Op-Ed: Albania bashing is England’s new national sport
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- The anti-Albanian spectacle must end, argues David MacShane, UK's former Minister of State for Europe.
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By DENIS MACSHANE*
Have pity on poor Albania. This tiny west Balkan nation with a population the size of Greater Manchester is the new bogeyman for politicians, much of the press, and every pub wiseacre in England.
It is not just Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage. Chris Mullin, the former Labour MP and chair of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, whose Vietnamese wife worked as an interpreter for the Home Office as Vietnamese cannabis farmers in Britain were detained, tweeted that “Albanians and others fleeing safe countries need to be returned forthwith”.
It is a fair point. Other European countries seem to be able to process undocumented arrivals faster than the UK manages. As an MP I was in despair in the middle 1990s at the up to 2 years it took to process applications to stay in the UK – then mainly from Asian Commonwealth countries.
Sometimes we turn a blind eye. The end of communism in 1990 saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands East European, notably Poles, who came to Britain on a tourist visa and promptly disappeared into the informal or black cash-in-hand labour market.
The Polish diaspora in Britain helped the illegal over-stayers find accommodation and of course many Brits who would be horrified at the idea they were aiding and abetting illegal immigrants welcomed the arrival of hard working handymen, electricians, plumbers and were happy to make money renting room or flats to the 1990 generation of European immigrants who did not have papers.
So why have Albanians become a figure of such hate? In Greece, there are about 1 million Albananian immigrants, roughly half there legally and half working without documentation. They do the agricultural or construction work that modern fully-educated Greeks prefer to avoid. The Albanians are carers of elderly Greeks with dementia who can live in their own homes. They are the waiters and gyros chefs serve Europe’s best fast food to British tourists who don’t know the difference between an Albanian and a Greek.
The Kosovo Albanian refugees who fled Milosovic’s genocidal attacks like the mass murder of 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica and the Serb death squads killing Kosovan Albania villagers in 1998 and 1998 came to Britain. They opened car washes which were welcomed in every city and town. Sturdy Brits could have opened car washes but they preferred to let Albanians do the cold wet work and in exchange we got nice clean cars without the scratches of going through giant rollers in car washes of old.
In 2017, President Macron of France launched his European policy and told an audience in the Sorbonne “the EU will have to open itself up to the Balkan countries, because our EU is still attractive, and its aura is a key factor of peace and stability on our continent.”
Macron was copying Margaret Thatcher who in the 1980s was a strong advocate for opening the European Community to the post-dictatorship and very poor nations of Portugal, Greece and Spain.
Thatcher was challenged in the Commons by the new rising star of Labour, Jack Straw, at a time when Labour’s policy was withdrawal from Europe, Brexit avant la lettre. Mrs Thatcher slapped him down saying that supporting these poor countries many of whose citizens had emigrated to richer north Europe would provide an opportunity for British investment and ensure their citizens would stay at home as economic opportunities opened up.
She was right and Macron was right in 2017 to open up a European perspective to Albania. But he has not delivered. Today Albania is parked in the so-called European Political Community along with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Britain and other countries deemed to be outside the European Union single market and its wider labour market.
It is not Macron’s fault. Angela Merkel baulked at taking on German public opinion by letting the quarrelling, divided, West Balkans join Europe. As anti-Muslim prejudice rose in Europe the fact that the 2.8 million Albanians are nominally Muslim frightened continental politicians who faced pressure from anti-Muslim rightists like Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or the Swedish Democrats.
Little matter that Albanian wine is on sale in Waitrose and alcohol is served everywhere in Albania and young women in western clothes fill the streets or Tirana. Albanian soccer starts play in every major league and Dua Lipa is Europe’s number one rock star.
Boris Johnson was a strong advocate for bringing in West Balkan nations to the EU but Brexit has killed all UK influence over EU policy.
If by now Albania was on the slipway to the EU like Croatia or Slovenia or in the 1980s Portugal and Greece there would be no need for any young Albanian man to seek work in Britain. If cannabis was decriminalised as Germany is proposing British cannabis farmers would set up shop legally.
Cocaine is a different matter but it is a fashionable recreational drug for hedge fund managers, Goldman Sachs bankers, rising Tory stars of the David Cameron-George Osborne era as well as for BBC journalists, political consultants, the fashion and entertainment industry. It seems unfair to demonise Albanians for providing what many elite circles in fashionable quarters of English cities so eagerly consume.
The great Albanian scare will calm down. There are lots of measures the government could take to speed up processing of asylum claims, send home swiftly arrivals from countries without proper papers or who overstay a tourist or family re-union visa from Pakistan, India or East Africa.
But in the meantime we can all enjoy the spectacle of the British political and media class in one of its periodic fits of moralising about a new set of foreigners turning up on our shores.
*Denis MacShane is a British former politician, author and commentator who served as the UK Minister of State for Europe from 2002 to 2005.
