Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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СКАЧАТЬ homogeneity in this part of the world has been disrupted by migration. Except that has never been ‘how it works’: the UK, for instance, does not have a ‘white’ or monocultural history.

      This is not a country unsettled by immigration, it is one made by it. Its first inhabitants came from Southern Europe, and by the time Roman troops and their auxiliaries landed on the southern tip of England in AD 43, this was already a place of diverse traditions and languages. The population was varied; made up of people from the areas that would come to be known as North Africa, Syria, the Balkans and Scandinavia. ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here,’ writes journalist Peter Fryer in the opening to his book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.³

      Throughout the 1800s, people like black radical Chartist leader William Cuffay, businessperson and nurse Mary Seacole and Wu Tingfang, the first Chinese barrister in the UK, were among many who lived in this country. ‘There’s a myth that … pervades the public debate that migration is something that happened in Britain after 1945 or that it’s a modern phenomenon. Actually we have a long, rich and very diverse history of migration,’ historian Sundeep Lidher tells me. She is one of the architects of Our Migration Story, a website that documents the generations of migrants who have come to and shaped the British Isles.⁴

      Without detailed public knowledge of these histories, the UK’s understanding of itself will always be narrow-minded, and as Lidher points out, mythical and inaccurate. With the history of migration ‘comes a more accurate insight into our long-standing interactions and entanglements with the wider globe’, Lidher explains. We talk nearly two years after the EU referendum, but the ill-informed debate that shaped the campaigns still hangs over us; she conveys a sense of urgency and frustration that the UK’s migratory past is not better known. Imbued with nostalgia for a return to the Empire that was and is so rarely discussed in detail,⁵ the simplistic calls to ‘take back control’ of ‘our’ borders during the referendum erased a much more complex past.

      Britain has never been an independent country since it came into being in 1707, Professor Gurminder Bhambra points out. It has always been stitched together with other entities – the Empire, followed by the Commonwealth and then the EU. ‘There has been no independent Britain,’ writes Bhambra, ‘no “island nation”.’⁶

      The UK’s migration history isn’t just about Empire, but the way we talk about immigration now can’t be understood without looking back at recent UK immigration legislation and how it related to race and the colonial project. A cursory look at this country’s past suggests that, if only this history were more widely known, people might think about immigration slightly differently. It might be seen as less of a problem and more as an understandable, neutral reality. Or at the very least, it may make it easier for us to understand anti-immigration sentiment for what it is: as less of a fact of life and more as a product of history.

      Still, even when the UK’s migration histories are recognised, they’re presented as rose-tinted pictures that are predictably too celebratory an understanding of the past, fictions in which immigration plays a part, but without the resistance to and exclusions that accompanied it.⁷ In 2013, then prime minister David Cameron did just that. ‘Our migrant communities are a fundamental part of who we are and Britain is a far richer and stronger society because of them,’ he said. ‘This is our island story: open, diverse and welcoming, and I am immensely proud of it.’⁸ We do not need to look back too far into history to find a very different picture of this country and its relationship with immigration.

      In January 1955, Winston Churchill, generally lionised as a British hero, made a bold suggestion in one of his cabinet meetings. With a general election likely to happen within the year – one that he would not, in the end, contest – he tried to persuade his colleagues to adopt a campaign slogan that was similar to the rallying cry of the far right in the decades that followed. ‘Keep England White’, he suggested, would be a good message.⁹ The prime minister, who had been heavily involved in the Boer War, Britain’s bloody colonial adventures, and in creating the 1943 Bengal famine – which is estimated to have killed 3 million people – was adamant that restricting Caribbean migration was ‘the most important subject facing this country’.¹⁰ Objecting to people of colour coming to the UK, in 1954 Churchill told the governor-in-chief of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, that their presence would create ‘a magpie society’, adding ‘that would never do’.¹¹

      Churchill’s views on matters of race and migration were hardly abnormal. Before and after the 1955 election, politicians from the left and the right complained that people of colour coming to the UK would threaten the very idea of the nation and undermine Britons’ standard of living by taking jobs and housing. Immigration, how it was understood and the legislation that would be introduced to ‘control’ it, was inseparable from race and racism.

      ‘Race is something we make,’ philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah tells us, ‘it’s not something that makes us.’ Invented to control and govern populations, race has never had any biological basis; it’s racism that gives it meaning.¹² Race hasn’t always existed in the way we understand it now; it was a term used, for instance, to talk about class. Intended for a middle-class audience, one London weekly newspaper described ‘the Bethnal Green poor’ as ‘a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing’.¹³ But over the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the racial hierarchy was solidified. Forming a justification for colonialism and slavery since the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, and then backed up by the scientific racism of eugenicist Frances Galton, as well as academics, politicians and thinkers – in other words, significant sections of the elite – it increasingly came to be believed that visible differences were a sign of much deeper ones. Humans have inherited a biological essence related to skin colour and bodily features, they said, and this biology decides our abilities. ‘Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization,’ scientist Robert Knox declared in 1850.¹⁴

      As they plundered, exploited and brutally controlled colonies and the people in them, all to enrich Britain as part of the growth of the capitalist project, colonialists swore by the racial hierarchy. Whiteness was not simply a descriptor; it was used to give anchor to the idea that Europe was the place of modernity and civilisation. White Europeans – in particular white upper-class men – were thought inherently modern and sophisticated; their black and brown counterparts, the opposite. The former, human; the latter, not. These ideas live on, subtly drawing a line between the developed and the developing, the advanced and the backward.

      During Empire, the colonised needed to be civilised, and it was the responsibility of white Britons to do just that. ‘Is it not strange to think, that they who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world, that they should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and that many … are become so dissolute as to think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?’ wrote abolitionist and philosopher Ottobah Cugoano in 1787.¹⁵

      Yet, to this day, national myths abound of Britons nobly leading the charge against slavery. In fact, when slavery was abolished in Britain, slave owners were granted, using taxpayers money, £20 million in compensation, or the equivalent of around £17 billion today, the largest public bailout until the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.¹⁶ Conveniently ignored are the facts that slaves and their descendants never saw a penny of compensation and the UK then played a significant role in forcing millions of people into bondage and indentured labour.¹⁷

      As working classes at home agitated for and began to win democratic rights in the early twentieth century, the Empire was used to give coherence to a country deeply divided along class lines. People were told it wasn’t just the elite that benefited from the imperial project, but also the country as a whole; white people’s sense of self and of the nation was defined by their relation to the colonised. In one mass marketing campaign, which came in the form СКАЧАТЬ