Theresa May hosts a meeting in relation to the Windrush generation, with Commonwealth leaders, Foreign Ministers and High Commissioners at 10 Downing Street, London in April, 2018. Daniel Leal-Olivas/Press Association. All rights reserved.
It is
five years this summer since the Home Office commissioned a poster van reading
‘In the country illegally? Go Home or Face arrest’ to drive through the
streets of diverse areas of London, between 22 July and 22 August 2013. The vans episode was part
of a wider campaign Operation Vaken. Responding to this
as researchers, we kick-started a group research project that culminated in the
publication of the book Go Home: The Politics of Immigration Controversies.
As we wrote the final revisions to the ‘Go Home?’ book
manuscript in June 2016, the UK really did seem at ‘breaking
point’, but not in the way that MEP Nigel Farage’s Leave poster was
intended to suggest. The Brexit referendum campaign still raged, and a
remain-campaigning MP was murdered in the street by a man shouting ‘Britain
First’.
Meeting
up in the wake of the Windrush scandal and the ongoing Brexit dramas in
June 2018, and looking back on the moment of the vans in 2013, we realised we had
more questions than we had answers.
Were we really ‘shocked’ by the phrasing
of the vans at the time, or merely curious and irritated that the longstanding
violence of state racism had become so shameless and so crass? Has the Home Office backed off
from such theatrical tactics since then? If yes, do we know why? The vans have
played an iconic role in discussions of the Windrush scandal. Why? What do we
think the overall approach to Home Office communications has been since the
vans? What do we think is going on ‘on the ground’ with immigration raids? If
we were doing the project from now, what would be our focus? What, if anything,
might we revise in the light of later events?
We decided to carry on our conversation through the medium of a
chain letter over the summer to reflect on these questions. The ensuing
exchange also reflects the news events of the summer; the ongoing Brexit
shambles, the World Cup, Boris Johnson’s resignation and Theresa May’s dancing.
Letter
1: June 6, 2018
The vans marked a ramping-up of anti-immigration rhetorics; as
many noted, ‘go home’ was a common far-right slogan in the 1970s. The vans also
represent a clear example of what Shirin Rai calls ‘performance politics’:
whereby policies are implemented less for their effectiveness (the
vans only led 11 people to leave the UK voluntarily
according to the official evaluation), than for demonstrating ‘toughness’ to
citizens who are concerned about immigration and wanted to see something being
done, and generating splashy media headlines.
Screenshot: Go home or face arrest vans. Evening Standard, September 4, 2013
In using such theatrical communication tactics, the government is creating
a show for narrow audiences. They are thereby defining whose
concerns matter, and whose do not, and by extension who is included within or
excluded from the body politic. The interviews, focus groups and street survey
we carried out revealed widespread concerns within communities about how the Go
Home Vans and more generally the ‘hostile environment’ sowed hatred and
division, and made many people, including British citizens, feel they did not
have the right to be in the UK.
Five years later, the vans are back in the news again. But this
time, they’re being mentioned in
relation to the ongoing Windrush scandal. The vans have become symbols of the
cruelty and the whipping
up of anti-immigrant sentiment which mark the hostile environment.
The newspapers are filling up with the heart-breaking stories of Paulette
Wilson, Anthony Bryan, Michael Braithwaite and others.
They came to the UK as British citizens many years ago and have now found
themselves on the wrong side of a system in which NHS staff, landlords,
teachers and others are acting as proxy border agents. The term ‘hostile
environment’ itself has now become toxic; the newly appointed Home Secretary
Sajid Javid has replaced it with the euphemistic ‘compliant
environment’. So why has it suddenly become unacceptable to treat
people in this way, when for a long time it was not only acceptable, but also
seen as an easy win.
So why has it suddenly become unacceptable to treat people in this
way, when for a long time it was not only acceptable, but also seen as an easy
win for governments wanting to demonstrate toughness to voters who felt that
something needed to be done?
