Transcriber: Van Vu Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
So, Brexit.
(Laughter)
Within a couple of hours of it being announced
that we had voted to leave the European Union,
the key campaigners for Brexit had backtracked on their key pledges,
perhaps most significantly,
the pledge that an extra 350 million pounds a week would go to the NHS.
Alongside the political misrepresentations prior to the vote,
there had been a number of problematic claims
made subsequent to the vote.
Here the most dominant narrative has been that Brexit was delivered
by a disenfranchised, left-behind, northern white working class,
who were upset at the processes of economic globalization
and the possibility, or the lack of possibilities,
of progress within the country.
And yet, if we look at the figures,
as Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, has done,
we see a very different picture.
He argues that 52% of the people who voted for Brexit
were from Southern England, not from the North,
59% of people who voted for Brexit
were from the middle class, not the working class.
And from the lowest two social classes,
the proportion of people who voted for Brexit was only 24%.
So the typical Leave voter
was not someone from the northern, white working class.
The typical Leave voter
was propertied, pensioned, well-off
and likely to be
from the white middle class living in Southern England.
Lorenza Antonucci, who's a researcher here in the city,
she's done subsequent follow-up research,
and she's found that there is no association
between self-identifying yourself as working class and voting Leave.
However, there is an association
between self-identifying as middle class and voting Leave.
If we look at the figures for the BME population -
that is the Black and ethnic minority citizens -
we see that 67% of Asians voted to remain,
70% of Muslims voted to remain
and 73% of Afro-Caribbean and black British citizens voted to remain.
If this had been a vote of people who were disenfranchised and upset
at the consequences of economic globalization,
then we would have expected the vote for Brexit
to be much higher amongst these populations,
not least because as the recent race audit has demonstrated,
these are the populations who have suffered disproportionately
as a consequence of such processes.
So if Brexit is not about the white working class,
then what is it about?
I would suggest here
that we need to go back to one of the key refrains
that was part of the discourse during the lead-up to the vote.
And the key refrain at that point
was that we want our country back.
We want national sovereignty.
And the idea that was at play during this time
was the idea that Britain is a nation
and it has a history as a nation.
And yet Britain isn't a nation.
It's never been a nation.
Britain came into being in 1707
through the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland.
Both England and Scotland had colonies prior to Union.
And after Union, they went on to establish the British Empire,
the largest empire that the world has ever seen.
It covered one quarter of the world's earth territory,
and it governed over one fifth of its population.
This political formation stayed in place until 1948,
when as a consequence of forms of decolonization
in the various parts of empire,
the empire transformed into being the Commonwealth.
And then in 1973, we entered the European Economic Community,
the precursor to the EU.
By entering the European Economic Community in 1973,
one of the things that got displaced in our sense of ourselves at that time
was the impact of decolonization.
Decolonization over the late 20th century
was turning Britain from an empire with global status
into a small island.
But we never had to experience what it felt like to be a small island
because we entered the EEC,
and by entering the EEC,
we went on to continue to have status on the world stage.
And so in a sense,
I would suggest that the vote for Brexit
is a vote that represents the delayed resentment at the loss of empire
and at the loss of privileges associated with empire.
It's a vote against the multicultural community that Britain had become.
And this is no way a better evidenced
than the fact that walking down the street,
it hasn't been uncommon in the months after Brexit
for me, as a darker British citizen,
to hear ...
"We voted to leave.
Why haven't you left yet?"
And so in this way, the vote for Brexit
was not just about the status of non-UK EU citizens in Britain.
It wasn't just about our relationship to the European Union.
It was also about the question
of the legitimacy of belonging of those who look different.
To understand this,
we need to understand the history of British citizenship.
Just as many people think of Britain being a nation and not an empire,
people often think
that British citizenship is something that has existed for a very long time.
In fact, British citizenship only came into being in 1948
with the British Nationality Act.
What this act legislated for was two main forms of citizenship.
One was that you could be a citizen of the UK and its colonies.
Note here that there's no separate citizenship for being in the UK
and a separate citizenship for being in the colonies.
It's one common, shared citizenship.
The other form of citizenship is Commonwealth citizenship.
And this is the form of citizenship
that was given to anybody who lived in a country
that had previously been colonized by Britain
and was now in the Commonwealth.
So in 1948,
Britain gave citizenship to an excess of 800 million people
You might wonder, why on earth would any government do that?
