Go Back To Where You Came From (Picture: Channel 4)
Vile racists get to spout their bigotry on a new Channel 4 reality show, Go Back To Where You Came From. The show’s producers clearly felt there was not enough racism sloshing around and decided to give a platform to some more.
The show takes six “opinionated Brits” and sends half to Somalia and half to Syria. There they are supposed to see, and perhaps begin to understand, the horrors that drive people to flee their homes.
But four of them are not just people with strong opinions. It is clear from the opening scene that they are rancid racists.
Standing over the cliffs of Dover one participant declares, “What I’d do, I’d get Royal Navy to set landmines up and then any boat that comes within 50 metres of this beach, they’d get fucking blown up.”
Nathan from Barnsley thinks his children “will be going to work on a fucking camel” if the government doesn’t get a grip on immigration.
Chloe, a Tory who often appears on GB News, tells viewers that, “In 10 years’ time, Britain’s going to be full of people wearing burqas. Islam will have taken over.”
This is the kind of murderous and dehumanising language that encouraged the far right riots we saw last summer.
One group arrives in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Two people quickly condemn it as a “shit-hole” that “needs tidying up”.
When the other group arrives in Raqqa, north Syria, they drive past someone selling tomatoes and speaking in Arabic. “I thought he was a suicide bomber,” one of the group remarks.
We then find out that one participant lives in Llanelli, Wales, on the road of the proposed refugee hotel. A second says they live in a “right wing town”, where the fascist British National Party (BNP) used to hold rallies that were “just like the Euros, as big as that”.
Three of them visit a camp for internally displaced refugees in Somalia.
They meet an aid worker who used to live at a refugee camp. She explained how she travelled to the European Union. “I was taken by a smuggler. I left because many women were raped and I was violated myself. I saw what was happening in the camps.”
The aid worker talks about how many women and girls are forced to go through female genital mutilation. But in a whiplash moment, one of the male participants jokes “Why would you cut off the clit? That’s the best part.”
The group in Syria visits a family struggling to get by, living in a war-damaged building after their own home was destroyed in a mortar attack. “My dream is to have a house that is safe for me and my family,” the father says.
The children pick through the rubbish to find plastic to sell so the family can survive. Chloe immediately trivialises this suffering by remarking that at least the children were “getting an entrepreneurial kick out of it”.
Again and again, the show shifts attention away from those going through genuine horrors for years, to the British people who are simply sampling “the experience”.
People living in Syria and Somalia do not exist to be used by Channel 4 as a learning experience for racist right wingers. Or to boost the advertising revenues of TV companies.
One of the more left wing participants says at one point, “Great Britain needs to have empathy again. We have lost consideration for human beings.”
Pleas for empathy give liberal TV reviewers an excuse to defend the programme. They say no-one would watch a worthy documentaries about refugees. And no racists would watch a programme unless they had a voice in it.
And it’s good that Channel 4 is “being brave” and “trying new approaches”. But Channel 4 has a long history of controversial reality shows. Benefits Street became a byword for crass and exploitative television.
There is a world of difference between challenging racism and feeding it to boost ratings and advertising revenues.
The real obscenity of this show is that it exploits the experiences of refugees as fodder for the racists and as “entertainment” for anyone still watching at home.