This shift happened very quickly; even as the news was breaking,
PM Theresa May initially
refused to discuss the situation of the Windrush generation with Caribbean
diplomats. Is it because the hostile
environment now touches a generation which was integral to the building of
Britain’s post-war welfare state (and therefore more difficult to scapegoat as
scroungers or job-stealers)? Is it because (to a limited extent) the Windrush has
become memorialised as part of Britain’s official history – and related to
this, Britain’s self-perception as fair and decent? Is it because taking away
the rights of British citizens is unacceptable but taking away the rights of
migrant workers, international students or refugees is perceived as a necessary
evil to keep immigration under control? What is crucial is how much the shift
in attitudes will be limited to compensation for the Windrush generation, or
how much it will involve a wider critique of the hostile environment.
Letter
2: June 19, 2018
Five years ago, we found when surveying attitudes to theatrical
performances of immigration control, that attitudes
were altered when actions were framed as overtly racist.
While bordering, including quite violent forms, could be assessed as tolerable
or even desirable, overt racism in the form of ‘racial profiling’ in
immigration spot-checks was not endorsed.
We might read this as indicative of the complex and contradictory
processes of bordering, race-making and contested nationalism running through
recent British histories. Whereas not so long ago the appeal of authoritarian
populism could be bolstered by the racist call for stronger borders, because
people ‘felt a bit swamped’, recent years have seen a concerted campaign to separate
discussion of immigration from that of racism. As we found, this could enable
racially minoritised groups to echo anti-migrant rhetoric,
despite the recent histories of migration among their own communities.
Yet something about the Windrush scandal has upset this
demarcation. Everyone can see the racism. The realisation that these particular
racist outcomes are a result of the intended and carefully planned impact of
immigration policy has unsettled the terms of public debate, something we must
see as an opportunity.
Jamaican immigrants welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship HMT 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury,22/06/48. Press Association filephoto. All rights reserved.In retrospect, the ‘Go Home’ vans have become a symbol of poor
judgement. The revelations of the Windrush case have led to a rapidly
increasing awareness of the hostile environment and its workings. Yet it is
those vans that are referenced repeatedly, an iconic example of Theresa May’s
political signature, at once cruel and awkward, miscalculating audience
response. So it is the vans that have become, retrospectively, the symbol of
the hostile environment and also of its failures. Not indefinite detention,
including of pregnant women and children. Not the making destitute of those
with irregular status, as a deterrent to other would-be arrivals. Not the barriers
to healthcare. Not the imposition of the role of border guarding on hauliers,
lecturers, landlords, everyone. Instead it is the crass call to ‘go home’ that
has stuck itself in our collective memories. Post-Windrush,
debate has returned to the question of who is and who is not ‘illegal’.
In our earlier work we found that participants were eager to
demonstrate that they were ‘deserving’, unlike those undeserving illegals.
Post-Windrush, debate has returned to the question of who is and who is not
‘illegal’ – with disappointing references to the necessity of
detaining/dispossessing/deporting ‘illegals’, while respecting the rights of
those who have ‘contributed’ to this country. However, as we know, the
experience of the Windrush generation reveals how easily people can become
‘illegal’, despite their entitlement to citizenship.
Instead of assuming a stable terrain of status, value, empathy –
with clear demarcations between the allegedly deserving and undeserving – it
might be helpful to consider the fragility of bordering endeavours. Despite
decades of increasingly rabid anti-migrant rhetoric from both mainstream and
far-right parties and sections of the popular media, the Windrush scandal
reveals the fragility of the consensus around bordering practices.
The failures that led to the abandonment of the children of
Windrush link to other narratives underlying popular distrust of public
institutions – unwieldy and opaque bureaucracies, unaccountable elites or
experts who mess up the lives of ordinary people with their meddling,
contradictory or meaningless instructions, impossible and incomprehensible
paperwork.
Sympathy for children of Windrush could be seen as the human face
of Brexit consciousness. Could this become one trigger, among others such as
Grenfell, for an alternative progressive populism? Or does the authoritarian
under-belly of populism make this too risky?
Letter
3: June 27, 2018
The Windrush scandal is one rooted in
decades of the repositioning of this group of people from natural citizens to
not only undeserving but deportable. This started shortly after they arrived,
with the 1971 Immigration Act
stripping away any natural claims as British Commonwealth citizens, redefining the
Windrush generation as immigrants with the right to remain indefinitely but
with this only officially granted to those who could pay the then high price of
completing the application process. In terms of daily life, this was largely
unproblematic.
Andria Marsh holding a photo of her parents, who arrived on the Windrush, after the service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, London to mark the 70th anniversary,June 2018. Victoria Jones/Press Association. All rights reserved.However, with the hardening of Home Office
policy over the last six years, and legal changes to immigration law that
occurred around the same time and since then, all that has changed. The
Windrush Generation became subject to the long arm of border control. With
bodies such as the Department of Work and Pensions, the NHS, educational institutions, banks as well as employers
and landlords now
charged with carrying out checks on people’s citizenship and right to live in
the UK, now aged Caribbean men and women are being repositioned as undeserving
of the privileges and opportunities afforded to British citizens – if they
cannot provide documentation for every year that
they’ve lived in the UK as proof of their long-term residency. As invited
citizens from the Caribbean, the Windrush scandal revealed the coming to life
of the fascist slogan that was a common microaggression many generations of people
have faced for decades: ‘Go Home. Go back to where you belong’. A common microaggression many generations of people
have faced for decades: ‘Go Home. Go back to where you belong’.
This raises a number of issues in terms of the study
we conducted five years ago.
Did we get it wrong when we said that
there had been a notable hardening of Home Office policy? Has not the
immigration policy, practice and legal framing in the UK of those from once
colonised spaces always been at best tolerant?
Or is it the theatrics, the
performance and modes of control that have become more notable, not least in
the context of what Imogen Tyler refers
to as the ‘authoritarian turn’ taking place in contemporary Europe? Was the
slogan used in the government-sponsored campaign from which the study was
based, the rallying cry of this resurgent form of social control?
Tyler’s work speaks of deportation as
a mode of control that has been increasingly used to remove those deemed
deportable. Our study revealed fears among some of the children of those who
came from the Caribbean (as well as from Africa and Asia) about how the increasing
hostile environment would impact other groups.
This has indeed become the case. What
the Windrush scandal reveals is both the normalising of the hostile
environment, and the flexibility of its desirability testing and deportation
regimes in at once being seen as acceptable (for some groups) and deplorable
(for others). The Windrush scandal is one instance when such regimes were
deemed deplorable. The inability to separate these regimes from their racialised
anchoring was something that – as we saw from the UK Government very fast back-tracking – could not be sustained.
The fact that this was also the
year of the seventieth anniversary of both the Empire Windrush arrival and the
NHS added to both the need to protest on behalf of, and celebrate the contributions
made by this group – which made the UK Government’s original tough stance even
more untenable. The disquiet also reveals the ways such dominant power regimes
constantly work to include and exclude, using those who are included to justify
in multiple ways the exclusion of others.
Screenshot: Facebook.Finally, the study we conducted revealed re/newed forms of community activism
at play. People who had never been political
or never marched, took to the streets and protested against the vans, the raids
and the profiling being done both in London and throughout the UK. Such
community-driven activism was a key element of the action against the Windrush scandal
(for example, Wales Solidarity with the Windrush Generation and their
Families, Bristol
Solidarity with the Windrush Generation and their Families) and a UK Government
petition for amnesty for anyone who was a minor that arrived in
Britain between 1948 and 1971. The petition garnered 179,952 signatures, and
the outcome of the subsequent debate was that “the Government is clear that an amnesty for this group is not
required because these people do not require amnesty: they already have the
right to remain here”.
Letter
4: July 12, 2018
Last night the English football team lost a semi-final game in the
World Cup. Apparently, this was the most-watched television
event in the UK since the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympic Games in 2012.
