Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State 9780745342030, 9780745342047, 9781786807625, 9781786807649, 9781786807632

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Empire’s Endgame

Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King's College London. She is the author of Deadly and Slick: How Sex makes Race in Postcolonial Britain (Verso, 2021). Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London. She is the author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008) and Traffick (Pluto, 2005). Nadine El-Enany is Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, and the author of Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (MUP, 2020). Adam Elliott-Cooper is a Researcher in Social Sciences at Greenwich University. He is the author Black Resistance to British Policing (MUP). Dalia Gebrial is the editor of a special issue of the Historical Materialism journal on identity politics and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2017). Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Color Line (Pluto, 2019). Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and coeditor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). He also blogs at The Disorder of Things. Luke de Noronha is an academic and writer working at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (MUP, 2020).

FireWorks Series editors: Gargi Bhattacharyya, Professor of Sociology, University of East London Anitra Nelson, Associate Professor, Honorary Principal Fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne Wilf Sullivan, Race Equality Office, Trade Union Congress

Also available Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies Ursula Huws Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Coronavirus Crisis Edited by Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar

Fireworks

Empire’s Endgame Racism and the British State Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha

First published 2021 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha 2021 The right of Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 4203 0 978 0 7453 4204 7 978 1 7868 0762 5 978 1 7868 0764 9 978 1 7868 0763 2

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Contents

Series Prefacevii Prefaceviii Introduction: Racialised Mythologies in Times of Neglect, Cruelty and Expulsion

1

PART 1  RACIALISING THE CRISIS 1 Windrush 2 ‘Knife Crime’: Prevention and Order 3 Gang Land

19 30 41

PART 2  THE PERSISTENCE OF NATIONALISM 4 Nationalist Convulsions 5 Progressive Patriotism 6 The Limits of Representation

57 68 84

PART 3  STATE PATRIARCH 7 Our Heart Belongs to Daddy 8 ‘Pakistani Grooming Gangs’ 9 (Powerful) Men Behaving Badly

103 113 126

vi  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

PART 4  SEND IN THE ARMY 10 Longing for Authority 11 Militarisation on the Mainland 12 Zero-sum Game

135 149 161

PART 5  WHAT NOW? 13 Covid-19: A Real Crisis 14 Shared Grief, Hope and Resistance

173 186

Notes201 Index214

Series Preface Addressing urgent questions about how to make a just and sustainable world, the Fireworks series throws a new light on contemporary movements, crises and challenges. Each book is written to extend the popular imagination and unmake dominant framings of key issues. Launched in 2020, the series offers guides to matters of social equity, justice and environmental sustainability. FireWorks books provide short, accessible and authoritative commentaries that illuminate underground political currents or marginalised voices, and highlight political thought and writing that exists substantially in languages other than English. Their authors seek to ignite key debates for twenty-first-century politics, economics and society. FireWorks books do not assume specialist knowledge, but offer up-to-date and well-researched overviews for a wide range of politically aware readers. They provide an opportunity to go deeper into a subject than is possible in current news and online media, but are still short enough to be read in a few hours. In these fast-changing times, these books provide snappy and thought-provoking interventions on complex political issues. As times get dark, FireWorks offer a flash of light to reveal the broader social landscape and economic structures that form our political moment.

Fireworks

Preface

This book is the product of a deep sense that we cannot and do not want to make sense of the world alone. In our individual academic projects, we consider state racism from the perspectives of the disciplines we work in: law, anthropology, geography, international relations, sociology, cultural studies and literature. In our political organising, we try to push back against the state, to imagine new horizons of possibility outside of its logic, and to form bonds of solidarity capable of challenging its power. In collaborating on this book, we sought to create a space apart from the pressures of academic research and without the urgency of activism; a space to think, together, about the changing face of racism in Britain.  As we were working on the book, friends and colleagues often asked how, as a group of eight, we were writing together. More than once we were asked what we were up to. Was this some strange new cult? Who was ventriloquising who? The actuality was less dramatic. Rather than divide into smaller groups which would each produce a chapter, we opted for an anarchic mix of collective thinking, noisy and very funny discussion, silent writing and remote editing. We usually met for a few hours in one of our offices (or via video link during the Covid-19 lockdown), with some questions in mind, usually generated from an initial exchange of gossip or fury. As our discussions evolved, someone would map the conversation on a whiteboard or

PREFACE  ◆ ix

flipchart paper, tracing the connections and keeping track of key points. Realising we were running out of time, we would wind down the discussion to write, separately, in silence (exam conditions!) for an hour or so. We would then collate the pages and read through each other’s work. The more we worked like this, the more synergy our writing took on. Our aim was that when we read the final product, we would no longer be able to recall who had written what. In a landscape of personal brands and an academic culture that values celebrity over collaboration, working against the imperative to be a distinct, singular voice offered us a different approach to the challenge of writing. Collaboration also helped us to cope with the dizzying instability of life in contemporary Britain. We wrote the book between March 2019 and July 2020, during which time the mood music of authoritarian nationalism grew louder and louder. Meeting in person was a way to listen more closely to that music, to try to distil the relationship between what was being said and what was being done by the state, and to examine the cacophony of timeline media by placing it at a remove, if only for a few hours. Critical inquiry was a kind of group therapy, as the final throes of Theresa May’s short, disastrous premiership gave way to Johnsonism. The book’s title, Empire’s Endgame, reflects our starting point. This project began life as an homage to an earlier collectively authored book, The Empire Strikes Back, published in 1982 by a group at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. We wanted to explore what a collective project to analyse and dismantle state racism might look like in our differently troubled and

x  ◆   EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

troublesome time. One parallel has been the dominance of the fantasy blockbuster in our collective cinematic imagination, something Greta Thunberg has decried, with some accuracy, by saying: How can we tackle climate change if the adults are obsessed over a children’s movie series based on Legos?1 And so the ‘Endgame’ in our title is less a clever reference to the Samuel Beckett play and more a reference to the Avengers film. Avengers: Endgame is, infamously, the much marketed crescendo of a series of films depicting the Marvel universe. Through the second decade of the twenty-first century, an extensive series of Marvel superhero movies – plus a smaller parallel DC universe and a resurrection of the Star Wars series – dominated English-language cinema culture. As the world became increasingly chaotic, with an end to any pretence that there existed a political class fit to address the urgent and deadly challenges of forced migration, internal war and climate catastrophe, the displacement and spectacularisation of collective fears into a neo-mythic world of superheroes felt both symptomatic and all too understandable. Yet, despite the will to distraction, the endgame analysis of Marvel also echoed our own. In both of our accounts, and in the face of violence and climate disaster, something cataclysmic seemed to be on its way. Underneath all the bravado and show of the immensely powerful, there was weakness and the threat of imminent obsolescence. For all the fanfares of a remade authoritarian nationalism, all the buffoonish

PREFACE  ◆ xi

showing off and refashioned fantasies of omniscience, the period we examine is one of imperial decline. The ascendancy of authoritarian nationalism that we trace here – however triumphant the national mood music – only makes sense through the lens of decline. We are familiar with the many premature announcements of end-times, and laughed about this often in our time together, but remain convinced that we are witnessing, at last and with so many casualties, the endgame of one imperial phase. Of course, and again learning from Marvel, we are also aware that the endgame itself can take a long time to play out. Nevertheless, and in the spirit of trying to think historically about an all too troubling present, what we present here is a peculiarly British experience of endings. There are, no doubt, global parallels. Clearly there are other buffoons, although refracted through the class performances of other cultures. There are other places where the state remakes itself by rendering populations unintelligible or disentitled. Other forms of almost similar (but not quite) collapse of our planet on fire. At the same time, what we describe in the following chapters should be understood as the last gasp of one imperial formation, with all the excess, irrationality and clapped-out posturing of a former power’s demise. We started out hoping that this endgame might, eventually, open the possibility of something better. Now, as we complete our work, it looks as if a lot more of us might have to die first. Another impetus for this work was our collective desire to extricate ourselves from the relentless immediacy of the internet, with far too much political energy taken

xii  ◆   EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

up in digesting, decrying and responding to non-debate via social media. Working together was also a way of quietening that noise and pausing to reassess what we felt the noise could tell us about the larger political landscape, with all of its dangers and possibilities. We’re not immune to the confected dramas of social and timeline media; indeed, many of our conversations began with one of us enraged at the latest scandal dividing anti-racist Twitter. But gathering together in person to think, write and plot together offered some respite from the atomising effects of digital life. Taking time to write sometimes felt like an indulgence, given the scale of our political and ecological crises. But while none of us believe writing or thinking is any substitute for political action, this project has offered us some sustenance for the messy work of organising. We hope something here sustains you in taking action too.

Introduction: Racialised Mythologies in Times of Neglect, Cruelty and Expulsion

Living in a world long disfigured by the violent, world-making force of racism, we have no choice but to be anti-racist. However, to act effectively against racism, we need to be able to describe it, to keep up with its shifting forms. As Cedric Robinson puts it: ‘Race presents all the appearance of stability. History, however, compromises this fixity. Race is mercurial – deadly and slick.’1 Cultures and practices of racism are rooted (and routed) in empire and yet they are constantly shifting in form and function. Racism is historically specific. We therefore need to ask how racial meanings and hierarchies are made and remade in our times. This book is our attempt to describe how racism has been working its deadly magic in contemporary Britain over the last few years. Because we view racism as historically specific and messy, we have found it necessary to map some of the complex relations between empire, racist culture, state practices and political economy. This means connecting the most overt manifestations of racist culture – the name calling, the racist street violence, the zealous anti-immigrant politics – to the shifting practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty.

