There should be no euphemisms for what happened in Portsmouth. A masked mob gathered outside a hotel because its occupants were believed to be foreign. They were wrong. The people inside were not asylum seekers. They were Pakistani teenagers who had come to Britain to play cricket.
That mistake is not merely “unfortunate”. It exposes something deeply poisonous about the climate being created by the far right: the idea that a group of brown or apparently foreign men can be treated as a threat simply because of how they look.
Imagine the humiliation and fear of being young sportsmen, representing your country, arriving at a hotel in a supposedly welcoming city and discovering a masked crowd outside because people have decided that your presence is suspicious. Their crime, apparently, was to look foreign.
This is where racist politics leads when fear is repeatedly stoked, migrants are dehumanised and every unfamiliar face is presented as evidence of some supposed national emergency. People stop seeing individuals. They see categories. They see “migrants”, “foreigners” or “outsiders”. And once that happens, intimidation begins to look acceptable.
It is particularly disgraceful when politicians respond by explaining why such behaviour is “understandable”. There can be legitimate debates about asylum policy, immigration, border enforcement and the pressures placed on communities. But none of those debates provides a licence to harass strangers, assemble masked mobs outside hotels or judge people by the colour of their skin.
And let us be clear: the fact that these men turned out to be Pakistani cricketers is not the only reason the behaviour was wrong. If they had actually been asylum seekers, the mob would still have had no justification for threatening or intimidating them.
A democratic society does not decide who deserves safety by nationality, religion, skin colour or immigration status. It certainly does not outsource public debate to balaclava-wearing crowds.
Britain can have an honest argument about immigration without surrendering its decency. Portsmouth can be angry about government policy without becoming hostile to people who look different. And politicians can acknowledge genuine public concerns without legitimising racial suspicion.
The answer to a society under strain is not more hatred, more scapegoating, or more intimidation.
It is the courage to reject racism — loudly, unequivocally and every single time it appears.