In the days preceding the game, national media seemed to be entirely taken over
by it – almost every guest on Radio 4’s Today programme was asked about the
game, from the Colombian ambassador to (many) childhood friends of Gareth
Southgate, the team’s manager. Three times in just over a week,
I
heard the BBC’s lead political journalists interviewing
English guests with partners from other countries about which team they or
their children would support in the World Cup as they watched it at home (‘will
you need to be in separate rooms?’). Each time it was treated jovially and
amicably but why was this reminder of the Tebbit
Test even relevant in what Southgate
himself described as a diverse ‘modern England’ represented by
his team?
Gareth Southgate and Ashley Young after the FIFA World Cup semi-final, July 12, 2018. Elmar Kremser/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Stuart Hall wrote of a ‘multicultural drift’ in Britain.
Rather than a deliberate policy of ‘multiculturalism’ (such policies
incidentally never having existed in the UK at a national level, despite the
frequent announcement of their failure), multicultural drift describes how it
simply became normal, boring even, to live with people who looked different or
came from different parts of the world. And this was represented nowhere more
prominently than in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, that
televisual event even bigger than the World Cup semi-final, which featured,
among other things, workers’ political resistance, suffragettes, the NHS – and
Empire Windrush representing the arrival of Commonwealth citizens from the
Caribbean as central to British history and identity.
This triumph of spectacular conviviality and an alternative set of
‘British values’ (of struggle, change, and interconnection) to those announced
by government as under threat, was followed only a year later by the wake-up
call of the Go
Home van.
Outside the level of spectacular communications, entrenchment of
immigration controls in law and institutional practice and indefinite detention
for administrative infractions continued. While Britain had become increasingly
cosmopolitan – in its dictionary definition of ‘familiar with and at ease in many different countries and
cultures’, it had simultaneously become more fearful, and this was embodied
nowhere more clearly than in the performance of Home Secretary/Prime Minister Theresa May.
This July 2018 week’s news seems
emblematic of where we are, five years on from the Go Home van, two years from
the Brexit vote. In Westminster and in the media establishment there is a
consensus that ‘the people’ voted for Brexit – and in doing so, rejected both
internationalism and migrants – though the result was in fact a very slender
majority of what was basically a 50/50 split, and was followed by the 2017
general election which resulted in a minority government, now dependent on
Northern Irish DUP votes while the Northern Irish border has emerged as one of
the most intractable – and for some reason, completely unanticipated –
questions about how Brexit could work.
Scotland did not vote in a majority
for Brexit, and the First Minister continues to press for a further independence referendum in the light of Brexit negotiations. There is
less than a year until the UK leaves the EU and apparent constitutional chaos, as
only this week did ‘a plan’ emerge, immediately followed by the resignation of
both the Brexit Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. But never mind, perhaps
football would be ‘coming home’ (to
England, whose media often forgets it is only part of the Britain being riven
by Brexit). What seems to be ‘coming home,’
aside from the defeated team, are the reverberations of Britain’s colonial
history.
What seems to be ‘coming home,’
aside from the defeated team, are the reverberations of Britain’s colonial
history. This can be understood as what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘postcolonial melancholia,’ the failure to properly contemplate the real history of
empire’s cruelties and loss. The result is a persistent illusion that
‘greatness’ is a birthright of ‘the British’ – and when this greatness is not
delivered for the majority of the population, a feeling of being cheated which
tends to be directed at the ‘un-British’. In recent politics, this has been
channelled into the problems of capitalist scarcity and competition,
re-enforced by austerity policies, being blamed on the shadowy figure of
‘immigration’. This is also a gendered melancholia, one expression of it
exploding after World Cup defeats in increased domestic violence.
It is notable that in his
resignation letter, the Foreign Secretary claimed that the current Brexit
‘plan’ means the UK is ‘truly headed
for the status of colony – and many
will struggle to see the economic or political advantages of that particular
arrangement’. No irony was signalled from this man whose own plans for
post-Brexit Britain apparently included an ‘Empire 2.0’ in which Britain would
be ‘re-entering the Commonwealth’. There is no recognition from this self-styled
‘historian’ that
Britain’s prosperity has been entwined with that of Commonwealth countries and
their populations since British forces invaded and colonised swathes of the
world. Britain (not just the English football team) would not exist in its
current form without the violent histories of colonisation and resistance to
it. But the British Empire is no more – and it is not for the former Foreign
Secretary to grant permission to ‘enter’ or ‘leave’ those territories; Britain
has to get used to asking for permission to enter others’ homes, rather than
simply taking away others’ permission to enter Britain.
