“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.”
“[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.”
This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour.
During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were encouraged to join the UK work force.
Today the economy is in stagnation, profit and investment are low or below zero: private capital is sitting dormant and the state is not investing. Thus there is no need of migrants and cheap labour even when the country need 40,000 nurses, for example.
Analyses of the UK’s recent riots continue. Nadine El-Enany has her say.
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