Like in the U.S., the far-right in the UK thinks getting rid of unwanted immigrants is the answer to every problem

 

In the United Kingdom, given its long history of colonialism that once made the British Empire the largest the world had ever seen…

 

…it isn’t surprising that attitudes akin to arch-imperialist Winston Churchill’s belief in “social Darwinism” still has a hold on the imagination, or the difficulty in accepting the fact that the British are not the “master race” or dominant culture anymore. Churchill even used the term “Aryan” to describe the British people; Hitler also believed this, and strove to make “peace” with Britain for this reason. Churchill was an anti-Semite, he only believed in “equal rights” for “civilized” people under British rule, and promoted a policy of discrimination against (black) immigrants from the West Indies to keep Britain “white.”

These views remain that of many people in the UK, but racism and anti-immigrant fervor became a standard of political debate, particularly in the Tory party, since the 1960s.  Although the Tory party has always been the main conservative party in the UK, like the Republican Party in the U.S. its ideology strayed from being to the right on economic and tax issues but moderate on social issues (in fact the Republican Party started out as a “progressive” party), but on the issues of race and immigration have become increasingly extremist in its political rhetoric.

During the Sixties, segregation and even a form of apartheid was argued for by many on the British right and supported by their followers in the public domain. Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech imagined a race war between “civilized” whites and barbaric immigrant peoples from other races over who had any rights in the country. By the time the 1970s rolled along, the British government decided to end British citizenship to those peoples still under the old colonial system, but before that happened allowed those about to lose their citizenship the right to immigrate without “papers.”

These immigrants included those from the West Indies, many who traveled via a vessel called the Empire Windrush—thus the infamous Windrush scandal, when the Tory government under then Home Secretary (later prime minister) Theresa May tried to force these people and their descendants to leave the country by instituting a “hostile environment” policy, which tried to take away social services (including access to the health care system) from anyone who didn’t have the proper “papers”—which was a problem for the “Windrush” generation since they were not required to have “papers” when they immigrated.

The uproar over this policy caused the Tory government to back down, but that hardly stopped the push to “cleanse” the UK of unwanted people of a different hue, which took a sinister turn with Brexit, the focus of which was not on European immigrants and guest workers, but those who racists could actually “see”—and the darker they were, the more unwanted they became. African and West Indian guest workers, immigrants and asylum-seekers became the focus of a British version of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, even though blacks comprised a much smaller percentage of immigrants than South Asians and Europeans. They are just easier to focus a xenophobe’s hate on.

Today, angst over immigrants, asylum-seekers and “boat people” has only increased and used as a bludgeon by the Tories to avoid taking responsibility for its disastrous stewardship of the economy (and voters in this country think Republicans are going to do any better than Democrats?) by accusing them of stealing jobs, for crime and a failure to “assimilate”—without acknowledging that their own paranoid talk is causing discriminatory attitudes that oppose assimilation.

But what seems “surprising” now is that the face of racist policies in the UK has a decidedly “brown” look to it, meaning those of Indian extraction, especially Hindus and Christians. Hindus of course bring their discriminatory caste system background with them, and as we know in this country fundamentalist Christianity has a decidedly “unchristian” outlook. Currently there are 3 million people residing in the UK who are of South Asian extraction, either British citizens, or foreign nationals (most immigrants).

Poles are the next largest “ethnic” group in the UK, their numbers rising 10 times what they were in 2001 to over 700,000; most arrived when the UK was still a member of the European Union with its “open” borders when British businesses could import labor, and obviously many decided to stay.

But as mentioned, the focus of Brexit was not on European immigrants, but those who you could actually “see.” At one point South Asians tended to lean toward the Labor Party, but that has changed, likely a reaction to the increasing xenophobia amongst the “natives,” and many decided it was “better” not to be lumped in with other groups (Africans especially), and saw active prejudice against them as a way of reducing prejudice against themselves.  Thus while many South Asians sill claim to be “victims” of racism, it isn’t so much by whites but by immigrant “gangs,” as we are seeing now in the aftermath of a riot after a cricket match between Indian and Pakistani teams in Leicester—falsely implying that the perpetrators were non-South Asian immigrant hoodlums.

