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Brexit and the fear of immigrants

Brexit—the prospect of Britain exiting the European Union—has garnered a great deal of attention in the past year as Britons debate the pros and cons of remaining a member of the EU. So-called Eurosceptics oppose integration with Europe for a variety of reasons, among them the constraints it places on the UK’s ability to negotiate more advantageous trade agreements, and the regulations and bureaucratic excesses the EU imposes on Britain in economic, financial, and judicial matters. By far the greatest grievance against EU membership, however, concerns its requirement to keep borders open, a policy that Eurosceptics regard as the cause of widespread immigration to the UK from Eastern Europe. Many of these migrants are Muslim, as are the thousands upon thousands of refugees now pouring into Europe from Syria and North Africa.

The immigration of peoples from the member states of the European Union, and now from the turmoil in the Middle East, has provoked a political backlash from certain elements of the British population. Extreme right-wing parties such as the British National Party (BNP) have thrived in certain constituencies since the 1970s. The BNP’s frankly neo-fascist pronouncements alienated many people and have given way to more reasonable-sounding groups such as the English Defense League (EDL), Britain First, and the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP). These groups downplay the racial and ethnic composition of the people they wish to exclude from society and focus instead on what they call threats to “Britishness,” particularly Islam. Britain First, for example, which appeared in 2011 as an offshoot of the BNP, claims on its homepage that it is “not against individual Muslims, but specifically against the doctrine and religion of Islam itself as an ideology.” The English Defence League, founded in 2009, describes itself as “a human rights organization that exists to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.”

This kind of rhetoric against those deemed alien and “un-British” is not new. The fears and anxieties generated by the presence of Muslims in Britain recall an earlier moment in British history when immigrants from India, Pakistan, and the colonies of Africa and the Caribbean began to enter Britain in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. For a significant portion of the British public, the presence of people of color created distress, which was articulated as the loss of a British “way of life” consequent upon the loss of empire and the immigration of former colonial subjects to their country. In 1968, Enoch Powell, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, had declared the settlement of blacks in Britain to be a threat to the nation’s very existence. In his so-called “River of Blood” speech, he foresaw, “like the Roman,… ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” if immigration was not banned outright and the “re-emigration” of former colonial subjects back to their countries of origin not put into effect. Powell conveyed the ominous message that if blacks—a term that included Asians and Arabs as well as Africans and West Indians–in Britain were given the same freedoms from discrimination that white Britons enjoyed, then those very freedoms and the British way of life they represented would be destroyed in a traumatic blood-letting.

By the 1970s, what had once been the racist rantings of a fringe politician became core beliefs held by many Britons and manifested themselves in the ideology of the New Right. Its grassroots support would derive from Britons who saw in the immigration of large numbers of people of color from former colonies a threat to the life they had known. For many conservatives, people of color represented the forces responsible for Britain’s decline, for the social instability brought on by unemployment and recession. “The nation has been and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by implantation of unassimilated and unassimilable populations. . . . alien wedges in the heartland of the state,” asserted Powell in 1976. By this time, his message of racial intolerance and of black people as the source of danger to British society had been embraced by a significant portion of Britons and would soon help to produce the electoral victory of the Conservative party, with Margaret Thatcher at its head. As Alfred Sherman, a prominent right-wing theorist, put it in September 1979, on the eve of Thatcher’s election as prime minister, “the imposition of mass immigration from backward alien cultures is just one symptom of this self-destructive urge reflected in the assault on patriotism, the family–both as a conjugal and economic unit–the Christian religion in public life and schools, traditional morality, in matters of sex, honesty, public display, and respect for the law–in short, all that is English and wholesome.”

The fact that Britain has been here before does not alter the gravity of the consequences of the UK leaving the European Union. Conservatives, for example, who campaigned on the promise to do away with the EU’s Human Rights Act and replace it with a British bill of rights, appear to have accepted the reality that abolishing the EU measure will be not only difficult but will carry significant repercussions. The Northern Ireland peace agreement, to name but one instance, is predicated on the acceptance of the Human Rights Act, and doing away with it might open the door to an unraveling of other elements of the accord. Scotland, much of Wales, and Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland strongly support EU membership; should English voters choose to leave the EU, the constitutional showdown would have serious consequences for the UK. And should Britain leave the EU altogether—which a significant element within the Conservative party, including its leader, David Cameron, opposes—it’s hard to see how effective the UK would be in influencing the decisions taken in Europe or in any other part of the world. A retreat to a kind of “little Englandism” reminiscent of Gladstone would not serve British international interests well.

Image credit: “Westminster, London” by Berit Watkin, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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