British Election Photo Ops With Children Go Awry

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/british-election-photo-ops-with-children-go-awry.html

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As campaigning intensifies before next month’s general election in Britain, candidates have been forced to respond to the U.K. Independence Party’s calls to restrict immigration, by leaving the European Union.

When he arrived Wednesday at a primary school in Heanor, in the English Midlands, Tristram Hunt, the Labour Party’s spokesman on education, might have expected a brief respite from this fractious debate. But then, as a crew from the BBC recorded the scene, Mr. Hunt asked a 10-year-old boy sitting next to him in a classroom, “Do you know who you’d vote for?”

“UKIP,” the boy replied, using the acronym for the party accused of xenophobia by its rivals and critics.

“You’d vote UKIP?” Mr. Hunt said, slightly taken aback. Perhaps not wanting to seem judgmental, the likely education minister in the event of a Labour victory added, “Very good. Why’s that?”

“Like to get all the foreigners out of the country,” the sixth grader explained.

The boy’s mother told The Daily Mail on Thursday that it was “a bit embarrassing” that video of the exchange had made him a viral star on Vine, quickly racking up nearly a quarter of a million views on a Buzzfeed reporter’s account. “When my son told me what he’d said,” she told The Mail, “I sat him down and explained it isn’t about being foreign.”

“But,” she added, “I do personally support an Australian points system, if you have something to offer the country when you are coming in that’s fair enough.”

Neither the boy nor his mother were named in British media reports.

Nigel Farage, the U.K. Independence Party leader, has repeatedly invoked Australia’s approach to immigration as a model on the campaign trail.

Britain already uses a similar points system, grading potential migrants based in part on what they might contribute to society, for applicants coming from outside the European Union. Citizens of the union, however, are free to migrate across the common market countries.

While U.K. Independence Party activists blamed misrepresentations of their views on the media, opponents of the party suggested that the boy had rightly interpreted their coded, nationalistic messaging.

The exchange came on the same day that Labour released a YouTube video documenting another recent visit by Mr. Hunt, to a temple in Harrow where the Gujarati language is taught to secondary students.

In the campaign video, Mr. Hunt said that he wanted to ensure continued support for the teaching of “a whole swath of languages vital for Britain’s future — Punjabi, Gujarati, Polish, Turkish.”

”This is where we’re going to succeed in the modern world, by being an open, trading, well-educated nation,” he added.

Mr. Hunt visited the temple’s school in the company of Uma Kumaran, a parliamentary candidate in the area, who added that learning the languages of their parents’ homelands was important for the children of immigrants as well. “You know, you’ve got your British identity, but you need to preserve your cultures and your traditions,” Ms. Kumaran said.

The viral spread of Mr. Hunt’s discussion with the boy came a week after social networks lit up with jokes about an image of a young girl reacting with apparent dismay during another classroom visit, by Prime Minister David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party.

While various comic and political motivations were ascribed to the reaction of the girl, 6-year-old Lucy Howath, a Press Association video report on the event showed that she was momentarily upset about not recalling the name of a character in the story Mr. Cameron was helping her to read.