Windrush scandal shows ‘Brexitland’ still values immigration and is not hateful of foreigners
People see the grave injustice of treating the West Indians as criminals - people who have been here since the Forties
But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire world view.
It has shattered their defining myth — that while the brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those inhabitants of “Brexitland”, is a seething pit of racism.
For nearly two years the liberal intelligentsia has talked about swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng disgusted with foreigners.
These people yearn for a time when “faces were white”, says Lib Dem leader Vince Cable.
The vote for Brexit was a “whitelash”, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
These mad voters just want “less foreign-looking people on their streets”, said Labour’s Diane Abbott.
The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violence after the referendum. Columnists lapped it up.
Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.
It was a lie, of course.
With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows.
People see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the Forties and Fifties, and given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971.
The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or, in some cases, deported — because rules introduced when Prime Minister May was Home Secretary stipulate all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace.
On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration. They simply want some say over it.
There is a self-serving narrative being promoted by old elites, for whom Brexit was evidence of the public’s bovine nature and their message has been consistent: “You are borderline fascists so it should be us, not you, who make the big political decisions.” Indeed, the great irony exposed by the Windrush affair is that both the May set and elite Remainers opposed to the PM share a similar, prejudiced view of ordinary Brits as anti-migrant.
May’s tough talk on migrants is designed to pander to what she views as a racist audience, just as elite Remainers’ post-referendum hand-wringing has been driven by their fear of the racist crowd.
Both May and her Remainer critics mistake public concern over the porousness of borders in the 21st century as hostility to migrants.
In truth, public concern over mass immigration is driven largely by a concern for protecting the integrity of the nation, against the encroachment of a class, whether it is in Brussels or London, that continually tells us we live in a post-borders, post-nation, “global citizenship” world in which anyone can be a Brit simply by turning up.
Sensitive to how this weakens the nation and their identity, many Britons see this elitist promotion of the erasure of borders as an assault on democracy more than a promotion of liberal values.
They do not, for the most part, hate migrants. And they do not view UK citizenship as a white-person thing. To most of them, the Windrush generation are as British as they are.
Their hostility is to the removal of the question of immigration from the democratic sphere and to the new post-borders ideology that leads to a dilution of nationhood. And, in turn, to a weakening of popular sovereignty, a questioning of the value of democracy itself and to the end of citizenship. The Windrush scandal has exposed the extent to which every section of the British political elite fails to see how central control over one’s borders is to nationhood, democracy and citizenship.
The scandal of the mistreatment itself is a product of the May set’s inability to make a national democratic project of resuming control over the nation’s borders so, instead, she effectively outsourced border control to landlords, doctors and employers, all of whom were charged with checking whether individuals were citizens.
This outsourcing spoke to an unwillingness to challenge in a more direct, institutional manner the erosion of British borders following the elevation of the virtues of migration.
May described this outsourcing as a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, but this tough talk disguised the broader cowardice of a Tory machine that would not firm up borders for fear of offending new elites.
On the other side, the angry response to the Windrush scandal from the Remainers signals their desire to remove immigration from any democratic consideration.
Their pro-EU moral myopia means their chief concern is not with the Windrush people themselves, but rather with using this affair to make the case yet again for less discussion on immigration.
Any public discussion is bad because so many people are racist, they say.
The Windrush episode shows the folly of trying to control immigration, they claim, when, in fact, it shows the thoughtlessness of a Home Office that introduced new rules (fine) but failed to consider how those rules might impact on a significant section of the immigrant population that has been here for decades (not fine).
The Windrush people are British citizens. And for this to mean something we need to argue for the right of the nation and its people to control their borders and determine their destiny.
It isn’t Remainers who can make the case for the citizenship of the Windrush people, they have abandoned the ideal of citizenship in favour of a new managerial elitism that treats the public as a problem to be controlled rather than consulted.
No, it is Brexiteers who still understand what this means, and who are even willing to be demeaned for the “crime” of voting for democratic citizenship against technocracy, who can really stand up for our Windrush fellow citizens.