Child refugees have become pawns in a rightwing culture war

“Who could be against children joining their families?” Few questions better capture the cruelty of the Conservative government’s approach to child refugees than that posed by Labour peer Alf Dubs this week. Dubs was protesting against the government’s decision to scrap a commitment from the Brexit withdrawal agreement that allows unaccompanied child refugees to reunite with their families in Britain. The House of Lords struck down the measure on Tuesday – only for the government to promptly overturn its changes. Dubs’ question pinpointed the confusing priorities of Boris Johnson’s hard-right government: why did it pick this fight?

Related: Brexit bill passes parliament as Johnson overturns Lords amendments

The government’s position is riven with contradictions: it publicly supports protecting family reunification, but argues that including the commitment within the Brexit withdrawal bill ties its hands in EU negotiations. How can your hands be tied by something you’ve publicly supported? Vulnerable children should not be made bargaining chips, but the row over child refugees plays into a culture war that has proved a winning electoral formula for the right. Much like rightwing politicians’ tirades against international aid, which pit overseas donations against the needs of British pensioners waiting for beds in hospital corridors, the debate around child refugees fortifies a nativist narrative: (white) Britain comes first.

This message is finding a growing audience among a population that has experienced the economic hardships of austerity and absorbed its belt-tightening mantra. The populist right preys on this invented feeling of economic scarcity. While debating the issue of unaccompanied child refugees recently on Sky News, my fellow panellist, a Conservative supporter, argued the government’s priority should be housing the many deprived British children and families living in temporary accommodation.

It was a perfect example of the racialised antagonism that pits groups against one another. Having helped to plunge a fifth of the population into poverty, the right now uses Britain’s straitened circumstances as justification to attack progressives for wanting to help refugee children. This deepens the divisive rhetoric of “us” and “them”; the latter category now includes not just migrants or foreigners, but also people who are anxious to defend them.

Across the world, progressives are consumed by the question of how to dismantle this dog-whistle racism. The communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio works on political messaging designed to defeat far-right narratives. She has closely studied successful progressive campaigns, from New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s 2017 victory to Ireland’s 2018 referendum on abortion. During the 2018 US midterm elections, Shenker-Osorio worked with grassroots groups in Minnesota that were attempting to counter Republican race-baiting and immigrant-bashing. They found that messages focused only on economics weren’t cutting through. As JaNaé Bates, communications director for the Isaiah coalition of faith communities for racial and economic justice in Minnesota, has explained, some voters who wanted free healthcare, education and childcare would add: “If my Somali neighbour is going to get it [too], I don’t want it.”

Progressive groups worked with Shenker-Osorio to develop a campaign message with an inclusive narrative capable of persuading swing voters. It focused on a relatable subject: long Minnesota winters. A campaign ad, which ran on radio and online, claimed that everyone knew how to dig their neighbours out of the snow – regardless of whether they had lived in Minnesota for one year or 50. The ad concluded with a rousing message that called out the divisive rhetoric of opposition candidates: “There are lots of ways to be Minnesotan and all of them are greater than fear”.

Minnesota, previously a marginal Democrat state, wound up with resounding Democrat victories for governor, attorney general and Senate races, taking control of the state house and elected the first Somali-American, Ilhan Omar, to Congress. Its story is a lesson for the challenges facing the UK left: how to build a more inclusive version of the collective “us” and share ideas with progressive movements in other countries – which is exactly how the populist right is organising. As Shenker-Osorio says when we talk on the phone: “The right uses the same talking points everywhere, all they do is run it through a localised spellcheck.”

The alternative is to be dragged into a nativist narrative that incites division. And that’s where everyone loses, from desperate families forced to use food banks, to children living in camps far away from their families.

• Rachel Shabi is the author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands