Britain's White Borders and Normalising the Far Right
Britain's White Borders and Normalising the Far Right
Nadya Ali examines how racially discriminatory immigration and counter-terrorism policies are threatening the rights and entitlements of us all
At Prime Minister's questions recently, the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, claimed that the Conservative party had “lost control of immigration”. Citing latest immigration figures which showed an increase in those arriving in Britain on work visas, Starmer decried the ‘low wage Tory economy’ allowing businesses in certain sectors to pay non-citizens 20% less than British citizens, thereby incentivising immigration.
In the raucous public school-style din of the House of Commons, it may have been easy to overlook the pivot politicians have been making from talking about “illegal” immigration as the problem, towards the trouble being any and all immigration. As Aditya Chakrabortty recently pointed out in the Guardian, “So now we know: the sticking point is no longer what kind of foreigner you are – it’s simply your foreignness.”
The distinction between non-citizens on the move and refugees seeking asylum has, in popular political discourse and increasingly in policy, collapsed. This is not a new development, the Conservatives’ commitment to reduce net immigration dates back to the 2015 election manifesto, but it is one that comes into sharper focus through current events.
So, how have traditionally far-right views previously espoused by the likes of the British National Party, become the norm in British politics?
In my new book, The Violence of Britishness: Racism, Borders and the Conditions of Citizenship, I chart how colonial ideas of Britishness as whiteness have been reproduced in key policy areas such as counter-terrorism and immigration, that have grievously impacted on Britain’s Black and brown citizens. In fact, if we are to grapple with why foreignness is increasingly reviled, we must look first to the treatment of those who have historical ties to parts of the British Empire that were not white settler colonies.
Britain’s Black and brown citizens have struggled to be regarded as ‘properly’ British because they are not white. This hierarchy of citizenship has been remade in the last 20 years through the proliferation of everyday racial borders introduced through War on Terror programmes like Prevent aimed at Muslims, and hostile environment immigration policies aimed ostensibly at non-citizens.
Everyday racial borders call into question the belonging of citizens of colour and undermine their ability to access public goods, often with fatal consequences. From the horrifying deportations and deaths of the Windrush scandal, to Shamima Begum and countless others like her who have been deprived of citizenship and made stateless, the rights of Black and brown people has been made conditional on ‘good behaviour’ and ‘character tests’ which seemingly do not apply to white Britons.
However, this does not mean racial borders have consequences only for people of colour: they spell trouble for everyone.
If the state is able to deny Black and brown citizens their rights and entitlements because they don’t have the ‘correct’ paperwork, or because they were charged with a crime, it can also deny other citizens who fail the test of being a ‘deserving’ Briton too. Deciding who is ‘British’ is also an exercise in deciding who gets to access what is left of our declining public infrastructure. In these times of scarcity, where inequality is accelerating, where not being able to afford to eat is the norm for many, the violence of ‘Britishness’ is deadly.
A Cross Party Consensus on Keeping ‘Foreigners’ Out
It is only more recently that the (unobtainable) desire to keep ‘foreigners’ out of Britain has become so normalised that it amounts effectively to a cross-party consensus. From reducing what Starmer calls ‘immigration dependency’ in key sectors, to Suella Braverman’s attempts to discourage the international students on whom the university sector depends to stay afloat from coming to the UK, to the truly inhumane detention and deportation of asylum seekers, the project to take back control of Britain’s borders has many faces.
Reducing immigration is a political imperative that now triumphs over feeding or caring for Britons themselves. This is a contraction that needn’t surprise us: preventing non-citizens from living and working in Britain was never going to pull up the living standards of Britons – a truth that British politicians will continue to skip over in their bid to retain office.
Though pointing out the impact of labour shortages should not be taken as a defence for the persistently poor pay and conditions immigrant workers face fruit picking or working in care homes, Labour’s promise to put “fairness” at the heart of its immigration policy, where the focus would be on upskilling British workers but “pragmatic” about the need for non-citizens workers, may be read as the progressive face of a deeply contentious policy area.
Talk of fairness in immigration does not actually extend to migrants themselves. The fact they are being underpaid for their labour in comparison to British citizens, and are often found to be working in deeply exploitative sectors like social care, seems to be of minimal concern to politicians . All the while, private companies like Serco are making record profits from public money to run immigration services.
Ideas of foreignness are now, after Brexit, capacious enough to include (usually white) EU nationals, and we know from recent history that what was once considered to be a far-right fantasy of ‘Britain for the British’, involving forced repatriation (deportation) and the end of refugee rights, is now the stuff of mainstream political discourse. But we didn’t get here overnight.
How Did We Get Here?
