Empire's Endgame

Racism and the British State

Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıolu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany, Luke de Noronha

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786807632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Politica economica

'Rigorous, impassioned and urgent' - Ash Sarkar

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of authoritarian regimes, it is the lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus. In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in Britain. While the 'hostile environment' policy and Brexit referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Engaging with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes rather than expels in the face of crisis.

PART 1

Racialising the Crisis

CHAPTER ONE

Windrush

‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’, it began. This wartime quote by Winston Churchill … is to me the most apt way of expressing the gratitude of the Caribbean high commissioners and the West Indian diaspora for the incredible work by Amelia Gentleman.

– The High Commissioner for Barbados, quoted in the Foreword by Katherine Viner to Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal (2019)¹

It wasn’t Labour who cut the Border Force. It was the Tories. Labour’s last manifesto committed to adding five hundred extra border guards, over and above the level we will inherit from this Government. They are vital in the fight against people-traffickers, and the drug and gun smugglers, as well as preventing illegal immigration.

– Diane Abbott’s speech on Labour’s plans for a simpler, fairer immigration system, September 2018²

In spring 2018, British politics was dominated by what came to be known as the ‘Windrush scandal’. The scandal concerned older Caribbean migrants who had moved to the UK before 1973, and who therefore should have had a ‘right of abode’ (permanent and unconditional right of residence and re-entry), but who instead had been treated as ‘illegal immigrants’ and denied access to healthcare, welfare benefits and housing. In some cases, ‘Windrush migrants’ were deported. In one case, a man who had lived in the UK since 1969 lost his job at a local council because new immigration rules stipulated he had to have a passport to work. Having never left the country since his arrival in Britain, he could not produce the necessary documentation and so was left with no job and no recourse to claim out-of-work benefits. Another member of the ‘Windrush generation’ had lived in the UK since he was five months old. After travelling to the Caribbean to visit his sick mother he was denied re-entry at the UK border. Another man of Caribbean heritage who had lived in the UK for 40 years was given a £5,000 hospital bill after his immigration status was checked. Finding he had no residency status, the council evicted him from his home, and he was discharged from hospital onto the streets, ineligible for a state-funded hostel as an ‘illegal immigrant’.

There were over 50,000 people of Caribbean heritage who potentially faced similar problems, as the border moved from the airports and docks to housing offices, job centres, hospitals, schools, workplaces and streets. This expansion and internalisation of the border was part of the Conservative Party’s policy to make the UK a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants (although these policies were very much a continuation/extension of New Labour immigration policy). In responding to moral panic about immigrants stealing jobs, welfare benefits, or both, the government made proof of legal status mandatory for access to the basic means of existence: employment, housing, healthcare, education, a bank account, a driving licence. This is the hostile environment: the system of immigration checks and data-sharing which saw the expansion of everyday, everywhere bordering.

Over a number of months in 2018, left and liberal media outlets began to collect the stories of these long-settled British Caribbeans who had been illegalised, made destitute and banished. Soon, other sections of the press, including those on the right, began to cover the ‘Windrush scandal’. One Daily Mail editorial summed up the paper’s position: ‘The Windrush scandal is yet another example of how poorly Britain treats those to whom it owes a great debt and how twisted our bureaucratic morals are.’³ Meanwhile, Brexit campaigner and far-right Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg described the ‘hostile environment’ as ‘fundamentally un-British’.⁴ Both the Mail and Rees-Mogg used the scandal in an attempt to revalorise people from the Commonwealth as ‘deserving migrants’, while petitioning for a ‘hard Brexit’ that would extricate Britain from the EU’s ‘twisted’, ‘un-British’ bureaucracy, and make the lives of many EU nationals in Britain increasingly difficult and insecure.

In other words, outrage was not directed at the ‘hostile environment’ per se, which the government had created to root out ‘illegal immigrants’. Rather, the scandal was seen by the Mail and others as an example of ‘how it is those who play by the rules and do the right thing who get punished – while those who act on the sly seem only to get rewarded for it’. The ‘Windrush scandal’ demonstrated the lack of respect for good old British ‘common sense’: the ‘bad migrants’ flood in, stealing jobs and benefits, while the good ones get punished. The story was thereby made familiar in a very particular way: the point was that the Home Office was totally dysfunctional, rather than immigration controls being inherently punitive, violent and racist.

