British hypocrisy is to blame for the deadly plight of migrants

It is often argued that once it became clear that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting wasn’t going to tip the United States towards adopting national gun control laws, that was the moment the gun control argument was lost for good. The equivalent moment, as far as British and European attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers is concerned, was when the body of Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey, almost five years ago.

Despite the global grief, the front pages, the renderings of Kurdi’s little body in paintings, his elevation into a symbol of a world that had lost its way, nothing happened. In fact, EU migration policies became even harsher. Last week, the British public was again moved when the body of a Sudanese migrant, Abdulfatah Hamdallah, was found on French shores, drowned after trying to make it to Britain. In the same time frame, another more fortunate migrant made it safely to Kent, and was immediately assaulted.

Related: Harsh words fly back and forth across the Channel – while refugees remain desperate

This duality lies at the heart of our attitudes towards migrants, asylum seekers and refugees: an outpouring of grief one minute, a political pummelling the next. We like to think of ourselves as kind, and touched by the tragedy of specific cases, but we do nothing beyond expressing sympathy. We are horrified by the treatment of Windrush victims, but not the hostile environment and the policies that led to the scandal. We are haunted by the desperation of people who take treacherous and fatal journeys to the UK, but many of us are complicit in their fate by voting for politicians who pledge to make those routes “unviable”.

There is something now almost performative about the expressions of solidarity, in how we regularly try to erase our cruelty towards migrants and asylum seekers by staging acts of extravagant outrage. Little demonstrates this better than last week’s Daily Mail front page that covered Hamdallah’s drowning and the deadly risks desperate Channel crossers face. “Now will we wake up to this tragedy?” asked the paper, which has printed so many anti-immigrant front pages that, strung together, they may well stretch the length of the Channel.

A subtle but really rather clever modification to Britain’s anti-immigrant politics has come about over the past few years. The language of “hostility” has quietly been ditched for that of “compliance” – the muscle-flexing of Theresa May’s Go Home vans replaced with more abstract cultural notions of citizenship and belonging. The goal is to continue to make anti-immigration policies a lucrative vote-winner but retreat from the explicit cruelty, lest it dawn on voters that they are complicit in it.

The home secretary, Priti Patel, has nailed this paradoxical position. In one breath she uses stories of racism she has experienced to humanise herself and give herself credibility, then denies that systemic racism exists in the next. She makes the right noises about the tragic death of the Sudanese migrant, then blames “criminal gangs and people smugglers” rather than the fact that Britain blocks off all safe routes to asylum. Between the Home Office and the rightwing press, there is a calculated macabre performance, in which they switch theatre masks – mouth downturned and sad one moment, grotesquely angry the next.

And it works. The British public has been successfully convinced that being anti-migrant is not unkind, but a legitimate defence of their economy and way of life. The polls display this split personality. Last week, a YouGov poll found that nearly half of the British public have little or no sympathy for asylum seekers making the desperate journey across the Channel.

Other polls over the past four years constantly bring us the apparently encouraging news that Britain’s attitude is “softening” towards immigration. That “softening” seems not to have dented the majority handed to a government that has made anti-immigration a foundational ideology. If anything, the softening is a reflection of the British public’s increasing comfort and ease with a country where the only immigrants allowed in are handpicked, vetted, wealthy and from preferred races and classes – not scrappy, dispossessed and clambering on to a beach from a dinghy.

In failing to defend this unwelcome class of migrant, the left has been decisively outflanked on immigration. Beyond the human case, it has failed to make an ethical argument and engage with the bigotry underlying voters’ “legitimate concerns”. In shying away from the language of racism or xenophobia, it has signed up to the premise that being anti-immigration is not about morality but about economics, or culture, or British people simply wanting better “controls”. That failure is part of the wider challenge to the left in a country where the right’s resounding success has been to suspend voters’ ability to connect the dots between the plight of the victims of rightwing policies and the authors of those policies; between voters’ sympathy for people in trouble and their own role in bringing it about. The “tragedy” that we have to wake up to is that so many in Britain have been convinced that in order for someone else to thrive, they must lose.

And so they express, as Patel does, “upset” at the “tragic situation”, but continue to perpetuate it. Hamdallah knew he was unlikely to survive. The day before his death, he told his cousin that he might never see him again. In his last moments, he knew his gamble had not worked. He knew the risks but took them anyway because, more than wanting to live, he wanted a life. In not granting him that, Britain is more impoverished by his death than if he had arrived safely on its shores.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent