Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso) by Priyamvada Gopal
Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso) by Maya Goodfellow
The global anti-racist uprising of 2020, driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, has forced Britain into a confrontation with its imperial history. Racist binaries that were developed and established during the age of empire continue to frame and distort our collective sense of self and of racialised “others” both abroad and at home. We are rational, they are irrational; we are modern, they are mired in their backward traditions; we love freedom, they despise it. What is at stake is not some “offence” caused by the crimes and iconographies of the past. Rather, there is a need to develop a true understanding of empire that can help to address and dismantle the racist structures of today. Two recent books speak to these interrelated tasks.
Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent tackles one of the most persistent imperial myths, that values of liberty and democracy “grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world”. This myth of Britain as the bringer of liberty to less enlightened peoples is, in C. L. R. James’s words, “an organic part of the thought processes of the nation, and to disgorge it requires a herculean effort”. This is where Gopal’s contribution lies.
Insurgent Empire illuminates the role that peoples of the global south have played in the development of ideas of freedom – including in the west itself – within the context of anti-colonial struggles. As Gopal shows, while the British mainstream was largely deaf to voices of resistance in the south, British critics of imperialism often heard these voices and adjusted their politics accordingly.
By examining moments of imperial crisis – from the Indian uprising of 1857 to the rapid decolonisation of the post-war era – she shows how colonised peoples generated their own impetus for liberation, rather than learning the concepts of democracy under the unlikely tutelage of empire. Indeed, many significant British writers, politicians and activists had their understanding of the principles of equality and freedom enriched and expanded through their encounters with colonised subjects, in a process Gopal refers to as “reverse tutelage”.
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Rebellion was as inescapable a feature of the colonial epoch as the violence of the system itself. In 1865, an uprising against British rule in Jamaica was met with extensive state terror. Emancipation from slavery had proven a hollow victory for many, replaced by the servitude of wage labour. As the colonial governor’s brutal methods came under increasing scrutiny in London, numerous public figures rallied to his cause, among them Charles Dickens, who decried what he called “platform-sympathy with the black – or the native, or the devil – afar off, and platform indifference to our countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery”. Given the efforts of today’s jingoistic historians to talk up Britain’s role in the abolition of the slave trade, it is instructive to note the passionate commitment to the exploitation of black labour that remained pervasive among the British elite decades after their slaves were supposedly liberated.
The Jamaican rebels did, however, enjoy some support among the wider English public. In Manchester, at a meeting attracting several hundreds, speakers compared the crushing of the uprising to the Peterloo massacre of 1819 and identified common cause with the Jamaican rebels against a common enemy: the British ruling class. It was well understood that the likes of Dickens were denigrating the Jamaicans for no greater crime than the latter’s refusal to submit to wage slavery. As one trade unionist wrote, “Those of our countrymen who, in any dispute between white and black, confine their fellow-feeling to that side where they find complexions like their own, are not to be trusted.”
By the early 20th century, a new generation of anti-imperial intellectuals and campaigners was emerging from the colonised world, subscribing to a dynamic, eclectic mix of Marxism and nationalism. They were often drawn to London, in part because forms of political activity were permitted there that were forbidden under the harsh anti-sedition laws imposed in the colonies. These included the likes of C. L. R. James, George Padmore and the Indian-born MP Shapurji Saklatvala, who were now taking the spirit of rebellion into the heart of empire.
Saklatvala won Battersea North as a communist in 1922, held it for seven years, and used his seat in parliament to launch powerful attacks on the colonial enterprise. He dismissed the idea that Asia was more prone to despotic rule and attributed this stereotype to “Western ignorance” of their own colonies. Indeed, any improvements in the lives of Indian workers under British rule had not been “granted” through enlightened benevolence but “extorted by the workers fighting inch by inch against you”. Above all, Saklatvala urged a spirit of solidarity between the British working class and the colonised peoples of India, chiding parts of the British left for their “unwisdom, apathy or arrogance” in failing to explore this possibility. For his admirable efforts, state espionage agencies bestowed upon Saklatvala the enviable description of “one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England”.
Elsewhere, Gopal notes a “striking correlation” between the contributions of the Trinidadian writer George Padmore to the New Leader, the journal of the Independent Labour Party, and that paper’s shift toward a more radical editorial line. Padmore’s insistence that any serious analysis of capitalist imperialism needed to account for the structural role of racism clearly had a real influence on his white comrades.
In the empire’s dying days, “reverse tutelage” extended beyond the British left and into some corners of the mainstream. Gopal refers to the Oxford academic Margery Perham, whose paternalistic views were shaken, if not wholly dislodged, by the imperial retreat under fire. As she was forced to admit, “the desire for equality, for self-expression, for freedom from any kind of external mastery and its stigma of inferiority” came from the colonised peoples themselves, provoking this moment of self-doubt:
“People of my generation were taught from their schooldays that our empire was a splendid achievement, conducted as much for the good of its many peoples as for our own . . . Have we been utterly blind? Was the idealism we so often professed merely a cloak in which we tried to hide our complete self-interest from the world, and indeed from ourselves?”
As Gopal points out, “myths matter because, unlike crude propaganda, they often drive action through sincerely held views.” In tackling one of imperialism’s most persistent myths, she has produced a profoundly illuminating piece of work, rich in characters and detail. “Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of this nation’s imperial history and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience,” she says, “but rather agents whose resistance not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped some British ideas about freedom and who could be free.” She notes with regret that women’s voices were too often absent from the historical record of anti-colonial resistance, and hence from her account. However, this is partly compensated for by the book itself, with which Gopal takes her place as a vital critical voice alongside James, Padmore and Saklatvala.
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Gopal’s account of racist colonialism and resistance provides powerful context for Maya Goodfellow’s Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, which analyses British immigration policy, through the 20th century up to the present day. The UK’s immigration policy is one of imperial racism’s most harmful legacies. Reading the two books together, it’s clear how the racial binaries Gopal works to deconstruct have underpinned the systematic exclusion of various denigrated “others” today, always presented as posing some sort of threat to the innocent and upstanding British.
The UK’s “hostile environment” regime, after which Goodfellow’s book is named, led to the wrongful detention and deportation of hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, mainly from the Caribbean, and is thought to have affected tens of thousands of people from the so-called Windrush generation. The regime effectively imposed a presumption of guilt on people who had come to the UK legitimately as citizens of the empire, often as children. For lack of sufficient documentation, many were refused essential medical care and lost their jobs, while some were deported to countries they barely knew.
Yet, despite the huge outcry when the Windrush scandal was exposed, much of the regime remains in place. The policy was effectively bipartisan, as the Labour opposition had abstained on the 2014 immigration bill, introduced by Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary. Britain’s institutionally racist immigration politics have long been a constant, irrespective of which party happens to be in power.
Goodfellow shows how three key themes have been ever present in the modern history of British anti-immigration politics. First, a tendency to blame immigrants for all manner of social ills, including the racism that they are subjected to. Second, the (often covertly) racialised nature of the policies adopted and legislation imposed. Third, the habit of justifying all this by invoking the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary people”.
In 1955, Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested to his cabinet that “Keep England White” should be the next Tory general election slogan. Without explicitly expressing itself in such terms, the 1962 Immigration Act brought in by his successors was drafted so as to effectively obstruct people of colour from arriving from the empire and Commonwealth. Two years later in 1964, Labour’s general election win was marred by the loss of a previously safe Midlands seat to a Tory who had traded in nakedly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and effectively endorsed the slogan, “If you want a n***** for your neighbour, vote Labour”. The Wilson government’s response was to bring in what Goodfellow describes as “some of the country’s most poisonous immigration legislation to date”, including the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which effectively targeted Asians in newly independent former colonies in Africa, who had hitherto been British citizens.
The result of this succession of legislation was that, by 1980, visitors from the new Commonwealth and Pakistan were 30 times more likely to be refused entry into Britain than those from the old Commonwealth of predominantly white nations. Until a year earlier, the state had been carrying out “virginity tests” on women entering the country from south Asia. Their presence was welcomed in principle as it was thought to reduce the likelihood of mixed relationships and marriages between south Asian men and white women, but this was predicated on first “proving” whether or not the new arrivals were already married. The barbaric practice was only dropped under pressure from grassroots campaigns led by south Asian women.
The same broad themes continued into the New Labour era, where the major targets were those seeking asylum predominantly from countries in the global south, as well as racialised minorities already in the UK. The philosophy prefigured Theresa May’s hostile environment – the aim was to drive down the numbers of people wanting to come to Britain by making immigration as unattractive as possible. Immigration minister Mike O’Brien set the tone in 1997, telling the Daily Mail he wanted to show that the UK isn’t a “soft touch” for “gypsies” who were “seeking an easy life”.
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What followed was an increasingly punitive, tortuous asylum and immigration process that seemed virtually rigged to frustrate, demoralise and defeat ordinary and often highly vulnerable people who had done nothing worse than seek the prospect of a decent life. In 2001, Shokrolah Khaleghi, a former political prisoner in Iran, died of an overdose after his asylum claim was rejected. In 2003, Israfil Shiri, another Iranian, died after setting himself on fire, having been thrown out of his council house and denied benefits. Goodfellow names other similar examples.
Perhaps the most shocking and now eerily familiar case is that of Jimmy Mubenga, a married father of five, who died in 2010 while being deported to Angola after 17 years in the UK. Mubenga’s final words, while being restrained by guards working for the contractor G4S, were reportedly “I can’t breathe”. That same year, Labour’s general election manifesto boasted that net migration and the number of asylum claims had fallen, under a section headed “crime and immigration”.
Hostile Environment shows how modern anti-migrant discourse grew out of the early 1980s New Right, who pitted the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary people” against an out-of-touch metropolitan elite. Conveniently absent from this picture are migrants and racialised minorities, who have yet to acquire the status of “ordinary people”, and the racism of the British political class itself. The “legitimate concerns” discourse has been wielded very effectively in recent years by disproportionately upper-middle-class and almost exclusively white journalists and politicians to shout down any critique of the increasingly dark turn that anti-immigration politics has taken.
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The key to Britain’s anti-immigration politics is the dehumanisation of the migrant. Goodfellow’s work, like Gopal’s, is most powerful where it takes this on. While debunking the economic arguments against immigration, Goodfellow also makes clear that migrants should be valued as human beings, not for their economic utility. Moreover, she points to cases where precarious migrant workers have organised, fought for and won better pay and conditions, stressing that they should be recognised as a part of Britain’s working class with their own stake in its struggles.
Throughout, Hostile Environment does something simple but urgently necessary: treating those demonised by the political class as ordinary people with their own legitimate concerns. She tells us their names, quotes them at length, and conveys their stories with sensitivity. Hers is a work of diligent scholarship, but also of great humanity, which holds up a mirror to a society that may finally be ready to start truly looking at itself.
But Britain, as Goodfellow explictly states, will not be able to recognise, let alone dismantle its racist present without facing up to the realities and legacies of its imperial past. It is here that Hostile Environment dovetails most clearly with Insurgent Empire. Goodfellow demonstrates the ways in which British immigration policy has been shaped by racialised exclusion. Gopal shows us how this exclusion – along with racialised binaries and the dehumanisation of “others” – can be carefully taken apart and replaced with better and more truthful stories.
Both books help us toward a future where the lives of the hitherto excluded might finally be treated as though they matter.
From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.
