Divide and Rule

Anti-immigration tactics amount to a “divide and rule trick”, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and former professor of economics, said. He explained that the British establishment was trying to use fear of immigrants to distract from the effects of austerity.

“Lest we forget: turning the native poor against migrant labour is a variant of the old divide and rule trick that the British establishment honed ages ago to dominate the empire,” he said. “Today the establishment uses the same trick to dominate the domestic natives to hide austerity’s effects and to deflect anger towards the ‘other’ – the migrant, the foreigner.”