The Empire at Home

Internal Colonies and the End of Britain

James Trafford

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Modern Britain is forged through the redeployment of structures that facilitated and legitimized slavery, exploitation and extermination. This is the 'empire at home' and it is inseparable from the strategies of neo-colonial extraction and oppression of subjects abroad.

Here, James Trafford develops the notion of internal colonies, arguing that methods and structures used in colonial rule are re-deployed internally in contemporary Britain in order to recreate and solidify imperial power relations. Using examples including housing segregation, targeted surveillance and counter-insurgency techniques used in the fight against terrorism, Trafford reveals Britain's internal colonialism to be a reactive mechanism to retain British sovereignty.

As politics appears limited by nationalism and protectionism, The Empire at Home issues a powerful challenge to contemporary politics, demanding that Britain as an imperial structure must end.

1

The Mouth of a Shark

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark.

[…]

make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,

stripped and searched, find prison everywhere

and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side

with go home blacks, refugees

dirty immigrants, asylum seekers

(Warsan Shire, ‘Home’)¹

This is my home

this thin edge of

barbwire.

(Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza)²

IN THE SHADOWS OF FLIGHT PATHS

In the visitors’ room at the largest immigrant detention centre in Britain there is a mural of a shark. From the vantage point of stained boardbacked chairs and tables adorned with a sharpie-scrawled numbering system, the shark – with bared teeth – stares panopticon-like over the head of the guard who checks you into the room and assigns tables. Somewhat indecorously, a large clock sits within this mural.

When you have insecure immigration status, you don’t have life. Your life is not considered important. It should not be like this. Human life is more important than immigration status.

The clock haunts this space that is so fraught by time, a space of detainment without sentence or conviction. The ‘tuck-shop’ is closed again, staff disorganised as if caught off-guard. Today the room is opened an hour and a half late. A small crowd tensely waiting is now shuffling together into the tiny anteroom whilst one door locks before another can open. ‘It’s like we’re going into prison’, someone quietly remarks.

Just imagine, just walk in my shoes once. You have a normal life and then they detain you. Take you away from your family and your kids. It’s not normal. If you’re going to detain you like an animal – how can you expect them to live a normal life. It’s going to be ruining their lives for ever.

This cold, dank-smelling, exhausted space of visitation is at once secured, apprehensive, anxious, but also brimming with love, desire and ache. Enfolding in the tenderness of emotion and presence, lovers, mothers, fathers, children, friends – sucking in air in the vicinity of one another, capturing fragrances of scalp, neck, spirit.

The treatment we are getting here is not right. On our anniversary my husband travelled to see me. While we were kissing they came to me saying that we are not allowed to kiss. My husband just started crying because we being treated as criminal and making life hell for us.

Just beyond a grey business hotel, sitting at the other side of a dual carriageway to a drive-through McDonald’s, are the Heathrow Immigration Removal centres. Like many others, the running of Harmondsworth is outsourced to Mitie, a company now infamous for its subsumption business practices and the paucity of conditions of its immigration centres.³ Ostensibly a holding ground for asylum hearings, Harmondsworth is a prison that witnesses sickness, mental health crises and suicide. The people detained there are often refused access to medical care, and sent away with paracetamol regardless of ailment.

We are locked up like dogs. Even animals in this country have their rights. Detention is not supposed to be like a prison. But we are treated worse than prisoners. Where is the humanity in this country, where is the human right in this country.

Harmondsworth lies in the elongated shadows of flight paths, positioned for proximity to planes that extend its carceral reach. Rebuilt and expanded in 2001 under New Labour, it was the first purpose-built detention centre in the UK. It was brought into being by the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which had removed the right of entry for British Commonwealth citizens and made precarious the rights of many already residing in the country.

The people that they deport, and put on the charter flights. Those people lose their lives. Everything gets worse for them.⁴

The centre symbolises violent attempts to refound the authority and integrity of Britain in a post-colonial world that would ultimately resurrect colonialism inside, and neo-imperialism without. Their corporate facia of hostility is intertwined with strategies of containment and punitive bordering that extends far beyond national territories – outwards across Europe and Africa, and inwards across health services, education and housing.

Britain – as nation-state – is colonialism

Put bluntly, this is the proposition and argument of this book.

Whilst this is a book that is largely about Britain, this is a Britain that is not limited to its island shores. This is because Britain has never been independent – there is no ‘island nation’, as Gurminder Bhambra puts it.⁵ Britain was established in 1707 with the formalisation of England’s annexation of Scotland forming a ‘united’ kingdom. By the early twentieth century, its empire dominated around one quarter of the Earth’s lands, one fifth of its people, and half of all Muslims. Britain ruled over 100 colonies, protectorates and dominions, with 52 forming the later Commonwealth. Britain-as-empire involved the annexation of lands, settler colonialism, chattel slavery, extraction, genocide and expansionist commerce.

Imperial empire had been built in opposition with its ‘others’, making stolen land into property and commodity, and Indigenous people into a commodified reserve. This was the condition of Britain’s wealth and sovereign political power. The British state was built upon inestimable wealth that was extracted across empire through forced taxation, dispossession, enslavement and forced labour. But Britain’s dependence on its colonies was not limited to economy and political might. There is a paradox at the core of Britain’s insistence on liberal freedoms, which empire brings to light. Defining the universality of liberal freedoms had relied on the creation of an ‘other’ against whom they could be measured. Not the product of an internal European character, liberal values of liberty and equality in the British metropole (the ‘parent’ state of its colonies) were produced through violent divisions of the world in its colonies.⁶ The very image of liberal Britain rested on freedoms that were won by expropriation and enclosure, exploitation and extermination.