The failure to re-imagine the
various meanings of ‘home’ and how home might be shared rather than owned or
controlled, lie at the heart of the politics of contradictory nationalism which
are now playing out.
Today, the ubiquitous white flag crossed
with blood-red is being forlornly removed from cars, shops, houses and bodies;
the over-excited news anchors might remember that there is more to Britain than
England (never mind football); the replacement Brexit and Foreign Secretaries
will have to resume negotiating a reality in which ‘the public’ apparently want
to control where non-Brits call home but maintain their own rights to free
movement and trade. The World Cup will remain out in The World. And the idea of
Britain as home seems increasingly narrow for all of us who live here and make
it home, including those many of us who thought that being part of the world
was a good thing, that it was possible to make a home without bricking up all
the doors, and that part of doing so might lie in recognising and understanding
both the mistakes and triumphs of the past.
Letter 5: September 5,
2018
Picking up this chain letter at the end of the summer, the World Cup
feels like a long time ago. A brief moment of national euphoria (for some)
before a return to the realities of pre-Brexit Britain.
I am struck by the comment at the end of the last entry that ‘the idea
of Britain as home seems increasingly narrow for all of us who live here and
make it home’. The Go Home vans were both a symbol and a mechanism of this
contraction. This has made me think about the question, if we were doing the
project now, what would be our focus? ‘The idea of Britain as home seems
increasingly narrow for all of us who live here and make it home’
It does seem that there has been a move away from the spectacular
performance politics of the vans and the #immigrationoffender Home Office
tweets, but the heightened visibility of everyday bordering continues.
I have seen signs in hospital waiting rooms this summer about NHS
treatment not being available for everyone. The creeping normality of these
kinds of signs in public and the interactions that go with them between doctor
and patient, landlord and potential tenant, university administrator and
student continue to unfold. The hostile environment becoming everyday is
different to the jolt produced by the vans. As an earlier post on this chain
letter pointed out, in our research we found that people were largely accepting
of these everyday forms of bordering (as opposed to those they saw as being
based on racial profiling). Given the shift in the centre ground of politics
highlighted in the last entry on this letter, perhaps the Home Office are just
running with this seemingly more palatable bordering and the theatrics
encapsulated by the vans are no longer necessary or useful for them?
Whether the Windrush scandal and the exposure of the violence of this
more ‘quiet’ bordering means a rupture in public consent remains to be seen,
but public anger certainly seems to have lessened over the summer since we
began this exchange. It would be interesting to repeat our survey and find out
how people feel about these various forms of bordering, five years on, after
the referendum and Windrush. Meanwhile, the language of ‘go home’ continues to
feature in many reports of racist and xenophobic abuse,
post-referendum. And, Theresa May, who was the face of the hostile environment
for so long, now appears to be trying to soften her image through displays of
awkward dancing on overseas visits. Where to even start?
If we were to pick up the project, reviving the local approach that we
used would be vital. One of the strengths of our research was the ability to
move from the national scale, through the survey, to close-up local case
studies, through the interviews and focus groups that we conducted. So many
pronouncements have been made on the level of the nation about living in these
anti-immigration and post-referendum times, but to know how this impacts on
people living in particular places, their sense of who belongs, their stability
or precarity, taking a finely grained qualitative approach would be valuable.
We formed partnerships with organisations working with those most impacted by
the hostile environment. How have five more years of anti-immigration messaging
impacted on the people they work with and indeed how are those groups faring
after five more years of austerity? What do the policy makers that we spoke to
think about the changing tactics of the Home Office over this five-year period?
Letter 6: September 7,
2018
The film that we commissioned for our project in March 2015 opens with a
group of energetic and noisy women with megaphones. The women, facilitated by
Southall Black Sisters (one of our civil society partners in the research), are
disrupting an immigration raid in Southall in August 2013. What has always
struck us about this clip is the chant, ‘Here to stay. Here to fight’. The same
chant was used in pro-migrant campaigns in the 1970s and 80s and its use to
challenge an Operation Vaken raid condenses over four decades of anti-racist feminist
activism. Something about the recursive nature of racism, as well as
anti-racist activism, is uncanny about this part of the film. Are we stuck in a
political groundhog day? Have things got any better? Well, yes and no.
In the beginning of 2018, we have started to
see a more clandestine leaching of the hostile environment culture that we
began to track five years ago, this time, through the illegalising of Britain’s
cohort of post-war Caribbean labour migrants. An insidious feature of the
diffuse violence of contemporary border regimes is that border strategies,
tactics and devices are not simply anticipatory
and proactive. As the public are now seeing,
borders can also unfurl backwards in time. To put it another way, you can stay
in place and through the on-going recalibration and whittling away of
citizenship and residency rights, the border can move underneath you. In this
case, through what Will Davies has called the ‘weaponising of paperwork’. As we saw
in 2013, some of complex border affects of hostile environment policies
manifest in a creeping domesticated insecuritisation that can affect different
minoritised groups. In an interview that Hannah Jones did with a
community worker in Bradford, she was told that third generation citizens of
migrant heritage were asking ‘Are we going to be allowed to stay here?’
Although it is relatively easy to feel
pessimistic about the normalisation of hostile environment policies, the recent
Windrush cases have made visible the debilitating and slow-moving effects of
British border regimes and their entanglement with racism. Dexter Bristol, who
came to the UK aged eight in 1968 to join his mother, collapsed and died in the
street from heart failure in March 2018. His mother believed his death was caused by the
extreme stress he had been under for more than a year in trying to prove his
immigration status. Bristol was sacked from his cleaning job in 2017 because he
did not have a passport. He was not able
to claim the benefits that he was entitled to because officials did not believe
he was in the UK legally. He did not go to the NHS when his health started to
deteriorate because he believed he had no right to health care. He did not go to the NHS when his health started to
deteriorate because he believed he had no right to health care.
The coroner’s inquest into Bristol’s
death in August 2018 refused to make the Home Office an ‘interested party’ in
the hearing, recording a verdict of death by natural causes. ‘He was prepared
to fight but as the months went on and he was required to find more evidence it
became very difficult’ immigration lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie said, ‘and we saw
him just decline into a shadow of himself.’ For Sentina Bristol, Dexter’s
mother, there was little doubt about the causes of her son’s death, ‘This is
racism. He was the victim of their policies, and it is a tragedy. I’m hoping no
one will go through what I’m going though now’.
As we have pointed out, a key tenet of the political
debate surrounding Operation Vaken included attempts by the government to
separate out its hostile environment approach from racism. ‘It is not racist to
ask people who are here illegally to leave Britain. It is merely telling them
to comply with the law.’ Mark Harper, then immigration minister wrote
in the Daily Mail, in reference to Vaken. ‘By no stretch of the rational
imagination can it be described as “racist”.’ As Bella Sankey has
countered, ‘When today’s Government barks “go home”, the phrase is not an
abstract one… it’s rooted in the popular fascism of a darker period we hoped
was behind us.’
The legacy of this ‘darker period’ of British
history has become more visible with the increase in anti-migrant feelings and
racism following the June 2016 Brexit vote. In the month after Brexit, there
was sharp rise in ‘racially or religiously
aggravated’ hate crime. As events have unfolded in the past five years there has
been more dialogue about the relationships between xenophobia and racism and
longer histories of British colonialism, English nationalism and the
racialisation of distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.