Well, remember that at the time,
the direction of movement
was not from the rest of the Commonwealth to Britain.
Empire was established by the migration of Britons to the rest of the world.
And so migration had never been seen to be a problem
up until the point that those citizens from the darker parts of Commonwealth -
that is India, the Caribbean, Pakistan and other places -
started to come to Britain.
Then suddenly, there was a moral panic about colored immigration,
about the effects on jobs, on education, on housing.
The most iconic representation of this period of migration
was the Empire Windrush.
This was a ship
that came from the Caribbean and docked in the Thames,
and 500 West Indians disembarked,
carrying British passports.
Whilst this is presented as iconic of both colored immigration
and also of British multiculturalism,
I would suggest that this is incorrect for two reasons.
First, the British Empire was constituted
by a plethora of languages, peoples and cultures.
The British Empire was already a multicultural entity.
So how could multiculturalism have come to Britain in 1948
when the very imperial form was itself multicultural?
Secondly, the point about this being the beginnings of colored immigration:
Well, the 500 West Indian who came, came as British citizens.
They came carrying British passports,
with the rights to live, work and settle in Britain.
At the same time as Empire Windrush
and the forms of colored immigration
that were going on and that were discussed,
there were other patterns of immigration.
This involved paler migrants,
and these migrations are very rarely discussed.
So in the five years after the end of the second World War,
the British government established the European Voluntary Workers scheme
in order to help rebuild Britain after the devastation wrought by that war.
This brought 100,000 Eastern Europeans
to come and live and work in Britain.
People came from Eastern Europe
and from the labor camps in Italy and Germany.
At the same time, 128,000 Polish migrants
were given the right to live and settle in Britain
as a consequence of their involvement in the Polish Free Army.
100,000 Irish migrants came to Britain annually in this period
to live and work and settle in Britain.
Around the same sort of time, just to put things into perspective,
what we're talking about in terms of Caribbean migration
is 17,000 people.
By the time of the 1961 Census,
5% of the total population of Britain was foreign-born.
Yet only one tenth of it was constituted by darker citizens.
The other nine tenths was made up of paler migrants,
and yet there is not one line of debate in Parliament
about the paler migrants.
The only discussion is on the arrival of the darker citizens,
who came with the rights to live and work in Britain.
The moral panic became so intense during the period of the '60s
that the government ended up passing the Commonwealth Immigration Acts
of '62, '68 and '71.
Each one of these acts progressively took rights away from darker citizens,
to the extent that by the end,
it was near impossible for them to come and exercise their rights -
to come and live and work in Britain.
And yet there was no comment
on the rights of paler migrants and citizens to come.
They continued to be able to come.
So is this racialization of citizenship
that I suggest is so significant and that requires unpacking?
The children and grandchildren of many of the paler migrants who came
eventually came to be understood as British,
in a way that most of the descendants of the Empire Windrush
and those who came from the darker Commonwealth countries never were.
Indeed, not far from here in 1968,
Enoch Powell, in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech,
talked about the dangers of the immigrant descended.
And it's clear
that he wasn't talking about the children of the paler migrants;
rather, he was talking about the children of the darker citizens.
And yet it's precisely their migrant history
that enables many of my white, seemingly English friends
to now apply for EU passports
from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Sweden, France
and maintain their access to the European Union,
whereas I, with my British passport
and my British parents and my British grandparents,
continue to be called a second generation immigrant,
even by people who work on these issues and should know better.
So where do we go from here?
The theme of today is "Perspectives."
And I'd like us to think about what constitutes an adequate perspective -
A perspective on the basis
with which we could develop a healthy politics
and policies that work for the greatest number.
One question that we might ask is
"Does the perspective that's being put forward,
does it properly account for our history,
particularly our shared histories?"
Britain has never been a nation.
It's always been an empire.
Policies are established on the basis of your historical belonging to nation,
not your historical belonging to empire.
This results in the arbitrary exclusion of peoples in the present.
But as we've seen,
Britain has constructed its sense of itself
on the basis of a series of exclusions
by turning some citizens into migrants.
It did this in the 1960s with the Commonwealth Immigration Acts,
and it's doing it in the present with non-UK EU citizens.
We're at a critical juncture
where our political community is being redefined.
It's up to us
to endeavor that it gets redefined in an open, inclusive and generous manner,
that it gets redefined in a way that puts the connections -
both historical and contemporary -
and uses them as the bedrock
for how we go on to develop our political community in the future.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)