The ‘end’ of empire was a long, slow and violent process, which stuttered through counter-insurgency, uprising, installed governments, enforced trade deals and post-colonial migration. What emerged was a system of neo-colonial imperialism built through the hard-fought domination over the territories, politics and economies of newly sovereign states. The formal independence of post-colonial states was intertwined with ongoing subordination that would later become embedded in multilateral organisations and international law.

The end of Britain’s formal colonies was seen by politicians like Enoch Powell as the possibility for its rebirth as a singular nation. However, at the same time that Britain fought to retain its imperial directives amidst global decolonising forces and world-making struggles, its borders were necessarily opened to inflows of capital, people and commodities. Prompted by domestic labour shortages and the desire to maintain commonwealth power, the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave some of Britain’s colonial subjects the right to travel to and work in the metropole through incentivised guest-worker style schemes. These were supposed to promote the temporary movement of labour from colony to metropole, forming precarious communities whose citizenship status was in question from the start. Also under Heathrow’s flight path, after the violent partitioning of Punjab by the British in 1947, Southall became Chota Punjab – Little Punjab. Not completely jokingly, one reason for settling there was that ‘if the gooras [whites] ever kicked us out, it would be easy to get on a plane and return home’.⁷

This brought tensions and tactics of colonial control into the heart of the metropole. Much of this book is concerned to show that these tensions and tactics underpin both the idea and the reality of Britain as island territory and neo-imperial state since the end of formal empire. From the embers of empire, Britain was rebuilt as the continuation of colonialism. I will argue that the history of post-war Britain is also the history of colonial strategies and techniques deployed ‘at home’. In tracing this deployment of internal colonialism, I aim to show that this was not just driven by the desire to rebuild Britain’s labour force, economy and global position. Britain has been politically, economically and existentially dependent upon its colonies and their re-formation inside the metropole. To put this somewhat glibly, as existential horizon and nation-state machinery, Britain is colonialism.

Of aliens and universals

In the summer of 1948, Britain saw both the Empire Windrush bringing around 800 Jamaican people to the port of Tilbury and the inauguration of the National Health Service (NHS). Both were symbolic of compacts between citizen and state, with the nascent welfare state rooted in liberal citizenship as universal entitlement. The edges of this universal compact were transparent – it was never meant for the others, which British empire held within. Further still, its universalism was written through this exclusion and as a means of its protection. Whilst trajectories in the metropole had progressively shifted towards welfarism, leniency and equality, their colonial counterparts were subject to genocidal violence and torture against anticolonial resistance; the scrambling efforts of the colonial office to hold onto power; claims over resources preserving unequal flows of trade.⁸

The emergence of a universal compact through social reforms had been underpinned by eugenicist arguments against the likely social degradation and perishing of the British nation.⁹ The National Insurance Act in 1911 sought to prevent the degeneration of Anglo-Saxon stock through social hygiene – intervening in living standards through health and unemployment provision for certain workers. Whilst advocating universalism, Beveridge’s infamous 1942 report relied on a similar logic to argue that at the present rate of reproduction, the ‘British race’ could not continue. With eugenicist credentials and a firm belief in the pride in Britain, Beveridge understood that its continued imperial quest required intervention to install a national minimum living standard: ‘good stock should be allowed to breed while bad stock would be ameliorated through state intervention’.¹⁰ As Robbie Shilliam writes, Beveridge saw the possibility for ‘the preservation of empire in the universal provision of social insurance and welfare in Britain’.¹¹ This welfare capitalism was financed by continuing colonial exploitation such as the reduction of plantation workers’ wages in Malaya by 80 per cent, with resistance to the cuts leading to the British setting up resettlement camps.¹² In this sense, universal provision was not just a weapon of exclusion, it was a weapon for the maintenance and protection of freedoms that had been built upon exclusion.

For Britain the decolonising world was a fragile state of affairs, with the commonwealth held together largely by a trusteeship system of colonial administration that would guide nations towards their own self-determination.¹³ Though the 1948 act meant that commonwealth immigrants had rights to British nationality, in reality migration was neither unrestricted nor spontaneous. With concerns over declining British stock, a waning post-war economy and labour shortages, the government formed a working party to manage the movement of labour from its prior and extant colonies. In order to incentivise limited movement, the Colonial Office organised a scheme that would select the best colonial subjects for migration under direct control of the office. For example, the Indian administration required proof of financial status and literacy through a series of checks before emigration was possible.¹⁴ Relying on colonial governments and extra-territorial immigration and border controls at ports of departure allowed Britain to circumvent nationality laws, so they would not have to implement border controls at port of entry.

As ‘children of the empire’ increasingly found their way to the mother nation and as the temporary arrangement began to give way to settlement, this did not herald a universal post-colonial welfare system, but rather a series of immigration restrictions, buttressed by increasing anti-immigrant resentment. If social and economic welfare movements in Britain were grounded in racialised nationalism, then as Satnam Verdee writes, ‘the golden age of welfare capitalism and the social democratic settlement was also the golden age of white supremacy’.¹⁵ Migrant people from the old colonies found themselves in a Britain that was differentiated, living and working in zones of dis-location that operated out of sync with the universal compact surrounding them. Then, as now, they were forced to carry the colonies on their backs. Uneasily traversing the spatio-temporal connections that supposedly made Britain post-colonial, these zones were spaces of precarity and permanent temporariness – shape...