When the New Labour government launched the Prevent strategy in 2006, it was explicitly to address the challenge of radicalisation in Muslim communities. According to prevailing policy wisdom, British Muslims were taking on a warped interpretation of Islam, and their communities were responsible for ensuring their youth did not turn to violence. The most significant aspect of the Prevent strategy was that Muslims were designated as a threat to Britain, furthering ideas of Britishness as whiteness.
After 9/11 and in Britain, more sharply after 7/7, Muslims were cast as outsiders to the nation, with alien, archaic values and dysfunctional community dynamics that required policy intervention. While preemptively addressing the challenge of terrorism may have seemed progressive at the time, placing collective responsibility on a whole group for the actions of a few was only possible because Muslims were racialised as a threatening homogenous mass. Early Prevent saw a considerable emphasis on educating Muslims on how to interpret and practise their own faith in a way that did not conflict with being British.
In particular, ‘British values’ emerged as a way of marking out who was a good citizen and were articulated against unspoken ‘Muslim values’. Things like democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, are regarded as uniquely British, and something which Muslims needed to be instructed into, while white Britons already knew and upheld. Crucially, signs of radicalisation were made synonymous with not upholding British values – of not being British enough.
Prevent introduced the surveillance of British Muslims into everyday life so that teachers, doctors, nurses, prison officers have been charged with the duty to stop people being drawn into radicalisation. Prevent is why Muslim children are ending up on a police database for innocuous comments. Prevent is also the route by which the citizenship of Muslims has become incrementally conditional on good British behaviour, and citizenship deprivation has become a normalised practice which overwhelmingly impacts Muslims.
The Hostile Environment
A little while later, as immigration crept further and further up the political agenda, politicians began to ‘crack down’ on those who were deemed to be taking advantage of British generosity embodied in access to public services and welfare. The No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) policy which has been around since as early as 1999, denies those on temporary visas from accessing benefits and services. The policy remains in place despite evidence it can lead to poverty and homelessness.
It was after the Conservative-led coalition came to power in 2010 that immigration controls began to intensify through what we now know as the ‘hostile environment’. These are the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016, which, as I write in the book, meant that “if individuals are unable to provide ‘lawful evidence’ which proves their settled immigration status, then access to employment, healthcare, welfare benefits, education, housing and banking is denied. Employers, landlords, health practitioners, universities and banks are now legally mandated to carry out immigration checks.”
At the time, communities minister Eric Pickles warned that ‘anyone foreign-looking’ (not white) would be impacted by these policies. In fact, as I detail in the book, organisations like the Joint Council Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) gave evidence to this effect, as did a number of other charities. But despite early warnings that these policies would impact on British citizens of colour who were not considered to be unconditionally British because they are not white, the proposed rules passed into law.
Later in 2018, the Windrush scandal broke. It emerged that the Home Office had deported, detained, made jobless, homeless and denied life-saving access to healthcare to ‘countless’ numbers of British citizens from Commonwealth countries who could not provide evidence of their immigration status. Black and brown citizens who struggled to prove their legal arrival in Britain on old or lost passports, were denied their basic rights and entitlements. Despite the scandal leading to the resignation of the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, every aspect of that policy remains in place. In the meantime, Windrush campaigners struggle to access the justice they have long sought.
Racism in Times of Scarcity
In this hierarchy of citizenship, where it pays to be white, the returns for being on top are not what they used to be. Britain is in trouble. From a period of sustained austerity after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, to the Covid-19 pandemic and now a cost of living crisis, inequality is accelerating. The privileges of being a citizen appear to be diminishing for those who cannot buy their way out of NHS waiting lists or who increasingly rely on foodbanks to feed themselves and their families. Britain is increasingly a country where work doesn’t pay for many, and up to 40% of people on Universal Credit also have a job.
In this context of reduced spending on public services that has impacted more grievously on people of colour, those on low incomes and disabled people, deciding who gets what is about deciding who is deserving and who is not. Who is British enough and who is not. From this perspective, it might be tempting to think of those policies aimed at stripping asylum seekers of their rights under international law as a distraction from the ‘real’ inequality that Britain is awash with. In fact, some journalists like to think of border violence as a ‘culture war’ designed to create more heat than light, infuriating all the right people. This would be a mistake.
The treatment of people of colour, whether they are citizens or non-citizens, has paved the way for stealthily stripping away the rights of larger groups in society. By making the rights and entitlements of citizenship contested and conditional for Black and brown citizens because of racism, it becomes easier for the state to take things away from other groups because a precedent has already been set. In a week where the Telegraph was inviting its readers to calculate how much disabled people are costing them through welfare benefits, we can see how the parcelling of who are deserving and undeserving of public goods ultimately means we all lose out.
Dr Nadya Ali is a writer and researcher currently working in policy and advocacy in the charity sector. She previously worked for more than 10 years in Higher Education researching, publishing and teaching on the issues of security, borders and race and racism.
To buy a copy of The Violence of Britishness: Racism, Borders and the Conditions of Citizenship, click here.