet you could feel the hurt and the pain along with the fury. It was a speech that couldn't have been given by a white man.
This is a seismic moment for us as a nation. Nothing has changed - the Windrush scandal isn't the result of a new policy - and yet, potentially everything has. Since her days in the Home Office, Theresa May has had the astonishing bravura to boast of creating a hostile environment, to send nasty vans round our streets telling people who aren't British enough for her liking to "go home". She tells the entire nation that half of us are citizens of nowhere. She has repeatedly used EU citizens as bargaining chips. I never thought to see an individual so devoid of empathy or fundamental morality occupy Number Ten.

And somehow, this all got accepted as normal, mainstream politics by our media, and by the electorate.

The hasty apologies now are almost as sickening as the vile policy itself. They are not remotely sorry for what they did. They are sorry they got held to account. If you don't agree with me, how do you explain that even this weekend, Number Ten refused an official diplomatic request to meet Caribbean leaders and discuss the situation? How do you explain that it went on for so long? I've known of these cases for months, maybe years. And if I knew, it is simply inconceivable that the Home Secretary, The Immigration Minister and the Prime Minister did not. They must have known but felt relaxed about it and happy to let it continue.

So here's my challenge to you, my patient friends and readers. Given this new insight, why should we not be more anxious about the plight of EU citizens? There are 3.5 MILLION in our country right now. Like the Windrush generation, they came legally and at our invitation. They too have contributed to building our nation, working throughout all areas of society, from the NHS to fruit picking to building and plumbing to science to the arts to bus-driving and to veterinary surgeons. They have married our brothers and sisters and they have children of their own here. They have paid taxes and pension contributions. They have volunteered with our charities and taught in our schools. And this Government will not give them simple guarantees regarding their future.

Must we wait for a Windrush equivalent scandal or can we not see Brexit now for what it is - a vomit-pool of racism and exceptionalism from the far right of politics. Can we not see where this will go? And can we not, as a country built on diversity and courage, rise up against these small-minded nobodies who have puffed themselves up with all the sham importance of bullies, and say "enough"?

Please get active in resisting Brexit and the politics of the far right. Write to your MP. March. Post about your concerns on your own timeline. Do something.

If we don't, we will all get fleas.

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