The asylum regime that became increasingly restrictive from the 1980s and through the 1990s and 2000s only got worse from 2010 on. Seeing that people were fleeing conflict, famine and political persecution, the Coalition barely squeaked the door ajar to asylum seekers; between 2010 and 2015 they resettled just 143 refugees who had escaped violent civil war in Syria. So far, well over 5 million refugees have left Syria. During the largest refugee movement since the Second World War, it was only under intense public pressure that Prime Minister David Cameron committed to take in up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years. But in comparison to countries like Germany, this was a tiny number, and when compared with the countries in the so-called ‘developing’ world, which host the vast majority of refugees, it looked even smaller.67
But when the Coalition government was put under the spotlight for failing to take in refugees from Syria, campaigners lobbied politicians to take in child refugees by drawing on national mythology. Conjuring up images of Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransport, they argued that the UK should not betray its history. This proved to be an effective campaigning tool that tapped into existing thinking; one 2011 poll found that 84 per cent of people said they were proud to be British and 82 per cent believed protecting the most vulnerable is a core British value.68 But certain ‘children were unaccompanied, and their Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe’, Louise London reminds us, they were ‘excluded from entry to the United Kingdom [and] are not part of the British experience, because Britain never saw them’.69
The shameful present, in which refugees are turned away, asylum seekers are left destitute on the streets, migrants are indefinitely detained and members of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ are deported, is often compared to an imagined past, as activists and outraged politicians indignantly ask: What has this country become? The problem is, this is the kind of place it has long been.
Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.
Stuart Hall, Old and New Identities,Old and New Ethnicities
‘Western society historically was white, that’s how it works,’ right-wing commentator Melanie Phillips told me during a 2017 BBC Radio 4 debate.1 In the middle of a live recording, I’d been quietly brought into a small studio to talk to people I had never met but whom I sat with long enough during what was a brief segment for them to quiz me about so-called virtue signalling – a supposed phenomenon where people publicly and smugly say or do something ‘morally good’ for the principal purpose of demonstrating their rectitude. I hadn’t been invited on the programme to debate ‘race’ or the history of ‘the West’, but that’s where Phillips steered the conversation. Caught off guard, I explained why Phillips’s statement wasn’t true, but it seemed she had a point to prove; adamant that it was entirely logical that some people in the UK wanted to defend a Europe that she seemed to believe was once exclusively white.
Other people share Phillips’s anger at the supposed disruptive change that has taken place in Europe. When a BBC children’s cartoon used images of a multiracial family to explain life in Roman Britain, people on social media attacked it as historically inaccurate.2 They seemed to believe it’s common sense that racial and cultural 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