2  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

Britain is not a happy place. The market-oriented prosperity promised by Thatcherism and New Labour has proved for many to be hollow. While some aspects of the post-war consensus remain influential and continue to be circulated as the underlying common sense of UK political life, in reality the NHS and council homes that defined the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s are being privatised and stripped to the bone, accelerating the crises in housing, health and social care. The austerity imposed on other parts of the welfare state which followed the 2008 financial crisis has brought increased hardship and frustration, through both a lack of services and cuts to public sector jobs. On top of this, a deregulated labour market, zero-hour contracts and the gig economy mean that work, if you can get it, is precarious and low paid. In this context, reactionary nationalism is mobilised for political gain, and migrants, whether constructed as workers or scroungers, documented or illegal, have shouldered much of the blame for finance capitalism’s fiscal calamities. A nostalgia for empire and the euphoria of world war victory has displaced demands for a return to post-war welfarism.2 The crisis of legitimacy for governments that cannot provide the jobs and prosperity promised by market-led growth has been partially reconciled by new covenants, promises to protect the nation from violent crime, terrorism and immigrants.  In the following chapters we trace how shifting ideological repertoires of race and nation legitimate new forms of state power and practice in the context of this ‘organised abandonment’.3 Many of the questions which frame this book take the earlier work of cultural studies as their prompt and guide – particularly that of Stuart

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 3

Hall, Paul Gilroy and others working at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.4 We are interested in how crises of political legitimacy are articulated in relation to themes of race, cultural difference, law and order, militarism, nationalism, gender, sexuality and the family – often expressed in profoundly visceral and violent registers. We recognise that shifts in economic relations fundamentally shape political, ideological and cultural formations, and that crises of capital accumulation and profitability organise the more immediate terrain of political struggle. However we refuse the class reductionism which imagines that political interventions need focus only on the ‘economic base’, and all else will follow, and we reject the view that racism is a straightforward effect of economic crisis.5 We are interested in the political practices and logics that work through race, that signal race explicitly or implicitly, and that make and remake race in the present. This is why we ask throughout the book: what kind of state do we have now, and how is its programme of cruelty, neglect and expulsion justified ideologically? When trying to understand race and racism in Britain today, we need to analyse how racist state practices – immigration controls, counter-terror measures and criminal justice policies – seem to address people’s real problems and lived experiences. In other words, we need to think about the relationship between state racism and the making of political subjectivities. This project of making and remaking political subjectivities cannot be understood without attention to the place of (post)imperial racial

4  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

anxieties and the sense of pervasive loss that animates political imaginations. Our argument is not simply that racism tricks people into blaming their economic hardship on racialised outsiders. This is true but it is too flat. Beyond ‘false consciousness’ arguments, we are interested in the kinds of affects and political subjectivities that are brought into being through practices and representations of state neglect, cruelty and racialised expulsion. These practices do not only make racists, they also produce political subjects who long for authority, closure and certainty in ways which exceed the racial and implicate all of us. In our view, these desires and frustrations are inevitably shaped by the digital character of so much political and social life today, and thus our analysis of racism is also about how people communicate and imagine collectively on social media.  Mapping this terrain is far from straightforward. Racialised crises reveal the fault lines of a wider destabilisation, and thus the difficulty of even describing racism is a measure of our collective confusion in these unsettling times. That said, there is value in describing and drawing connections, even as the ground moves beneath our feet. For us, the return (if it ever went away) of race as an organising term in a time of crisis is the opening question not the closing answer. In part, this stems from a shared belief that defeating the dehumanising violence of racism requires an agility and openness to surprise, because the one thing our enemies do well, do better than us, is to retain the element of surprise. The weary cynicism of anti-racists who proclaim that they have seen it all before, that racism is endless, timeless and monolithic, prevents

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 5

us from seeing how things change. The point is not to say how things are always the same but to understand how we and ours continue to be shafted in spite of other changes. Things might still be awful but they are not awful in the same way. This, then, is where we begin – with the shared belief that it is not so easy to understand the times we are in. In particular, strange and multiple remakings of racism have taken on a heightened significance, but connecting these eruptions to economic and national crisis is no simple task. From this difficult starting point, this book seeks to deepen our understanding of racism in Britain, beyond Tory-bashing and outside the restrictive tempos set by public scandal and parliamentary squabbling. Hopefully this book also offers some tools for moving beyond accounts of racism that become stuck documenting structural inequalities or interpersonal humiliations, realities which should not be taken lightly, but which cannot, on their own, offer us a way out analytically. We hope the book provides some useful tools for thinking the problem differently, for understanding the present moment in new ways and, ultimately and most importantly, for building analytical connections that can inform political struggle. Before we begin our analysis of racialised folk devils in contemporary Britain, we thought it would be useful to explain what we mean by the neglectful state, which frames our argument in the subsequent chapters. In the next section, we offer a brief account of how neglect, cruelty and expulsion have defined British state practices over the past ten years of austerity. 

6  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

* * * ‘You cut, we bleed’ was the cri de cœur popularised by the feminist direct action group Sisters Uncut in the second decade of the twenty-first century, highlighting the relationship between austerity and gender-based violence. While it can be read as a direct demand to re-invest in services for survivors of domestic violence, this powerful assertion also speaks to the wider context of state abandonment and violence. It challenges a post-financial crisis common sense, in which those most in need of welfare support now face scrutiny, neglect and criminalisation – or a combination of all three. In more ways than one, cuts lead to bloodshed, and while these new cruelties disproportionately impact racialised people, the resulting poverty, despair, violence and death are by no means confined to them.  Unlike some of its European neighbours, Britain did not experience austerity as an external imposition. There were no European Bank bailout conditions to meet, no fraught negotiations with the Troika. Instead, Britain’s twenty-first-century austerity has been coded in terms of regaining control after the alleged profligacy of an earlier New Labour administration. As a result, British austerity has been narrated as an expression of sovereignty – ‘we are all in it together’ – as opposed to an external imposition undermining sovereignty, as in Greece and Italy. Despite this, the punishing features of twenty-first-century austerity in Britain are similar to those of other austeritystricken European economies. What is distinctive is the folding of ‘austerity’ (always presented as a necessity, an emergency response that is

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 7

beyond political challenge) into a longer-standing British political narrative and a decades-long attack on any vestige of the state as a redistributive actor. Britain had deregulated its labour market under the Blair government, proclaiming the benefits of ‘flexibility’ at work. The UK economy fell into its dangerous reliance on financial services in this period, a factor that impacted heavily following the 2008 crash, when income inequality increased further, making Britain one of the most unequal societies in Europe – establishing what Danny Dorling calls ‘peak inequality’.6 All of this began long before the arrival of post-crash austerity. Indeed, the demonisation of welfare recipients similarly predates austerity, and it is these economic and social policies that together set the stage for the breaking apart of cultures of mutuality. In an echo of the enforced austerity imposed in parts of southern Europe, Britain has seen a massive rolling back of state spending more broadly. In particular, services administered through local government have been slashed, with an extreme impact on libraries, children’s centres, youth services and support for the vulnerable, including notable cuts to services relating to domestic violence, mental health and disability support. Alongside this squeeze on services and public spaces, the terms of state support have changed. Conditionality has become central to the benefits system – claimants must fulfil various demands in order to receive assistance, with requirements ranging from evidencing an active pursuit of employment and attending assessment meetings, to undertaking unpaid work placements. This has been pursued independently of the pressures of austerity. Taken together, the long-stand-

8  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

ing political campaign to delegitimise claiming welfare benefits, even for the most vulnerable and including those in very low-paid work, and the stripping back of state spending, have worked together to create levels of poverty and hardship unseen for many decades. When we refer to the neglectful, as opposed to the welfarist, state, this is what we mean. We have lived through several decades of the state in retreat, except in its punitive functions. Healthcare and state schools remain national structures of provision, but even here the segmentation through restructuring (health trusts) and creeping privatisation (academies) reframes our contact with these services. We might think of ourselves as becoming accustomed to the radically transformed landscape of a post-crash global economy. This means that some devastating practices of dividing, rationing and excluding have become pretty much institutionalised across the board. Think here of welfare sanctioning, societal tolerance for street homelessness and food insecurity, the assorted practices of bordering, and perhaps the end of demands for a ‘good job’ by mainstream political parties. Taken together these represent a lessening of expectations and so a grudging acceptance that life’s hardships will not, and perhaps cannot, be ameliorated by state intervention. Meanwhile, we can observe a greater tolerance for state-administered punishment for those deemed lesser or alien – the criminal, the migrant, the benefits ‘cheat’. Assessments and algorithms connect the police and border officials who lurk in what remains of the welfare state, while hospitals, schools and community

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 9

centres become sites where ‘terrorists’, ‘gangsters’ and ‘illegals’ can be best rooted out. At least two generations have been disciplined to expect (and receive) little or nothing from the state except punishment or the threat of punishment. While claiming subsistence benefits, such as the dole or housing benefit, always included humiliation before bureaucratic power, the process of claiming the means of survival today has been made increasingly onerous, requiring repeated evidence, and exposing the claimant to the risk of further punishment if the demands of the claims process are mis-performed. Of the 130,000 preventable deaths arising from austerity,7 the most tragically sickening stories recount the impact of benefit sanctions as a form of social murder: the cutting off of all means of sustenance, systemic ‘failures’ leading to emaciated bodies, empty fridges and signs of self-harm. The suicides. These are tragedies coming not from direct cuts, although the squeezing of resources shapes the practices. Instead, suffering is inflicted as punishment for failure to adhere to the terms of conditionality. We are interested in how this threat of punishment for expressing need reshapes popular consciousness. Previously, studies of British racism would interpret the punishment of some as a form of reassurance to others. It was thought that those who ‘belonged’ were those who were not being punished, and who were therefore invited to identify with the state that acted to exclude Others in their name. But are there any constituencies at present who feel embraced by a sense of belonging that is staged by affirmative state practices? It seems hard to imagine.

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In an earlier moment of cultural studies there is the sense that in the 1960s and 1970s (perhaps even into the 1980s) the response to tense ‘race relations’ vacillated between more policing and carceral punishment, on the one hand, and various kinds of social reform on the other. Scholars associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies described the former as repressive and the latter as preventive. Now we have entered a period where social reform is off the table altogether. There is much less talk about lack of investment in communities, or deprivation as a cause of crime or unrest. Instead the approach to prevention simply involves more social control. This approach is based on containment and partial or complete exclusion via prevention orders, ASBOs, omnipresent surveillance, digital technologies of control and, as we will explore shortly, pre-criminal forms of punishment. In effect, there is no such thing as inclusion or belonging in positive terms, only in negative terms. And there is no social reform option. Only the promise of security for some (rarely fulfilled), and more coercion, prevention and repression for others. The neglectful and/or punitive state employs long-standing practices of racialised exclusion, punishment and scapegoating, but the terms of secure belonging are much more unstable than they were before. There remains a spectacular element to state racism, a familiar theatrics in which some are monstered as an example to and entertainment for others. Yet the harshness of the times also rebalances this process away from the pleasures of racist spectacle (‘these abject people are nothing like us and this is what they deserve’) and towards the increasingly explicit

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 11

threat of racist example (‘there is little that distinguishes me and mine from these abject people; what is done to them could be done to us and this realisation further fuels my rage’). In recent memory, and in particular in the first ten to 15 years of the twenty-first century, we observed manifold attacks on allegedly unproductive groups, particularly welfare claimants defined as ‘scroungers’. These attacks appeared to be central to the justification for the further retrenchment of the welfare state, austerity and increasingly conditional access to public goods. But after over a decade of austerity the terms of exclusion and belonging have changed. The British public is well aware that the majority of the poor and the majority of those dependent on food banks are actually working but in menial, low-paid jobs. If not in the grind of poverty pay, the burgeoning poor are the recipients of the innovative punishments of the welfare state, a fall into abjection which increasing numbers must fear. In this shift from an external social enemy to internalised fear of abjection, some of these arguments about ‘idle benefit scroungers’ have lost their popular appeal. The spectacle of the ‘scrounger’ seems of another time, occasionally resurrected by one or other new right-winger eager for clicks, but no longer a reliable hook for popular rage. In their place, ever-present racialised threats have to come to carry even more of the ideological load. In other words, we are suggesting that after ten years of brutal austerity, the welfare-bashing of ‘idle whites’ has lost much of its resonance and ideological efficacy. As a result, racism and nativism are being enlisted to do more work as

12  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

the rightward political forces seek to capture the loyalties of dispossessed white Britons by emphasising their ‘nativeness’ and besiegement by the nation’s enemies. And all of this despite an ongoing confusion, demonstrated by Brexit, about what the terms of nativeness and nationalism might be in this time. In this strange moment when political parties of the right seem to offer few or no concrete promises, and the Conservative Party can win a general election with the slimmest pretence of a manifesto, we might surmise that the privations of austerity and a socio-economic system structured to maintain extreme inequality have become recoded as a loss of racialised power and prestige. Material hardship and the humiliations associated with showing need threaten to unravel the ‘wages of whiteness’. We borrow this term from W.E.B. Du Bois, who posited that racial identification offered working-class whites a sense of racial superiority to ‘compensate’ for their exploitation and prevent them from finding common cause with black workers.8 The racialised nationalism of this moment, then, is one that redirects the very real disappointment and dispossession arising from economic crisis, the fragmentation of the welfare state and the doubling down of punitive state practices. Multiple privation is re-articulated as a fall from grace. And grace is misremembered as a state of happy racialised prestige. The strong sense that we might not all make it and, perhaps, that we are not supposed to, seems to range across the fears articulated by racists about territory and culture, by schoolchildren about the planet, by the government about global pandemics, and by everyone in

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 13

the struggle to make ends meet. Our fear is an outcome of state practices of engineered neglect, so that we learn to fight and fear each other in the contest for the means of life. Something here is also aligned to the emergence of a global economy which seems to render ever increasing numbers of people disposable. It feels different from the disposability of people during violent periods of colonialism and global war in previous centuries. There is an ‘end-of-the-worldism’ that seems to characterise our dark times. As should be evident from this brief discussion, our view is that there is no simple causal relationship between the economic and the cultural. It is not simply that economic realities determine racist culture – there is always struggle, negotiation, setbacks, contradictions and unpredictability. The mood of our times, structured by the economic, is one of atomisation, anxiety and unsteadiness. The lived experience of crisis makes the racist politics of fear and expulsion resonate in new ways. In the chapter which follows this introduction, we apply some of these points to help explain the racialised mythologies and most salient ‘folk devils’ that have taken hold in British politics over the last few years. In the context of inequality and precarity, austerity without end, and when the state has nothing to offer except the impossible promise of security, the figures of the ‘gangster’, the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘terrorist’ work their perverse magic, distorting democratic possibilities and licensing the worst kinds of authoritarianism.  The book is split into five parts. The first four parts are composed of three short chapters and the final part of two concluding chapters. In Part 1, ‘Racialising the Crisis’, we set

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the scene in contemporary Britain, drawing connections between different racialised ‘folk devils’ who have been conscripted to help explain and resolve Britain’s multiple crises. Racialised ‘folk devils’ have long been enlisted to justify relations of domination and obscure the real causes of people’s insecurity. But our intention in Part 1 is to say something more precise about how racism is working in this moment. As such, we are interested in who becomes a racialised ‘folk devil’, and how they are constructed, and then with what kinds of state practices they help legitimate. In Chapter 1 we ask who is to be punished, and who might be contingently exempt, by critically examining the 2018 ‘Windrush scandal’. In Chapter 2 we discuss the so-called ‘knife-crime epidemic’ and the use of pre-criminal forms of control and prevention in response to it. Finally, in Chapter 3 we discuss the myriad ‘gangs’ of Britain, whose apparent ubiquity licenses new forms of control, criminalisation and expulsion. In Part 2, we examine ‘The Persistence of Nationalism’. In Chapter 4 we discuss the colonial amnesia, nostalgia and melancholia that fuel Britain’s confused nationalist convulsions. We think it necessary here to discuss Powellism in some detail, and to outline the characters from the racial drama who still populate public discourse. In Chapter 5 we develop a critique of leftist nationalisms, so-called ‘progressive patriotisms’. We argue that demands for a welfare state which ignores or plays down the question of borders and citizenship plagued the Corbyn project and remains unresolved by the British left. In Chapter 6 we tackle the limits of representation, those entrepreneurial and state-friendly anti-racisms that have

INTRODUCTION  ◆ 15

been developed with gusto in recent years, energised by the Twitter timelines which favour hot takes, call-outs and easily quantifiable measures of influence, legitimacy and fame. We dwell on the power of social media to undo the historically informed, internationally contextualised and carefully thought-out analyses of racism so desperately needed in these times of multiple crises.  In Part 3, ‘State Patriarch’, we analyse state racism and nationalism through gender. In Chapter 7 we discuss the relationship between gender, sexuality and the nation state in historical perspective. We trace the changing nature of the state patriarch in the move from welfarism to neoliberal authoritarianism and ask: what kind of state patriarch do we have today? In Chapter 8 we engage with the political scandals that emerged when large numbers of girls were sexually exploited in post-industrial towns in northern England. During the time of the abuse, local institutions largely ignored the young victims (white and Asian), who were tainted by their class position and proximity to Asian men. Yet when these cases became a national scandal, these white girls were transformed into symbols of national purity who had been violated by racial Others (Muslim men in particular). Rather than addressing the sexism, misogyny and institutional neglect which leaves vulnerable girls exposed to predatory men and sexual violence, the demand for ‘justice’ became part of a racist campaign that reaffirmed the nation’s role as patriarchal protector. Finally, in Chapter 9 we consider the increased salience of the buffoon in the theatre of British politics, most obviously in the figure of Boris Johnson. We ask how and why are buffoonish strongmen at the helm

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of so much nationalist resurgence, and why is their antielitist posturing somehow seductive? In Part 4, ‘Send in the Army’, we explore the centrality of militarism and marshal metaphors to British racism. In Chapter 10 we discuss the longing for authority that underwrites authoritarianism in contemporary Britain, made plain in the repeated calls to ‘send in the army’ to deal with ‘social problems’. In Chapter 11 we route the militarisation of everyday life, and policing in particular, through a colonial history of counterinsurgency and conflict. Finally, in Chapter 12, we engage in a short discussion of the wider logics of zero-sum-game politics. We observe that this logic underwrites not only debates about race and migration, but also men’s rights activism and trans exclusionary feminisms. In Part 5 we conclude by first reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic – which emerged as we were trying to tie this book project up. In Chapter 13 we discuss the ways in which our analysis in the book proved depressingly prescient when it came to the political (mis)management of the coronavirus crisis. In response to the pandemic, the UK government turned to nativist posturing, war analogies, strongman buffoonery and new policing powers. The neglectful-cum-authoritarian state was in full display and tens of thousands died needlessly as a result. In Chapter 14 we offer some final reflections on languages and practices of collective grief, hope and survival.

PART 1

Racialising the Crisis

C HAPTE R O NE

Windrush

‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’, it began. This wartime quote by Winston Churchill … is to me the most apt way of expressing the gratitude of the Caribbean high commissioners and the West Indian diaspora for the incredible work by Amelia Gentleman. – The High Commissioner for Barbados, quoted in the Foreword by Katherine Viner to Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal (2019)1

It wasn’t Labour who cut the Border Force. It was the Tories. Labour’s last manifesto committed to adding five hundred extra border guards, over and above the level we will inherit from this Government. They are vital in the fight against people-traffickers, and the drug and gun smugglers, as well as preventing illegal immigration. – Diane Abbott’s speech on Labour’s plans for a simpler, fairer immigration system, September 20182

In spring 2018, British politics was dominated by what came to be known as the ‘Windrush scandal’. The scandal concerned older Caribbean migrants who had moved to the UK before 1973, and who therefore should have had a ‘right of abode’ (permanent and unconditional right of residence and re-entry), but who instead had been treated

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as ‘illegal immigrants’ and denied access to healthcare, welfare benefits and housing. In some cases, ‘Windrush migrants’ were deported. In one case, a man who had lived in the UK since 1969 lost his job at a local council because new immigration rules stipulated he had to have a passport to work. Having never left the country since his arrival in Britain, he could not produce the necessary documentation and so was left with no job and no recourse to claim out-of-work benefits. Another member of the ‘Windrush generation’ had lived in the UK since he was five months old. After travelling to the Caribbean to visit his sick mother he was denied re-entry at the UK border. Another man of Caribbean heritage who had lived in the UK for 40 years was given a £5,000 hospital bill after his immigration status was checked. Finding he had no residency status, the council evicted him from his home, and he was discharged from hospital onto the streets, ineligible for a state-funded hostel as an ‘illegal immigrant’. There were over 50,000 people of Caribbean heritage who potentially faced similar problems, as the border moved from the airports and docks to housing offices, job centres, hospitals, schools, workplaces and streets. This expansion and internalisation of the border was part of the Conservative Party’s policy to make the UK a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants (although these policies were very much a continuation/extension of New Labour immigration policy). In responding to moral panic about immigrants stealing jobs, welfare benefits, or both, the government made proof of legal status mandatory for access to the basic means of existence: employment, housing, healthcare, education, a bank account, a driving

WINDRUSH  ◆ 21

licence. This is the hostile environment: the system of immigration checks and data-sharing which saw the expansion of everyday, everywhere bordering. Over a number of months in 2018, left and liberal media outlets began to collect the stories of these long-settled British Caribbeans who had been illegalised, made destitute and banished. Soon, other sections of the press, including those on the right, began to cover the ‘Windrush scandal’. One Daily Mail editorial summed up the paper’s position: ‘The Windrush scandal is yet another example of how poorly Britain treats those to whom it owes a great debt and how twisted our bureaucratic morals are.’3 Meanwhile, Brexit campaigner and far-right Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg described the ‘hostile environment’ as ‘fundamentally un-British’.4 Both the Mail and ReesMogg used the scandal in an attempt to revalorise people from the Commonwealth as ‘deserving migrants’, while petitioning for a ‘hard Brexit’ that would extricate Britain from the EU’s ‘twisted’, ‘un-British’ bureaucracy, and make the lives of many EU nationals in Britain increasingly difficult and insecure. In other words, outrage was not directed at the ‘hostile environment’ per se, which the government had created to root out ‘illegal immigrants’. Rather, the scandal was seen by the Mail and others as an example of ‘how it is those who play by the rules and do the right thing who get punished – while those who act on the sly seem only to get rewarded for it’. The ‘Windrush scandal’ demonstrated the lack of respect for good old British ‘common sense’: the ‘bad migrants’ flood in, stealing jobs and benefits, while the good ones get punished. The story was thereby