Across the political spectrum, ‘Windrush migrants’ were celebrated for their contributions to the nation. The fact that the treatment of this particular group of ‘migrants’ became a national scandal, with a consensus across the political spectrum that the Home Office had acted not only unlawfully but also immorally, was surprising for a number of reasons. First, it was surprising because the tabloids are always talking about Britain as ‘a soft touch for migrants’. Normally we are told that migrants are bad and controls are too weak, so it was disorienting to have a public scandal where the migrants were good and the controls were too harsh. But the consensus on the treatment of Windrush victims was even more surprising given that all of the Windrush generation were black and many of them worked in lower-income jobs or were welfare claimants. This is the same economic demographic – ‘benefit scroungers’ and ‘job stealers’ – who are the target of popular outrage in debates about immigration.

However, unlike in most of the hateful political and media discourse on migrants, victims of the Windrush scandal were portrayed as elderly, respectable and law-abiding, and the well-rehearsed yarn about them having been invited over to help with the post-war effort prevailed. The ‘Windrush generation’ did not summon images of ‘illegal border crossings’, ‘breaking point’, or threats of crime and terrorism. They were not dangerously mobile, but settled, orderly and respectable. Thus, the ‘Windrush generation’ were folded into the national ‘we’, reclaimed as our war veterans, our bus conductors and our caring nurses. The Windrush scandal clearly played on the politics of respectability, economic contribution (even if historical) and good citizenship. As ever, the incorporation of black people into the national fold was partial, conditional and retractable.

Importantly, the opportunity to connect the Windrush scandal to the decimation of the welfare state and the wider demonisation of ‘illegal immigrants’ was missed by the left. The scandal became ultimately about immigration policies being applied to the wrong migrants, or applied in the wrong way. We should pause at this point to reiterate that ‘hostile environment’ policies involve denying ‘illegal immigrants’ the right to healthcare, housing, employment and education, as well as a driving licence and the ability to open a bank account – effectively denying people access to the means of life on the basis of immigration status. Many people incensed by the ‘Windrush scandal’ were against these immigration policies in general, but the overall tenor of the public debate involved special pleading for one particular group of ‘citizens’, rather than a wider interrogation of the exclusionary and expulsive logics of the immigration regime as a whole.

With some political imagination, the Windrush scandal should have allowed us to challenge received understandings of ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘welfare claimants’. After all, it should be easy enough to recognise that ‘illegal immigrants’ are simply those non-citizens who have been categorised as ‘illegal’ by law, a juridical group rather than a social one. ‘Illegal immigrants’, who share their lives with other migrants and citizens, are illegal only insofar as they have been subjected to an arbitrary legal process. Furthermore, the racist treatment experienced by the Windrush generation in the 1950s and ’60s, widely acknowledged across the political spectrum, should not be disconnected from the disproportionate enforcement of immigration controls against black and brown people today. Not all migrants are policed equally, and thus some are more likely to be made foreign through subjection to coercive state power. However, politicians, journalists and activists from across the left emphasised that Windrush migrants were distinct from ‘illegal immigrants’. David Lammy MP, in a rare and rousing speech in the Commons, suitably timed for maximum social media shares, reminded us that victims of the scandal included ‘a British citizen who paid taxes for 40 years’. Lammy’s steadfast separation of Windrush migrants, who were to be understood as citizens, from the real ‘illegal immigrants’, was repeated across the Labour Party.

These repeated references to tax records and national insurance contributions were more than proof of long-term residency. They served to construct the ‘Windrush generation’ as respectable, industrious people who ‘play by the rules’. Referring to Windrush scandal victims as ‘citizens’ (which in law was not quite true) worked to separate their treatment from the violence enacted against other non-citizens – the violence of immigration raids, indefinite detention and mass deportation flights, to destinations which include the Caribbean. While some commentators reminded us that post-war migrants were hardly welcomed by white Britons or the British state when they arrived, and others sought to historicise British citizenship as an imperial form of political membership later restricted to exclude ‘coloured’ migrants, there was a strong tendency, even among the left and anti-racists, to separate the violation of ‘Windrush migrants’ from the wider treatment of ‘migrants’. Indeed, Diane Abbott appeared on BBC’s Question Time to explain that the issue of ‘illegal immigration’ must not be confused with the ill-treatment of ‘Windrush migrants’, before promising that the Labour Party would ‘bear down on the numbers of illegal immigrants’ once in power. Evidently, immigration enforcement becomes visible as violence only when it affects certain groups – in this case ‘Windrush migrants’ who migrated, legally and respectfully, way back when.