For a time, then Home Secretary Priti Patel supported racist policies demonizing non-Indian non-whites, and current Home Secretary Suella Braverman, whose parents are of Indian descent but resided in other countries before immigrating to the UK…

 

…is, if anything, even worse. She has banned government diversity programs and training, calling it leftist "brainwashing" and "divisive," and the Manston detention center for refugees is holding three times the number of people intended because of deliberate efforts to slow processing them, if at all.

Like the Trump administration, Braverman wants to stop all immigration from “unwanted” groups if she can help it, and that includes gutting asylum laws. She has been passionate about this to say the least, even “dreaming” about it. She consistently defends her views and actions by accusing certain immigrants (meaning African and Muslim) of bringing crime and gang activity, and failing to “integrate.” 

It isn’t “racist” to protect the borders, Braverman asserts, but the hypocrisy is apparent when she only applies out of convenience her parents supposed motivations to immigrate to the UK, yet denies other immigrants the same motivation:

This isn’t just about policy or economics for me. It’s intensely personal. My parents came here in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius. They loved Britain from afar, as children of the Commonwealth. It was Britain that offered them security and opportunity as young adults. It’s not racist for anyone, ethnic minority or otherwise, to want to control our borders. It’s not bigoted to say that we have too many asylum seekers who are abusing the system. It’s not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration places pressure on housing, public services and community relations.

The problem with this is that Braverman is exempting Indians such as herself from immigration policies, and stereotyping non-Indians; yes, her views thus are racist. She has even follow Trump’s lead in creating a “third-party” asylum policy, sending asylum-seekers to countries with the same conditions of the countries they were fleeing from. Much outrage has been generated by Braverman’s Rwanda asylum plan. Derided for proclaiming “I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession,” her “dream” is in fact a nightmare for those who were forced into it. The Independent reported that after one of the initial implementations of the policy,

Documents released by the Home Office showed that detainees self-harmed, threatened suicide, and were put into “pain-inducing” restraint after begging not to be deported from the UK. One man was found cutting his wrists with shards of a drinks can, while another smashed his head against a plane seat while screaming “No, no” in desperate scenes on 14 June.

The Rwanda asylum plan is outrageous on its face since, as some of us may recall, that country was the scene of genocide during the Rwandan civil war in 1994. Why Braverman remains in her position is troubling since she was recently forced to resign for illegally using her personal email account for government business, but then was reinstated by Liz Truss’ replacement as prime minister, another individual of Indian heritage, Rishi Sunak (like Braverman maybe waving goodbye to those unwanted immigrants):

 

Many even on the left hoped that Sunak would bring “moderation” to the Tory party simply because he was of Indian extraction, but that turned out not to be the case. Sunak is just another rich man who is as far away from the “street” as can be, but like most in the party he has used “crime,” scapegoating by race and immigration, and “culture war” terms to disguise the fact that like  most on his side of the aisle he cares more about power and how to keep it. He is continuing the Tory policy of making the impact of immigration sound worse than it is, and use racism to turn focus away from the impact of disastrous economic policies, the cause of the “early retirement” of Truss.

Thus the UK isn’t much different from the U.S.—or Australia, for that matter; one of Russell Crowe’s early films was Romper Stomper, in which he played the leader of an Australian neo-Nazi gang that preyed on Southeast Asian immigrants. Hypocrisy is rampant, and even if the idea of controlling borders is sounds “sound,” its implementation in ignoring international norms in regard to asylum policy, and putting different groups on a numbered scale of “acceptability” that favors certain groups over others, it is being implemented in a most inhumane way by representatives from one of those “favored” groups.