'This depressing statistic is above all the work of middle-brow press, the real gutter of the British media, with its hysterical paranoid hostility to asylum seekers.'

Steve Tomkins says that changing the name of asylum seekers will not change opinions

Names are changed all the time, usually to make a better impression on people.

Elton John changed his name because he thought “Reg Dwight” might make him sound silly – and then sang Candle In The Wind dressed as Donald Duck.

Engelbert Humperdinck changed his presumably because Arnold George Dorsey wasn’t silly enough.

Another example in the news recently is that the In dependent Asylum Commission wants to change what we call ‘asylum seekers’.

‘Asylum’, it says, has too many negative connotations for British people, and should be replaced with ‘sanctuary’. ‘Asylum seekers’ should be renamed ‘sanctuary seekers’.

Conclusions

I try not to leap to conclusions, but on this basis it seems highly likely that the In dependent Asylum Commission (why are they still called that?), for all the invaluable work that it does, has some real twits working for it.

I’m with them all the way on the basic point that people who come to the UK looking for asylum and/or sanctuary deserve a better deal.

And not the least interesting thing about this story is that according to the Commission’s research one in three of us see asylum as ‘negative’.

That is, not that the system may be open to abuse, or that unfounded claims for asylum are annoying, but that the very idea of asylum – of people coming to our country to escape persecution in their own – is a bad thing.

This depressing statistic is above all the work of middle-brow press, the real gutter of the British media, with its hysterical paranoid hostility to asylum seekers.

Not that it’s anything very new – the British public were every bit as hostile to Jewish asylum seekers from Nazi Germany.

The question is whether you can change public attitudes to a group of people by simply renaming them.

The Commission chose ‘sanctuary’ as a replacement for ‘asylum’, because in its research 81% of people found felt the word had ‘positive overtones’.

Overtones

Which overlooks the rather obvious fact that the reason it has positive overtones is that it hasn’t been applied to immigration. If it is applied to immigration, people who oppose immigration will start to feel negative about it.

There seems to be a deathless optimism here about the possibility of overcoming prejudice by inventing new vocabulary.

The Spastics Society changed its name to Scope in 1994 because ‘spastic’, though a technical term, has become such a term of abuse.

Since then, teacher friends of mine tell me that they have heard ‘scope’, ‘scopie’ and ‘scoper’ used as insults. They also report ‘challenged’, ‘special needs’, and ‘care in the community’ being used in the same way.

Creating nicer vocabulary doesn’t make kids nicer, it just gives them more ammunition. And the same goes for readers of the Daily Mail.