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made familiar in a very particular way: the point was that the Home Office was totally dysfunctional, rather than immigration controls being inherently punitive, violent and racist. Across the political spectrum, ‘Windrush migrants’ were celebrated for their contributions to the nation. The fact that the treatment of this particular group of ‘migrants’ became a national scandal, with a consensus across the political spectrum that the Home Office had acted not only unlawfully but also immorally, was surprising for a number of reasons. First, it was surprising because the tabloids are always talking about Britain as ‘a soft touch for migrants’. Normally we are told that migrants are bad and controls are too weak, so it was disorienting to have a public scandal where the migrants were good and the controls were too harsh.  But the consensus on the treatment of Windrush victims was even more surprising given that all of the Windrush generation were black and many of them worked in lower-income jobs or were welfare claimants. This is the same economic demographic – ‘benefit scroungers’ and ‘job stealers’ – who are the target of popular outrage in debates about immigration. However, unlike in most of the hateful political and media discourse on migrants, victims of the Windrush scandal were portrayed as elderly, respectable and law-abiding, and the well-rehearsed yarn about them having been invited over to help with the post-war effort prevailed. The ‘Windrush generation’ did not summon images of ‘illegal border crossings’, ‘breaking point’, or threats of crime and terrorism. They were not dangerously mobile, but settled, orderly and respectable. Thus, the

WINDRUSH  ◆ 23

‘Windrush generation’ were folded into the national ‘we’, reclaimed as our war veterans, our bus conductors and our caring nurses. The Windrush scandal clearly played on the politics of respectability, economic contribution (even if historical) and good citizenship. As ever, the incorporation of black people into the national fold was partial, conditional and retractable. Importantly, the opportunity to connect the Windrush scandal to the decimation of the welfare state and the wider demonisation of ‘illegal immigrants’ was missed by the left. The scandal became ultimately about immigration policies being applied to the wrong migrants, or applied in the wrong way. We should pause at this point to reiterate that ‘hostile environment’ policies involve denying ‘illegal immigrants’ the right to healthcare, housing, employment and education, as well as a driving licence and the ability to open a bank account – effectively denying people access to the means of life on the basis of immigration status. Many people incensed by the ‘Windrush scandal’ were against these immigration policies in general, but the overall tenor of the public debate involved special pleading for one particular group of ‘citizens’, rather than a wider interrogation of the exclusionary and expulsive logics of the immigration regime as a whole. With some political imagination, the Windrush scandal should have allowed us to challenge received understandings of ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘welfare claimants’. After all, it should be easy enough to recognise that ‘illegal immigrants’ are simply those non-citizens who have been categorised as ‘illegal’ by law, a juridical group rather than a social one. ‘Illegal immigrants’, who share

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their lives with other migrants and citizens, are illegal only insofar as they have been subjected to an arbitrary legal process. Furthermore, the racist treatment experienced by the Windrush generation in the 1950s and ’60s, widely acknowledged across the political spectrum, should not be disconnected from the disproportionate enforcement of immigration controls against black and brown people today. Not all migrants are policed equally, and thus some are more likely to be made foreign through subjection to coercive state power. However, politicians, journalists and activists from across the left emphasised that Windrush migrants were distinct from ‘illegal immigrants’. David Lammy MP, in a rare and rousing speech in the Commons, suitably timed for maximum social media shares, reminded us that victims of the scandal included ‘a British citizen who paid taxes for 40 years’. Lammy’s steadfast separation of Windrush migrants, who were to be understood as citizens, from the real ‘illegal immigrants’, was repeated across the Labour Party.  These repeated references to tax records and national insurance contributions were more than proof of longterm residency. They served to construct the ‘Windrush generation’ as respectable, industrious people who ‘play by the rules’. Referring to Windrush scandal victims as ‘citizens’ (which in law was not quite true) worked to separate their treatment from the violence enacted against other non-citizens – the violence of immigration raids, indefinite detention and mass deportation flights, to destinations which include the Caribbean. While some commentators reminded us that post-war migrants were hardly welcomed by white Britons or the British state

WINDRUSH  ◆ 25

when they arrived, and others sought to historicise British citizenship as an imperial form of political membership later restricted to exclude ‘coloured’ migrants, there was a strong tendency, even among the left and anti-racists, to separate the violation of ‘Windrush migrants’ from the wider treatment of ‘migrants’. Indeed, Diane Abbott appeared on BBC’s Question Time to explain that the issue of ‘illegal immigration’ must not be confused with the ill-treatment of ‘Windrush migrants’, before promising that the Labour Party would ‘bear down on the numbers of illegal immigrants’ once in power. Evidently, immigration enforcement becomes visible as violence only when it affects certain groups – in this case ‘Windrush migrants’ who migrated, legally and respectfully, way back when. * * * Perhaps the clearest indication of the limits of this newfound hospitality came when Sajid Javid, as Home Secretary, explained that members of the ‘Windrush generation’ with criminal records would be fully excluded from compensation and legal recourse. Having a criminal record, however minor or from however long ago, was enough to erase over 45 years of residence. Even in that rarest of moments in British politics when there was widespread sympathy for one particular group of ‘migrants’, the spectre of ‘criminal history’ was enough to brand some ‘Windrush migrants’ as unwanted guests who had abused our hospitality. Exile remained perfectly proportionate in these cases, never mind what people were returned to. The

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mere mention of criminality was enough to set the nation into default mode: ‘send them back’. Clearly, if the ‘Windrush migrants’ were to be considered British, and welcomed into the national fold, they were incorporated because they were law-abiding. They had proved, over time, that they were not ‘lesser breeds without the law’. Indeed, the Windrush migrants were contrasted explicitly and implicitly with younger, law-breaking black Britons during this period. Newspapers which sympathetically covered the Caribbean grandparents you might help cross the road, or allow in front of you in the queue at the post office, presented at the same time a very different image of ‘Black Britain’ in their inner pages. The national outrage over the ‘Windrush scandal’ was matched by a much more hostile collective outrage over youth violence, because the other big news story of spring 2018 was the so-called ‘knife-crime epidemic’. Commentators made a point of emphasising statistics from particular cities (mainly London), in which the majority of ‘knife crime’ victims and perpetrators were black men and boys – and often the focus was specifically on ‘black Caribbean’ teenagers.  ‘Black youth’ were once again vilified as sources of danger, violence and moral decline, and violence was linked to the family (read ‘absent fathers’) and the nihilism of contemporary urban life (read ‘black culture’). While wayward black youth symbolised a national crime crisis, their soft, neglectful or inept parents were also held responsible. As such, these later generations were separated from the sympathetic protection and welfare afforded to the ‘Windrush generation’ who came before them. Echoing repeated moral panics directed at

WINDRUSH  ◆ 27

black Britons over the last seven decades, ‘knife crime’ called for a law-and-order response. It was time for the police and the state to reassert control in the context of spiralling lawlessness, urban decline and a nation lacking discipline and confidence. While the state tends to have a clear line when it comes to dealing with crime, the British left have struggled with how to respond to problems of violence in oppressed, lower-income communities. At best, the left is able to identify the social harms caused by a lack of social provision (housing, education, healthcare), and to recognise how this can lead young people in particular to be more likely to be affected by and implicated in violence. But the British left mostly seem unable to say that while one individual harming another is morally wrong, so is having uniformed agents force human beings into cages. Without a compelling critique of police and prisons, much of the left falls back on the carceral logic which divides society into victims and perpetrators. It then becomes possible to argue for the effectiveness of ‘evidence-led’, ‘targeted’ policing – perhaps with a sprinkling of unconscious-bias training for good measure.  Arguments are made for policing to be carried out by officers who are ‘part of the community’, which in addition to black and brown officers also sees police occupying schools, youth clubs and places of worship. Without a critical language, the left implicitly consents to these police powers which are then challenged only for being used ‘at random’ (as if those subjected to stop and search are ever identified randomly), or for being used in a discriminatory manner (as if there were any other way

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in which such powers could be used). This poverty of understanding, and lack of effective articulation, results in the left focusing on a defence of the welfare state, which includes the call for more police. Indeed, more bobbies on the beat has a homely leftish resonance as well as an authoritarian rightish one. Constrained by this logic, the police and the prison system are perceived as flawed, but still fundamentally necessary. Such constraints limit demands to diversity drives, community consultations, equality impact assessments, increased funding and, in extreme cases, public inquiries.  What should have been learnt from the ‘Windrush scandal’ – from the illegalisation and expulsion of long-settled Commonwealth citizens – was that racist discrimination persists across a range of state institutions and practices, and that this takes new forms as punitive, everyday borders proliferate. The exclusionary logic of immigration controls – according to which ‘migrants’ take jobs, resources and public goods and therefore need to be excluded – operates to justify and obscure the wider disentitlement and abandonment of citizens. Conditionality and punitiveness in the benefits system can then be reframed as protecting citizens from queue-jumping immigrants. Moreover, the total surveillance and exclusion of ‘illegal immigrants’, managed via comprehensive data-sharing initiatives, allows the government to trial new forms of conditionality and punitiveness that can then be rolled out more widely – just as charging migrants to use the NHS provides an ominous trial run for further privatisation. Defining ‘Windrush migrants’ as wronged

WINDRUSH  ◆ 29

citizens, and contrasting them with ‘illegal immigrants’, does little to illuminate these connections. All this is to say that the ‘Windrush scandal’ was not some un-British aberration, but an inevitable outcome of aggressive immigration policies enforced by racist institutions as part of a larger bid to further delegitimise any remaining investment in the caring, welfarist state. In short, ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies work in combination with the politics of austerity. And policies surrounding immigration, welfare and crime can only be understood when considered in their relation.5  We have observed that the sympathy for Windrush migrants was highly conditional and had no effect on the ongoing demonisation of over-policed and criminalised young black people. Indeed, declarations of the Windrush migrants’ worthiness may have even been nourished and vindicated by their being placed in opposition to young people accused of ‘knife crime’. In the next chapter we examine the ‘knife-crime epidemic’ in more detail, considering the state practices which are trialled and licensed through this racist politics of law and order.

