Mick Hartley

Some problems with Banksy's rescue boat, as the complex reality threatens to swamp the parading of virtue:

The street artist Banksy has divided opinion in Italy after a rescue vessel he is funding in the Mediterranean became overloaded with migrants.

The Italian coastguard came to the aid of MV Louise Michel after it said it was unable to manouevre safely. It was towing migrants in a liferaft, along with the body of a dead companion.

The 31m ship, a former French customs patrol boat, offloaded 49 of the most vulnerable on to the coastguard ship and a further 180 to Sea-Watch 4, a larger German charity vessel.

Banksy’s decision to buy and operate the vessel has put him at the heart of Italy’s migrant crisis. The passengers taken off Louise Michel were transported to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where their presence heightened ill feeling. The island is struggling to cope with more than 1,500 migrants, with 450 arriving this weekend in a large wooden fishing boat. […]

Banksy is popular in Italy but the response to his initiative underlines how polarised the nation has become on the subject of immigration. The conservative newspaper Il Giornale accused the artist of “speaking in slogans” and failing to understand the complexity of migration.

Louise Michel, named after a 19th century French anarchist, began its first mission from the Spanish port of Burriana on August 18. Sprayed bright pink with a fire extinguisher by Banksy and featuring the image of a small girl in a lifevest holding a heart-shaped life ring, its operators have taken an aggressive approach to what they see as the culpable negligence of the EU. “The people have sat in a mix of salt water and fuel for days. It is night and European states are not doing their f***ing job,” said Lea Reisner, head of operations at an early phase of the voyage. The boat was bought with the proceeds of the sale of art and is crewed by a rescue professionals from across Europe. “She runs on a flat hierarchy and a vegan diet,” the operators said.

The artist presented the venture in a video, with images cutting from huge pleasure yachts to migrants foundering in water. “Like most people who make it in the art world, I bought a yacht to cruise the Med,” the accompanying captions say. “It’s a French Navy vessel we converted into a lifeboat because the EU authorities deliberately ignore distress calls from ‘non-Europeans’ .” The video ends with the slogan: “All Black Lives Matter.”

Claire Faggianelli, of the collective responsible for transforming the boat, said Banksy had emailed to congratulate them on the rescues.

Giovanni Orsina, professor of contemporary history at LUISS University, Rome, said he thought Banksy’s initiative would push people from Italy’s non-ideological centre towards the anti-immigrant League of Matteo Salvini. “A rich Englishman is using a foreign boat to deposit migrants in Italy. It seems perfectly calculated to deepen the gulf between rich progressives and those who suffer the consequences of their policies.”

A reader of the Giornale di Sicilia said: “It would be much better if he managed to take all the immigrants directly to England, a very civilised country with much better employment prospects.”

It's almost beyond parody: the "“All Black Lives Matter” slogan, the vegan diet and "flat hierarchy", the ship named after an obscure 19th century French anarchist, and the man himself, with a smug proclamation of his status as the uniquely moral artist – "Like most people who make it in the art world, I bought a yacht to cruise the Med". 

As a Times commenter says: "Oh no Banksy, looks like you’ve started believing your own hype mate, classic mistake . . You do graffiti not politics remember !"

I wonder why he didn't go for helping migrants crossing the English Channel. Not as dramatic or indeed as sunny as the Med, but the problem's basically the same, if on a smaller scale. And it's closer to home. Perhaps he knew what the reaction would be here….