It is significant that much of the hostility
whipped up by Vaken and Brexit has been on the terrain of health and welfare,
with migrants being seen as a drain on national resources and a particular
threat to the white working class. Robbie Shilliam has named these
discursive associations as a ‘nationalisation of entitlement sentiment’,
connected to ‘the historic dissolution, via the 1948 National Assistance Act,
of the formal distinction between the deserving and underserving poor.’ He goes
on to suggest that, ‘at the same time this distinction was informally
racialized so as to place the homogenised deserving “white working class” in opposition
to undeserving “immigrants” from the “new” (i.e. majority coloured)
Commonwealth countries.’ ‘We are here because you
were there…. We are the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.’
As well as challenging longstanding omissions
in thinking race and class together, these types of analysis are reinvigorating
discussions of migration. And in a variety of settings. Labour MP David Lammy’s
fiery speeches on the devastating impact of the hostile environment on Windrush
residents, mobilised Stuart Hall’s wide-ranging contributions on the
connections between Caribbean migration and colonialism. ‘We are here because
you were there…. We are the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea’,
Lammy tweeted.
Perhaps the recursive is a vital and necessary
part of political process of moving forward.
Letter 7: September 11, 2018
One
rarely discussed aspect of response to the vans is the suggestion that they
aped emotions and experiences unknown to the poster’s authors. Everything we
learned about the escapade seems to confirm this view – it was most of all an
attempt to both anticipate and echo a particular popular racist voice. To speak
as if the elite is one with a racist populace. And in this, it was as
convincing as Dick Van Dyke’s Disney cockneyisms and read as such, a mockingly
disrespectful ventriloquism.
Many
British people may have wished that their neighbours would ‘go home’ and the
aftermath of the EU referendum confirms this, including in the various attacks
on Britons of colour. But that is another thing from having the rich and
powerful put on their common voice to affirm ‘we ‘ate jonny foreigner, just
like you oiks’.
Theresa May dances as she arrives on stage to make her keynote speech at the Conservative Party annual conference, October, 2018. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved. Farage
might have got away with this, just, as a marginal figure able to laugh at his
own gaffes in the pub, but the instruments of the state cannot. If we accept
that Brexit reveals not only the entrenched xenophobia of half of the
electorate but also the exasperation with and distrust of big government,
bureaucratic mechanisms and the accountability of supposedly democratic
institutions, then the vans carry out their ill-fated local tours in the moment
just before this and the response to them anticipates popular distrust in all
and any pronouncements of the state.
We might
consider the vans as one of the last moments when centrists believed that the
rhetoric of the far right could be tamed and repurposed for their own electoral
advantage. What has come since then is undoubtedly uncertain and potentially
dangerous – giving greater space and attention to ‘real’ fascists – but it is
also a crumbling of the practices and habits of violent and violating state
racism that were shared by centre-left and centre-right. Since the Windrush
scandal, this has not been sustainable. Tory ministers have appeared on
television to decry the terrible tragedy of these events, as if their
government played no role in manufacturing these outcomes. Former ministers
from the Blair era have become scathing critics of indefinite detention, as if
such practices were not introduced under their watch. Suddenly, everyone wants
to say how much they value Britain’s black communities and their contribution,
much to the amusement of older members of the black community. Former ministers from the Blair era have become scathing
critics of indefinite detention, as if such practices were not introduced under
their watch. The
events of the last five years have whipped back the curtain, revealing the
mechanisms and impacts of state racism for all to see. The consequence is to
open political opportunities for both racists and anti-racists and to make the
disguised racisms of the time just past appear opportunistic or inauthentic or
just plain racist or, equally, perhaps not racist enough. It might be a
dangerous moment but it is a moment when the old tricks of government cannot be
repeated. And the undecidedness and uncertainty of now this minute demands that
we adjust our responses and stretch to see the opportunities and also the
extent of the new dangers.
Letter 8: September 11, 2018
With the clock ticking on Britain’s
membership of the European Union, Boris Johnson hurling out Islamophobic
metaphors on a weekly basis in pursuit of Theresa May’s job, Tommy Robinson’s
profile resurgent and constant news of nationalist successes from the
continent, there are plenty of reasons to fear that the ‘Go Home’ vans of
summer 2013 presaged a darker political future.