C HAPTE R T WO

‘Knife Crime’: Prevention and Order

[There are] definitely more younger people involved … more knives involved with the serious violence on the streets … This, for my officers, in 2016/17/18, felt like the extra use of extraordinary force by groups on other young people to be a new phenomenon. – Cressida Dick, Met Police Commissioner, 20191

I want criminals to feel terror. – Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel, 20192

Debates about crime in the second decade of the twentyfirst century have been dominated by moral panic about ‘knife crime’. This panic has been based partly on a real problem of violence in lower-income communities. Figures released in 2019 indicated that police-recorded violent crime had risen by almost a fifth in England and Wales. In the same year, crimes involving blades rose by 12 per cent and almost 40,000 such offences were reported to police (although the 2019 figures fell short of the 2006 peak for injures involving knives).3 However, crime statistics are always slippery, reflecting policing practices and the uneven enforcement of the law as much as some discrete and measurable thing called

‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER  ◆ 31

‘crime’. ‘Knife crime’ is not a criminal offence in itself, but an amalgam of already existing offences (carrying a bladed article, robbery, burglary, grievous bodily harm, murder, etc.). By grouping together a number of existing offences, the police, politicians and the press can convey the idea that ‘knife crime’ is new, or is at least worse than anything Britain has seen before. This begs the question of why the category of ‘knife crime’ has risen to such prominence in national politics. Like new categories of crime from earlier periods, such as ‘mugging’, the problem of ‘knife crime’ is seen to have been introduced to Britain by racialised outsiders, therefore requiring new forms of policing and penalisation. Such moral panics are effective because they promise that the expansion of violent policing will be reserved for racialised outsiders, from whom the nation needs protecting. The racism that associates violent crime with black youth in Britain has been well-documented.4 For example, Tony Blair declared in 2007 that the problem of violent crime would not be solved ‘by pretending it isn’t young black kids doing it’,5 paving the way for the racialised policing of the ‘gang’ which we unpack in the next chapter. More recently, the Metropolitan Police’s response to the evidence of racial disproportionality in stop and searches has been to suggest that young people of ‘African-Caribbean heritage’ are more likely than white people to be perpetrators and victims of ‘knife crime’.6 Quite how police officers are able to distinguish people of ‘African-Caribbean heritage’ from other people racialised as black is unclear, but the police assure us that stop and search offers a crucial way to apprehend criminals and keep young people safe.

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Similarly, in March 2019, in a TV debate on ‘knife crime’ with the rapper and writer Akala, Piers Morgan stated: ‘statistically, it looks like in London, right now … the perpetrators and the victims appear to be almost exclusively young black men’. Morgan went on to ask Akala, ‘do you think there is a racial element to that in terms of any cultural issues, racial issues?’ The statistic, it turned out, was a fabrication, but Akala’s response to Morgan was instructive. He said, ‘clearly throughout human history, black people have not remotely had anything resembling a monopoly on violence. Over the last few years [in] some of the most horrendous knife attacks, both the victims and the perpetrators have been white and they’ve not been from London.’ The local geographies of violence and policing are therefore worth remarking on here. In areas coded as ‘black’ – like Brixton, Tottenham and Ladbroke Grove in London, Moss Side in Manchester, Chapeltown in Leeds, and Handsworth in Birmingham – stabbing incidents are less newsworthy, unless the victim is especially young. ‘Knife crime’ in these areas is considered notable in news and political discourse less because the victims deserve our sympathies but more as a quantitative confirmation of the association between race and criminality (‘black on black crime’). Not coincidentally, these are the areas that are most heavily policed and in which there have been historic confrontations between the police and young black people. On the other hand, when stabbing victims are seen to be innocent – which often means white and from less urban areas – offences tend to be especially newsworthy.

‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER  ◆ 33

When 17-year-old Jodie Chesney was murdered in a park in Romford, a part of London that is almost in Essex, the story was on the front pages for some time. The suspected attackers were reported to be black males. Two young men, aged 17 and 19, were later convicted after admitting to killing Jodie in a case of mistaken identity. Peter Chesney, Jodie’s father, featured regularly in London and national newspapers, in the aftermath of the murder and during the trial, invited to offer his opinion on how the government should better tackle ‘knife crime’ – the ­­ moral authority and demands of the victim have long been at the centre of Britain’s carceral culture. Peter Chesney went on to found the Jodie Chesney Foundation, which ‘aims to set up a hotline, staffed by youth workers and ex-gang members, that parents, siblings and friends of at-risk children can call with their concerns about knives and county lines drug gangs’. The inclusion of county lines drug gangs is telling, referring to concerns about urban gangs expanding their supply chains into towns and rural areas. This is about familiar crimes (read: urban, black) occurring in new places (read: non-urban, white). Despite the language of ‘protecting young people from grooming’ within government talk on county lines, the real fear is that black criminality is migrating out of black urban enclaves and spreading, virus-like, into unsuspecting parts of the country. In short, where crime happens matters, and contested geographies of policing, racism and belonging get mobilised in debates about the ‘knife-crime epidemic’ and ‘county lines drug gangs’. Part of the fear is that the

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police will lose the ability to contain if not to control such instances of (black) violence and criminality. The circulation of a discourse around the so-called ‘knife-crime epidemic’ is therefore significant not simply for the ideological association of race and crime. Just as with the ‘mugging crisis’ of the early 1970s, today’s moral panic has also led, unsurprisingly, to calls for an increase in police powers, particularly stop and search. The Conservative Party manifesto of November 2019 confirmed their core commitment to tougher policing of ‘knife crime’: Police will be empowered by a new court order to target known knife carriers, making it easier for officers to stop and search those convicted of knife crime. Anyone charged with knife possession will appear before magistrates within days not weeks. Those who use a knife as a weapon should go to prison.7 The police, politicians and much of the press have repeatedly ignored research indicating the failure of stop and search to yield crime prevention and detection outcomes. Available statistics suggest that disproportionality in the use of stop-and-search powers has increased in the context of the ‘knife-crime epidemic’, with black people being 4.3 times more likely to be stopped than white people in 2018, compared with 2.6 times in 2014.8 However, in our view the variable scale factor here only tells us so much. Whether black people are two times, five times, eight times, or 26 times more likely to be stopped by the police, the number is always too high, and the

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number itself feels unreal. What actually changes in our understanding when we modify the multiplier? What is clear is that young black boys and men in particular neighbourhoods are intensely over-policed, repeatedly stopped and searched, often humiliated and treated with disrespect by the police. During most searches, the police do not find anything, and when they do it tends to be small amounts of cannabis.9 In this context, the discourse surrounding ‘knife crime’ seems only to fuel the disproportionate and racist policing practices that already deny working-class young black men rights to freedom of association, free movement in public space and the presumption of innocence. And yet, documenting the racial disproportionality and ineffectiveness of policing practices risks taking the police at their word, assuming that there could be a rational and proportionate way of enforcing racially conceived laws. The racism surrounding ‘knife crime’ is about more than the uneven implementation of the law, it is about the very conception and formulation of ‘crime’. If racism forms the definition of criminal problems from the outset, then ‘fact-checking’ the police only gets us so far. When a particular ‘criminal problem’ (i.e. knife crime) is fixed onto a particular ‘criminal population’ (i.e. young black men), policing is racial and racist by definition. In this instance, aggressive stop-and-search policies, apparently targeting ‘knife crime’, but in practice primarily identifying ‘drugs offences’, are enforced against young people long familiar with heavy-handed, racist policing. None of this is likely to have any positive impact in reducing youth violence. But if the primary motivation for heavier

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policing is not preventing harm, but the symbolic demonstration of authority, order and discipline, then this is hardly surprising. * * * The response to ‘knife crime’ has not only been to conduct more stop and searches, but also to criminalise young people who are suspected of carrying knives. During the time we were writing this book, the government was legislating ‘knife-crime prevention orders’ (via the Offensive Weapons Act 2019), which like ASBOs before them operate without the due process protections of criminal law. Under these prevention orders, the police need only to convince a magistrate that an individual is ‘more likely than not’ to have carried a blade on at least two occasions. That is, the individual subject to a knife-crime prevention order does not need to have been convicted of carrying a knife, caught by police while carrying a knife, or even seen by a member of the public carrying a knife. Thus, the offences do not have to have been proven beyond reasonable doubt, only evidenced on a ‘balance of probabilities’, as more likely than not to have been committed, a much lower standard of proof. These prevention orders can be used against individuals as young as twelve – enforcing curfews and placing restrictions on where they can go, who they can associate with, and even imposing limitations on social media use, apparently to stop gang rivalries escalating online.10 Young people merely suspected of knife carrying will thus be subject to limitations on their movements and associ-

‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER  ◆ 37

ations, and any breach of the order is a criminal offence that can result in up to two years in prison. A twelve year old might be accused of knife carrying based on police intelligence, receive a knife crime prevention order, and then risk incarceration if they travel to a certain area, meet with a particular friend or relative, or access Instagram or Snapchat. A moral panic centred on ‘knife crime’, a new category of crime, creates a new problem that is then subject to prevention and order. However, referring to these processes as criminalisation largely misses the point. These forms of control are pre-criminal, post-criminal or extra-criminal. Indeed, knife-crime prevention orders present obvious links with counter-terror policing (which involves intense online surveillance and the criminalisation of associations and sympathies) and immigration policy (which sees people deported because their removal is deemed ‘conducive to the public good’, or denied citizenship because they are deemed ‘more likely than not’ to be of ‘bad character’). The connection here between knife-crime prevention orders, counter-terror policing and immigration policy is that they all rely on expelling racialised people from the albeit limited protections of criminal law. Processes of racialisation are both cause and effect of this pre-criminalisation. In relation to ‘knife crime’, police and politicians have also turned, again, to the problem of ‘black culture’ – and this time the culprit is drill music (a subgenre of rap). The police have defined drill music as an apparent driver of the purported increase in ‘knife crime’, and then, borrowing from anti-gang initiatives used by the LAPD, have

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convinced judges to pass injunctions that prevent artists from referring to specific names, places or events in their lyrics, arguing that their mere mention would constitute an incitement of violence. Suspended sentences have been handed out to musicians with no criminal record, while the media have stoked moral panic around the genre, reproducing similar panics to those around rock and roll, reggae and grime music.11 For example, Valentini, a rapper from Thurrock in Essex, had an injunction imposed that prevented him from wearing hoodies or face coverings and stipulated that he could not produce ‘any audio or video online that is threatening, abusive, insulting, incites violence, promotes criminal activity, shows weapons or makes reference to gang affiliations’.12 In late 2019, using a ‘rap translator’ (a native informer perhaps?), the police were able to convince a court that Valentini had rapped about weapons in a newly released song. Valentini was then jailed for 19 weeks as a result. What is important here is that the police were not able to present evidence of Valentini committing violent crime or selling drugs, but successfully argued that his music depicting these themes constituted guilt and demonstrated his involvement in ‘gang crime’. In another example, two drill rappers from Brixton, Skengdo and AM, were targeted by police and sections of the media. Following violence in south London, the rappers were banned from referring to any specific people, places or events. Detective Inspector Luke Williams of the Lambeth and Southwark Gang’s Unit confirmed: ‘The court found that violence in drill music can, and did in this case, amount to gang-related violence.’13 Some months later,

‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER  ◆ 39

after performing their song, ‘Attempted 1.0’, at a London concert in December 2018, the Metropolitan Police handed both rappers a two-year suspended sentence (meaning that if they were to offend during those two years, they would be incarcerated for nine months). In the policing of drill, we see again the evasion of due process protections and the extension of police powers through injunctions and pre-criminal modes of social control. The policing of sympathies and incitements, involving online surveillance and data capture, echoes the policing and (pre-)criminalisation of ‘terror suspects’. Indeed, the police reached for new powers precisely by labelling drill artists as terrorists.14 Like the anti-terror powers used in the UK’s anti-radicalisation policy, Prevent, these restrictions did not target violence or unlawful behaviour itself, but the alleged ‘promotion’ of such behaviour, in this case through artistic expression. Most pressingly for our argument, these authoritarian moves to control and police racialised threats, whether of the ‘black gang’ or the ‘Muslim terrorist’, are not distinct phenomena, but implicate and refer to one another. Counter-terror powers can be employed against drill artists, just as ideas about dangerous ‘gangs’ prove mutable in the context of widespread racial threat. We develop these points in the next chapter. By constructing ‘knife crime’ as both new and ‘on the rise’, the problem becomes something alien, something which descends on the respectable and law-abiding people of Britain from outside. And yet, these offences occur in British cities, committed by young men raised in Britain. In this way, ‘knife crime’ is both alien – unlike other kinds

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of street crime and violence – and yet cultivated in those uncontrolled spaces in the heart of the national territory, in urban centres, housing estates and black families. In this way ‘knife crime’ induces panic because it reminds ‘decent’ and ‘hard-working’ Britons that their country is not their own and is not safe for their children. Criminal youth subcultures offer a dystopian vision of where the nation is headed. These fears invariably play on wider concerns about immigration – past and future – and fuel alarm surrounding demographic shifts and moral decline. These feelings of existential threat explain why ‘knife crime’ becomes the main news story at a particular moment: not because of concern about young black men at risk of violence, but because the spectacle of that uncontrolled violence mobilises widespread anxieties over national identity, cultural difference and insecurity in ways that prove politically useful.

C HAPTE R T HR E E

Gang Land

Commander Jim Stokley, Scotland Yard’s most senior officer responding to gang crime, told The Times ‘there isn’t specific legislation’ for gangs, adding: ‘Clearly we can’t use terrorism legislation [but] in consultation with the CPS, we have found some existing legislation which we are going to use.’ – ‘Police to treat gangs like terror suspects with tough new laws’, Telegraph, 30 May 20181

As a cop I always used to stop and search, but now police live in fear of being called racist. – Andrew O’Hagan, Telegraph, 13 November 20182

The spectre of the ‘gang’ has a long history in Britain. While it was long used to denote groups of outlaws in various forms, in the twentieth century the term became racialised through a number of interconnected problems, including Irish migration to the British mainland early in the century and later the policing of ‘gangs’ of dissidents in British colonies including Kenya and Malaya.3 In post-war Britain, the influence of American frames on race and racism bolstered concerns about ‘gangs’ of ‘coloured’ criminals. By the twenty-first century, dispersal orders introduced by New Labour gave the police the power to

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break up gatherings larger than two, as both black and Asian youths came to symbolise Britain’s ‘gang’ problem. As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the media became fixated on ‘gangs’. London’s Evening Standard published investigative reports into the ‘Gangs of London’, while other regional newspapers decried the gangsters of ‘Gunchester’ and ‘Shottingham’ (Manchester and Nottingham).4 These ‘gangs’ were represented by images of young black men, hooded, masked or in mugshots. None of this felt new necessarily, except perhaps in its intensity. For over a decade the police had lobbied for more power and weapons, implementing targeted programmes, such as Operation Trident, with the explicit aim of policing ‘gangs’ in black communities. These were accompanied by calls for longer prison sentences, massive increases in stop-and-search powers, and public hand-wringing about the breakdown of the nuclear family, the lack of suitable role models, and a justice system weakened by political correctness and concerns about human rights. We can trace these discourses on race, crime and disorder through Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, and now Boris Johnson. However, it is worth pausing to question the specific work performed by the image of ‘the gang’. Crucially, ‘the gang’ mediates between the individual offender and the wider group from which they hail, with its alien culture, propensity to violence and incorrigible cultural difference. The inherently racial character of ‘the gang’ explains the flurry of policies and laws designed to identify, contain and criminalise ‘gangs’.

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Since 2012, the Metropolitan Police have been using a database called the Gangs Violence Matrix to identify, assess and measure potential harm and risk emanating from particular young people. This risk-assessment tool is designed to give the police a means of defining and ranking people described as ‘gang-associated’. However, it is not clear how someone gets on the Matrix, or how they get off it. What is clear is that the vast majority of those on the Gangs Matrix are black, which does not correspond to rates of ‘serious youth violence’. Researchers Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke analysed gangs policing in London, Nottingham and Greater Manchester. They found that 72 per cent of people on the London Gangs Matrix were black, while only 27 per cent of serious youth violence was committed by black people in London (the figures in Greater Manchester were starker: 81 per cent of ‘gang members’ were black while only 6 per cent of serious youth violence was committed by black people).5 Amnesty International found that ‘40 per cent of people listed on the Matrix have no record of involvement in any violent offence in the past two years and 35 per cent have never committed any “serious offence”’.6 As the same Amnesty report explains, the policing of gangs relies on online surveillance: The type of data collection that underpins the Gangs Matrix focuses law enforcement efforts disproportionately on black boys and young men. It erodes their right to privacy based on what may be nothing more than their associates in the area they grow up and how they express their subculture in music videos and social

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media posts. Officials in borough Gangs Units monitor the social media pages and online interactions of people they consider to be ‘at risk’ of gang involvement, interfering with the privacy of a much larger group of people than those involved in any kind of wrongdoing. Here we see the use of social media analysis and online surveillance within contemporary policing practices. The use of big data reflects the wider turn towards predictive policing technologies. As others have noted, the opacity of policing combined with the opacity of machine-learning algorithms portends troubling times ahead for those concerned with limiting the reach of the state.7 Being gang-identified, despite the absence of substantive evidence, can have significant implications beyond the criminal justice system. Information on ‘gang associations’ is regularly shared between government agencies, which can impact the ability of an individual, and their family, to access social housing, education and welfare benefits. Increasingly, for those who lack British citizenship, police intelligence on ‘suspected gang involvement’ is used to build deportation cases, often against individuals who moved to the UK as infants, and who have no criminal record, but who it is decided on a ‘balance of probabilities’ are more likely than not to have committed crimes. Under a policy called Operation Nexus, many people have been deported on the basis of such ‘non-convictions’.8 While the ‘gang’ is used to construct racialised forms of suspect criminality, it also makes possible certain forms of collective punishment, especially in criminal cases involving ‘Joint Enterprise’. Joint Enterprise is ‘a doctrine

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of common law which has been developed by the courts in cases where more than one person is to be prosecuted for the same offence’, the logic being that if a group of people were ‘in it together’, and had ‘common purpose’ in conspiring to commit crime together, they should be held collectively responsible. This means that people can be held liable for crimes committed by other people, even if they were not present when the crime was committed. This has particular implications for young black men identified as belonging to ‘a gang’, and many Joint Enterprise cases rely on invoking ‘the gang’ as the narrative thread for such ‘common purpose’. This is worrying when the very definition of ‘gangs’ through police intelligence is both empirically flimsy and heavily racialised.9 To give one example, in Manchester in 2016 a teenager was stabbed to death in Moss Side. Thirteen young men and boys were charged with his killing; eleven were sent to prison, with seven sentenced to life for murder (one of them had remained in his car during the fight, and another was twenty metres away when the stabbing took place), and four convicted of manslaughter. In this case, like many others, it was the image of ‘the gang’ that held the prosecution’s argument together, weaving together a case from patchy evidence, but successfully persuading the judge to ignore the simple claim made by all the defendants: that they were not part of a gang and thus there was no ‘common purpose’. Unsurprisingly, the number of black people serving custodial sentences for Joint Enterprise convictions – mostly for murder with sentences of over 15 years – is highly disproportionate. While the incarceration of black

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people in Britain is already more disproportionate than in the US, the rate for Joint Enterprise cases is even more striking. For those convicted under Joint Enterprise at the time of writing, 57.4 per cent are black and minority ethnic (37.7 per cent black/black British, 4.7 per cent Asian and 15.5 per cent mixed race). Non-white people also serve longer sentences under Joint Enterprise than white groups, and ‘the gang’ is invoked much more often to justify their ‘common purpose’. According to Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke, who surveyed 241 prisoners convicted under Joint Enterprise laws, over three quarters of the black and brown interviewees (78.9 per cent) reported that references to ‘gangs’ featured in their cases in court, whereas only 38.5 per cent of white interviewees had ‘the gang’ mentioned in their cases. Moreover, 97 per cent of those who reported that ‘gangs’ were introduced in court disputed the ‘gang’ label and ‘dismissed it as untrue, a “made up” feature of the prosecution’s argument’.10 Because ‘gangs’, like other fears around crime and disorder, concern ‘black youth’, a set of seasoned arguments about black cultural pathology find renewed articulation. The racialisation of ‘black Britons’, especially African-Caribbeans, has long operated through ideas about ‘cultural deprivation’. Perhaps more urgently, these cultures of criminality and outlawry are seen to be contagious, as sometimes appealing to white Britons, visible in the fact that multi-racial urban cultures seem particularly shaped by black cultural forms. In short, ‘black criminality’ is a reflection of cultures which themselves might poison other young people living in urban Britain, and this is another factor motivating heavy-handed

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punishment. Ideas about black culture as contagion have a long history, as does the appeal of black cultural forms within youth culture. Perhaps black cultural forms do have greater appeal to wider British society – not as poison but as inspiration – following the retreat of the welfare state and the concomitant waning of political legitimacy. As Stormzy’s intervention in electoral politics in November 2019 reminds us, there is good reason for the Conservative Party and its backers to be concerned that these energies might one day be organised into more effective support for social democracy. * * * The Conservative Party Manifesto of November 2019 should be read with these cases in mind. Where it promises to provide 10,000 more prison places, and to ensure that serious criminals receive tougher punishments – ending automatic release at the halfway point for example – we can predict where the heavy punishment will fall. It was Boris Johnson as Mayor of London who announced plans to punish gangs collectively for the acts of individual members, even when Joint Enterprise was not being pursued by prosecutors.11 This racist collective punishment gets justified through the discursive and cultural work performed by ‘the gang’. As we have argued, ‘the gang’ works incredibly well to justify the most severe punishments available to the British state: the curtailment of civil liberties (such as freedom of movement and self-expression), life imprisonment and, in the case of non-citizens, permanent exile.