* * *

Perhaps the clearest indication of the limits of this newfound hospitality came when Sajid Javid, as Home Secretary, explained that members of the ‘Windrush generation’ with criminal records would be fully excluded from compensation and legal recourse. Having a criminal record, however minor or from however long ago, was enough to erase over 45 years of residence. Even in that rarest of moments in British politics when there was widespread sympathy for one particular group of ‘migrants’, the spectre of ‘criminal history’ was enough to brand some ‘Windrush migrants’ as unwanted guests who had abused our hospitality. Exile remained perfectly proportionate in these cases, never mind what people were returned to. The mere mention of criminality was enough to set the nation into default mode: ‘send them back’.

Clearly, if the ‘Windrush migrants’ were to be considered British, and welcomed into the national fold, they were incorporated because they were law-abiding. They had proved, over time, that they were not ‘lesser breeds without the law’. Indeed, the Windrush migrants were contrasted explicitly and implicitly with younger, law-breaking black Britons during this period. Newspapers which sympathetically covered the Caribbean grandparents you might help cross the road, or allow in front of you in the queue at the post office, presented at the same time a very different image of ‘Black Britain’ in their inner pages. The national outrage over the ‘Windrush scandal’ was matched by a much more hostile collective outrage over youth violence, because the other big news story of spring 2018 was the so-called ‘knife-crime epidemic’.

Commentators made a point of emphasising statistics from particular cities (mainly London), in which the majority of ‘knife crime’ victims and perpetrators were black men and boys – and often the focus was specifically on ‘black Caribbean’ teenagers. ‘Black youth’ were once again vilified as sources of danger, violence and moral decline, and violence was linked to the family (read ‘absent fathers’) and the nihilism of contemporary urban life (read ‘black culture’). While wayward black youth symbolised a national crime crisis, their soft, neglectful or inept parents were also held responsible. As such, these later generations were separated from the sympathetic protection and welfare afforded to the ‘Windrush generation’ who came before them. Echoing repeated moral panics directed at black Britons over the last seven decades, ‘knife crime’ called for a law-and-order response. It was time for the police and the state to reassert control in the context of spiralling lawlessness, urban decline and a nation lacking discipline and confidence.

While the state tends to have a clear line when it comes to dealing with crime, the British left have struggled with how to respond to problems of violence in oppressed, lower-income communities. At best, the left is able to identify the social harms caused by a lack of social provision (housing, education, healthcare), and to recognise how this can lead young people in particular to be more likely to be affected by and implicated in violence. But the British left mostly seem unable to say that while one individual harming another is morally wrong, so is having uniformed agents force human beings into cages. Without a compelling critique of police and prisons, much of the left falls back on the carceral logic which divides society into victims and perpetrators. It then becomes possible to argue for the effectiveness of ‘evidence-led’, ‘targeted’ policing – perhaps with a sprinkling of unconscious-bias training for good measure.

Arguments are made for policing to be carried out by officers who are ‘part of the community’, which in addition to black and brown officers also sees police occupying schools, youth clubs and places of worship. Without a critical language, the left implicitly consents to these police powers which are then challenged only for being used ‘at random’ (as if those subjected to stop and search are ever identified randomly), or for being used in a discriminatory manner (as if there were any other way in which such powers could be used). This poverty of understanding, and lack of effective articulation, results in the left focusing on a defence of the welfare state, which includes the call for more police. Indeed, more bobbies on the beat has a homely leftish resonance as well as an authoritarian rightish one. Constrained by this logic, the police and the prison system are perceived as flawed, but still fundamentally necessary. Such constraints limit demands to diversity drives, community consultations, equality impact assessments, increased funding and, in extreme cases, public inquiries.

What should have been learnt from the ‘Windrush scandal’ – from the illegalisation and expulsion of long-settled Commonwealth citizens – was that racist discrimination persists across a range of state institutions and practices, and that this takes new forms as punitive, everyday borders proliferate. The exclusionary logic of immigration controls – according to which ‘migrants’ take jobs, resources and public goods and therefore need to be excluded – operates to justify and obscure the wider disentitlement and abandonment of citizens. Conditionality and punitiveness in the benefits system can then be reframed as p...