The letters above make for largely sombre
reading, eloquently articulating the fears and anxieties of the present
juncture. But there remains Raymond Williams’s famous question of how we ‘make
hope possible, rather than despair convincing.’ The answer may lie largely in
the activism that the previous letters describe, and with which our project
engaged. But what about the public and political mood more broadly? What signs
are there that the fixation on immigration and ‘illegals’ is waning?
While none of this is cause for complacency
or rejoicing, there are glimmering signs that the explosive force of the Brexit
referendum (which might yet result in economic depression and the break-up of
the United Kingdom) represented a peak of nationalist resentment, rather than
an accelerator of it.
As Rob Ford has explored in numerous blogposts, there is evidence in the
British Social Attitudes surveys and elsewhere that the British public has
become more sympathetic to immigration since June 2016, and that this isn’t
simply because they believe there will be less of it or more control over it. The
demographic trends are also pointing in this direction in the long-term, as
younger generations favour a more open and tolerant society, not to mention a
far more left-wing political economy.
While Leave’s referendum victory may be the
most decisive event of Britain’s post-war history, it was not (at least in
terms of probability) the most surprising one of the past five years. Between
March and June 2017, the Labour Party rose from around 28% in the opinion polls
to achieve 40% – an unprecedented turn around, that may well have been facilitated by regulations on broadcasting impartiality during election seasons.
Crucially, this involved turning around strongly pro-Leave regions (such as the
Welsh Valleys), who had been drifting towards Tories, but without having to
‘talk tough’ on immigration in the process. Astonishingly, Corbyn publicly linked
the two terror attacks during the election campaign season to Britain’s foreign
policy (a kind of truth that was presumed politically suicidal), only for polls
to show considerable public support for his analysis.
The second letter in this chain asks if the
Windrush scandal, combined with the Grenfell Tower tragedy, might become ‘one
trigger… for an alternative progressive populism’. Certainly, these harrowing
news stories have created the personalised biographies, family stories and affective
communities that are so powerful in shaping public sympathies. The risk remains
that by particularising ‘immigration’ as an issue, the division between the
‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ immigrant becomes entrenched, as if Windrush
families and recent Syrian refugees are completely different political issues.
But I think we can at least say that if some
equivalent to the ‘Go Home’ vans was being discussed in a Home Office
communications meeting tomorrow, that the risk of offending public
sensibilities would now be too great for the idea to go any further. I agree
with the diagnosis above that the vans have become a ’symbol of poor judgement’.
This is marginal progress, but we should appreciate the fact that the state has
lost confidence in a resolutely anti-immigration rhetoric. Meanwhile, Paul
Dacre will step down as editor of The
Daily Mail in November, and who knows what political and cultural
possibilities might be opened up as a result? Paul
Dacre will step down as editor of The
Daily Mail in November, and who knows what political and cultural
possibilities might be opened up as a result?
When we began the project five years ago, we
did so out of horror that a Whitehall department had signed off on an
experiment that repeated the rhetoric of the far right. As we looked more
closely at that department, signs emerged of a bureaucratic culture that was
more concerned with fire-fighting, reputation management and tracking public
attitudes than it was in dealing in facts. In that sense, we caught a glimmer
of a style of politics that has spread rapidly in the years since.
But to some extent, the upheavals of Brexit
and Windrush serve as a reality check, and the quest to appear tough, perform
toughness cannot carry on being ratcheted up indefinitely, especially as the
real injuries of the ‘hostile environment’ become plain.
The anxiety is that, beyond the limits of the state and newspapers, via online
communication channels that have been too often overlooked, the actual far
right has been thriving these past five years. Hope may lie in a nation that
comes to terms with itself at long last – the ‘coming home’ of Britain’s
colonial history that is mentioned in the fourth letter. The threat will then
lie with those who are enraged by that home-coming, and insist that others
should sooner ‘go home’ before Britain
accepts any guilt. The slogan ‘go home!’ will have migrated back to its
original context of brick walls, toilet doors and bus-shelters.