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However, while there is a particular history to its racialisation as black, ‘the gang’ is a highly mobile and protean signifier of racial otherness which can be qualified in other ways. There are Albanian, Somali and Asian gangs, and ‘illegal immigration’ is blamed on ‘trafficking gangs’ and ‘gang-masters’. Perhaps most visibly, child sexual exploitation has been blamed on ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’, which have become the most visceral marker of anti-Muslim sentiment in British politics. We discuss ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ at length in Part 3 of the book, but it is important to note here that this concern about ‘grooming gangs’ reveals a wider set of crises and contestations over gender, sexuality and culture. The ‘Pakistani grooming gang’ has been mobilised as a unique and existential threat to white girls, rehashing familiar fears of miscegenation, paedophilia and the civilisationist rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’. The far-right has made political capital out of the organised abuse of young women and girls by claiming that white men need to protect their women from this alien threat, further arguing that the state has been weakened by political correctness. Alongside this reading of ‘grooming gangs’, there has been a more liberal concern over the anti-feminist and anti-LGBT positions of Britain’s Muslim communities themselves. The ‘grooming gang’ encapsulates here the depraved sexualities of Muslim men, whose male pathology is seen to be nurtured by ethnic segregation, patriarchal family structures and by Islam itself. Meanwhile, the ‘black gang’ is also seen to be an effect of deficient masculinities, particularly with reference to ‘absent fathers’ and a ‘lack of good role models’, which then produce the

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violent and nihilistic expressions of masculinity exhibited by those wayward and rootless teenagers carrying knives and producing drill music. It is hardly surprising that the racialisation of particular ‘folk devils’ works through gender and sexuality, and that figurations of ‘the gang’ seem well placed to capture the group threat. However, what is particularly threatening about ‘the gang’ is that it represents an alternative form of social organisation. Part of this racial threat presented by black people, Muslims and various racial Others relies, therefore, not only on individual wrongdoing but on what that wrongdoing supposedly tells us about the group. These collective threats to the nation are imagined to play by their own, different, rules, and therefore to be acculturated within some other moral order and system of authority, embedded in an alternative and unknowable form of social organisation – both dangerous and seductive. As well as the ‘grooming gangs’ themselves, gangs involved in ‘knife crime’, county lines drug dealing, or terrorist cells each do their own kinds of ‘grooming’ – with their own lexicon, imagery and sinister system of values. This produces the conviction that this alternative system should at the very least be visible to the state and the nation, giving birth to an industry of interpreters, investigators, rehabilitators and enforcers, in a typically colonial/anthropological mode. Importantly, these alternative forms of social organisation become particularly threatening at a time of waning political legitimacy and nationalist resurgence. And so Muslims must condemn terrorism and confirm their commitment to tolerance, democracy and the rule

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of law. Black people must ‘disprove stereotypes’, while stressing their claim to the Commonwealth and therefore to British citizenship and belonging. Immigrants must speak English, learn ‘British values’, and pass the Life in the UK test. This compulsory demand to perform loyalty to the nation symbolically guards against ‘home-grown terrorism’, ‘grooming gangs’ and ‘knife crime’ among other things, but it is clearly connected to the broader realisation that many people in Britain are finding sources of authority and belonging elsewhere. People are not comporting themselves in accordance with the ideals of nationalist respectability, which is why David Cameron’s ‘muscular liberalism’ professed that it was not enough merely to abide by the law – citizens must actively invest in Britishness itself. The British state demands a monopoly on the legitimate use of grooming. There is a recognisable colonial lineage to these dynamics. Alternative currents of power have, from colonial contexts to modern multicultural Britain, been tolerated by the state if they organised people into productive work relations and respectable family structures. Indirect rule and multiculturalism both rely on respecting cultural leaders and customary law so long as this does not challenge the ultimate authority of the British government. This managerial calibration of difference is what the ‘British value’ of tolerance amounts to. When racialised groups present more substantive challenges to state authority, however – when they protest, riot and resist – they can then be suppressed legitimately, and the British state can remain virtuous in the face of ungrateful and uncivilised groups. Equally, it was colonialism which used

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race to determine who was worthy of the law – and who was subject to civil law and who to martial law. Colonial regimes also produced propertied white men as the individual bearers of rights, while racially inferior groups could be subject to collective punishment without any concern for due process rights. ‘Gang crime’, ‘knife crime’ and ‘radicalisation’ are not, it is worth restating, criminal offences in themselves. They are categories of crime, produced by melding together a collection of already existing offences, popular fears and racist images. The definitions of ‘the gang’ or of ‘extremism’ remain so fluid and ambiguous that they allow for the production of suspect communities, rather than individual suspects. Black working-class boys – in both urban areas where policing is most prevalent and in more rural areas (particularly since the rise in ‘county lines’ policing) – are all potential gang members. Muslims from a range of ethnic backgrounds, of all age groups from primary school upwards, are assumed to be potentially ‘radicalised’ and susceptible to ‘extremism’. Non-citizens, and indeed all of us, must prove our right to reside before renting a house, taking up employment or visiting the doctor – we are all perpetually demonstrating our ‘legality’. Surveillance and data-gathering technologies enacted through the Gangs Matrix, Prevent and the immigration system advance the pre-emptive policing of racialised populations. The Muslim, the immigrant and the black become subject to collective punishment precisely because their criminality and deviance represent an existential threat, and narratives on ‘the gang’ are fundamental to the production of this feeling of siege. Muslims want to overthrow liberal

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democracy and impose an alternative religious order, while young black people threaten our safety and civility while seducing urban white working-class youth to their ways. Politicians are right when they observe that the nation is losing its lustre for many young people, but most often it is not displaced by any coherent alternative form. Instead, we have individualised media environments, in which social and timeline media determine cultural value(s). Relatedly, public institutions and public spaces have been decimated, and it is corporations that increasingly define where we go, what we see and how we feel, organising social and cultural life in ways beyond the reach of the hollowed-out state. In this context, the reaction of the state to the ‘gang’, in its many incarnations, illustrates that its authority is threatened. In responding to various pressures on its legitimacy, law-and-order policing is used both to repress alternative currents of power and to replace the state influence formerly occupied by the welfare system. In this way, the policing of gangs is a kind of displacement from the wider concerns about waning state authority and governmental legitimacy. As a result, it is hard to imagine how the state would define itself, in terms of a necessary defence of the nation, without ‘knife crime’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘mass migration’ – especially when war has become so unpopular in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. With the abandonment of welfarism, the state’s main purpose and promise is to keep us safe. This promise of security underwrites the authoritarianism and militarism of political culture at this moment of crisis, as we discuss in Part 4.

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Importantly, it seems to us that ‘gangs’ are central to several different configurations of racial threat. The construction of migrants, criminals, terrorists and sex offenders as members of ‘gangs’ works to racialise the source of danger, emphasising that alternative modes of social organisation fuel violence and criminality. This then licenses the exclusion of particular populations from legal protections and due process rights (through, e.g., knife-crime prevention orders, control orders, deprivation of citizenship and deportation). Law has always operated to segment the population into those who can be saved, rehabilitated, protected or included, and those who cannot. Those excluded from legal protection become the defining boundary of ‘state responsibility’. Today, the racialisation of national insecurity licenses wider moves to expand executive power and circumvent the meagre protections afforded by the independent judiciary, thereby transforming the state and the fundamental practices through which it gets defined. It is worth keeping in mind that by highlighting the authoritarian nature of the state, we are not valorising the liberal state’s laws and practices of previous decades. Rather, we are seeking to trace transformations in how the political is delineated and therefore what new forms of authoritarian power become possible in their wake. It is in this vein that the chapters which follow in Part 2 seek to trace the form and content of nationalist appeal in Britain today.

PART 2

The Persistence of Nationalism

C HAPTE R F O UR

Nationalist Convulsions

[T]he word we used to use was sovereignty. It’s about self-government. It’s about identity. It’s about whether we are a proper nation or not. This is about us governing our country, it’s about us controlling our borders ... We need to be saying ‘we want our country back’. And we’re going to get it. And June 23 is going to be Independence Day. – Nigel Farage, April 2016

If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet. – Professor Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift1

As we were completing this work, the dangerous forces of nationalism were all too apparent. The heart-breaking 2019 general election saw the resurrection of an overtly nationalistic and racist government led by Boris Johnson. The right was consolidated as the Tory Party swept up the votes of erstwhile UKIP and Brexit Party voters. Johnson’s

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government took victory with the enthusiastic endorsement of Trump, following a political playbook influenced, if not scripted, by Steve Bannon. More broadly, as the troubled decade of the twenty-teens has ended, the full violence of exclusionary nationalisms has been unleashed across the globe – with re-education camps for Uighur Muslims in China, and the spectre of mass internment and statelessness targeting Muslims in India. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi defended the genocidal violence against the Rohingya as a matter of national security, and in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s popular campaign to harden the eastern flank of Fortress Europe has trapped people on the border, starving in camps. The richest nation on earth continues to cage children at its border, and while the infrastructure for this violence was developed during the ‘liberal years’ of Clinton and Obama (as well as Bush), the aggressive and spectacular violation of racialised Others is absolutely central to Trump’s mode of governance in the USA. Comparable regimes in Brazil under Bolsonaro, and Turkey under Erdogan, point to the wider set of alliances and confluences being forged between authoritarian strongmen and their ultra-nationalist mandates. In this chapter we focus on the British story, considering the stubborn allure of nationalism in British political culture. Importantly, appeals to the nation transcend neat political divisions of left and right. Although as a group we do not subscribe to a singular ‘line’, we all approach the pull of nationalism with scepticism, even in its welfarist incarnations. Historically, the British nation has only ever existed with colonies and has therefore constructed

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a national identity through a triumphalist sense of its own imperial greatness, in which the British national character is defined in opposition to the uncivilised nature of colonial subjects. British nationalism necessarily relies on the structured and purposeful forgetting of the violence and domination that characterised empire, while simultaneously lamenting the loss of global power and prestige when Britannia ruled the waves. Perversely, in the context of Brexit, the Leave side were able to narrate the UK’s membership in the European Union as one of colonial subjugation: Boris Johnson claimed the EU ‘relegated Britain to the status of a colony’, and Nigel Farage hailed the referendum result as Britain’s ‘Independence Day’. This distinctly British, or more accurately English, mix of colonial amnesia, nostalgia and melancholia underwrites the persistence of racism in British political and cultural life and explains the profound longing for authority, repression and the expulsion of racialised outsiders that this book charts. Put most simply, the history of this political and social formation means that British nationalism is unavoidably racial and racist, and any attempts to repurpose it for progressive or leftist ends are myopic and dangerous (see Chapter 5). Others have gone into far greater detail demonstrating how British nationalism and racism are co-constitutive, with Paul Gilroy remarking that ‘British nationalism cannot be purged of its racialized contents any more easily than a body can be purged of the skeleton that supports it.’2 More recently, social theorist Sivamohan Valluvan has argued that European colonial legacies mean ‘Western nation-making projects render race an inevitable and

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indispensable presence that is continually remade.’3 As he argues, the nation’s content, its inside, only gains meaning and substance through what it excludes, the outside. The challenge for us, then, is to theorise racism in relation to the shifting work performed by nationalism, which remains dangerous and persistent precisely because it successfully appeals to various political constituencies and imaginaries – including sadly on the left. There is no salvation in left nationalisms. However, in our view, sometimes the desire to name and centre race can obscure the centrality of nationalism to contemporary racisms. In other words, a willingness to talk about race sometimes forecloses a more careful analysis of the politics of nation. In some cases this encourages a politics of representation and inclusion that, as we argue, bolsters rather than challenges nationalist rhetorics. Unlike some other states, Britain struggles to pin down its definitive nation-building moment. As a result, nationalistic nostalgia may be referencing quite different incarnations of the nation (although this is true for most nationalisms). Sometimes it is the apparently austere Victorian values championed at the height of imperial power, but more often it is the euphoria of victory in the Second World War and the boom years that followed. The post-war establishment of the NHS and Britain’s welfare state can therefore associate the nationalism of war with the humanity underpinned by the social democratic reforms that followed it, not to mention the defeat of Nazism. This nostalgia, then, is not only for an imagined national greatness, but also for a time when the state could really do something, really police behaviour, really embody

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patriarchal authority, and really act on the world stage. For this reason, the remaking of state practices – which have become increasingly defined by cruelty, neglect and austerity – is experienced, culturally, as a diminution of national status. In other words, the moment of English nationalism that finds form through Brexit takes the disruption and disappointment of state neglect and rearticulates it as an outcome of national decline. In an echo of other English and British nationalisms, this iteration of nationalism includes a strange amalgamation of anti-elitism with a longing for authoritarianism. In this nostalgia, there is a desire for the state to demonstrate its power in a manner that we, the citizenaudience, can understand. This power is not necessarily coercive, but it is always firm. There remains a collective memory of a state – the welfare state – whose interventions demonstrated understanding and care, a state that sought to provide the healthcare, housing and education we all wanted. But this power was also authoritative. It instilled values and, when necessary, imposed law and order, meting out the justice we deserved. Some of the eruptions of racialised panic we describe in this book circle back to this nostalgia for an imagined powerful, competent state. The repetitive quest for a ‘progressive’ nationalism is therefore perhaps best understood as a response to the widely circulated view that something has been lost. This view of the nation, which frames it as an almost empty vessel into which progressive, rather than reactionary, policies can be poured, means that demands to provide more funding for police officers on our streets are considered a simple defence of essential, benevolent,

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public services, rather than calls bound up in the violent project of nation-building. While it remains clear that the gains of the welfare system – council housing, free education and universal healthcare – are being eroded, these material losses are often combined with other narratives of cultural loss and national decline. This register of loss attaches most strongly to the mythic ‘white working class’, who are understood to have been ‘left behind’ by globalisation. The formulation of the ‘left behind’ is framed as a loss not simply to the gain of elites, but also to the gain of ethnic outsiders who have been favoured by political correctness and reverse discrimination. The suggestion that ‘multiculturalism’ has been imposed on a native population by the elite, without discussion or consent, echoes long-standing far-right narratives which present ‘the elite’ as predominantly Jewish, conspiring to dilute or eradicate the apparent whiteness of the indigenous working class by encouraging immigration and multiculturalism. While ‘the great replacement’ theory is a far-right ideological repertoire, similar arguments find voice through political demography, the most respectable form of scientific racism in our times. Respected professors with prominent media profiles publish popular books on the ‘legitimate concerns’ of white majorities faced with demographic decline.4 In order to understand the stubborn persistence of these nativist currents – whether conservative and traditionalist, or liberal and even leftist – it is necessary to introduce the cast of characters British nationalism seeks to organise. To do so, we should return

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to the paradigmatic expression of this drama: Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. * * * In a Birmingham speech calling for an end to ‘coloured’ immigration, forewarning the scourge of black criminality and announcing the moral decline of the nation, Powell helped to reinvigorate English racism and fascism. He claimed that ‘the decent, ordinary Englishman’, the rightful protagonist of the national drama, faced an existential threat, as a deluge of immigrants, enabled by a mischievous Labour government, threatened his livelihood, his culture and his autonomy. The element of Powell’s speech that continues to resonate is the story he tells of Britain as a nation under threat, and the dichotomy he sets up between the ‘ordinary working man’ – white and a citizen – and the migrant worker. The migrant always remains both racialised and outside of Britain’s national story, regardless of the rights granted to Commonwealth and colony subjects by the 1948 British Nationality Act, and the centuries of military, economic, social and political connections forged by empire. Indeed, for Powell, black and brown Britons born in the UK would remain migrants (and so we remain: second and third generation migrants still). Though Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a blatant and embarrassing expression of racism, in its long afterlife it has been transformed into an apocryphal story of globalisation.5 Powell’s famous anecdote has become an enduring story that goes something like this:

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The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he was granted the same rights as every other citizen, from the right to vote to the right to free treatment under the National Health Service. But while for the immigrant entry to this country was an admission to privileges and opportunities, the implications for the existing population were not so rosy. For reasons they could not comprehend, ‘ordinary Englishmen’ found themselves made ‘strangers in their own country’. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition and their plans and prospects for the future thwarted. At work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker. These ordinary Englishmen began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them they were now unwanted. The story has three main characters. The first is the migrant – who may not technically be any more of a ‘migrant’ than someone moving from Cardiff to Canterbury, but is a migrant in the sense of being a racialised outsider. The migrant has been gifted the opportunity to escape the inevitable destitution of the kind that befalls his countrymen ‘back home’, and he now hopes to enjoy the comforts of Western life – which he did not build and to which he is not inherently entitled. The second character is the ‘global/metropolitan elite’ – the bosses, the government, the PC brigade – whose unexplained

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affinity for immigrants, whether it be metropolitan ‘virtue signalling’ or employer demand for cheap and exploitable labour, has led to Britain’s undoing. The final character is the white native: Powell compellingly centred ‘the decent, ordinary fellow Englishman’, what some among the contemporary right, as well as the centre and left, now call the traditional working class or, better yet, the ‘left behind’. It is at the expense of these respectable and indigenous Englishmen that the processes of post-war migration and multiculturalism have wrought their disruption. In order to make way for these racial aliens, the white citizen had to lose out – losing their industrialised jobs to outsourcing and undercutting foreign workers, their high streets to foreign shops and foreign crowds, and their safety and security to ‘black crime’. The majority lost control of how their country looks and feels – and, fast-forwarding to 2016, it was the language of sovereignty which fuelled the campaign of those who wanted their country back. In this story, Powellism is reheated to suggest that immigrant workers are the nefarious winners of neoliberal globalisation; their coalition with the global and political elite has left the white citizen-worker behind. Perhaps it is this last part of the story that resonates most sharply with sections of the left – where the exclusion of immigrants is enlisted primarily to defend and revalorise the native worker. Central to the Powellist narrative is the claim that ‘races’, or civilisations, exist in irreconcilable silos. Fixed in their immutable difference, they must compete with one another for scarce resources. This zero-sum-game logic has infused racism since Powell’s fateful interven-

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tion. During the apparently ‘liberal’ years of Blair and Cameron, Britain went about this management of difference more politely: through the language of integration, British values, security and fiscal responsibility. Britain’s political establishment became slick advocates of a putatively modern, liberal nationalism, attempting to weave seamlessly between multicultural inclusivity and the muscular exclusivity of nationalism. Powellism remained an implicit anchor, but one which could remain submerged except at crisis points, such as the 7/7 bombings or the 2011 riots, where the ungrateful children of Commonwealth migrants were once again in the spotlight as an existential danger to the nation. Cameron, nonetheless, tried to maintain a crisper, more corporate vision of the nation, setting his own party up as an antidote to the bigoted ramblings of the tabloid press and the ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ of UKIP, as he described them. It was, perhaps, his underestimation of the potency rather than the absurdity of Powellite nationalism that precipitated Cameron calling a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, a vote which he and his allies in New Labour were confident they would win. As blind to the power of British nationalism as some of their adversaries on the progressive left, the Remain establishment (in its Tory, Labour and other incarnations) was as surprised by the resurgence of a presumed-dead Powellism as they were by the Leave victory in the EU referendum. For New Labour, neoliberal multiculturalism – the promotion of a colour-blind take on Thatcherism’s meritocratic promise – was generally seen as an effective antidote to Powellite racism, which was framed primarily

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as narrow-minded ‘intolerance’ of other cultures which could be educated or legislated away. Even after Cameron declared multiculturalism a failure,6 the Remain alliance still presumed the political project of a monocultural nation to be a thing of the past. How wrong they were. The rest, as we know, is history. After the EU referendum, and the elections which followed, naked nationalism moved from supporting actor to leading role. As a result, many liberal and even left-wing actors now set their sights on reforming rather than defeating nationalism – a point we discuss in the next chapter. Falling back on the familiarity of nationalism, then, is not confined to party politics. The longing for the anchor of nationalism, with its heady mythologies and promise of a shared emotional world, extends notably to socialists and anti-racists. As we warn, however, the attempt to reform nationalism, or to develop a ‘progressive patriotism’ that can render progressive policies more appealing to ‘traditional voters’, is a dangerous strategy. There is no nationalist appeal without nostalgia and loss, and as Owen Hatherley rightly reminds us: ‘whenever the left thinks it can turn the past to its own advantage, it is outplayed by the right’.7 In the next chapter, we develop this critique of ‘progressive patriotism’.

C HAPTE R F I VE

Progressive Patriotism

To win back the ex-industrial towns where people have turned out in large numbers for Farage, Labour needs to talk about more than economics. It needs to fight personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights racism. It needs to sideline all voices who believe having a strong national security policy is somehow ‘imperialist’. It needs to forget scrapping Trident. The reluctance to speak this language this is, I believe, what left Labour over-reliant on triangulating to accommodate the proBrexit views of some voters in these towns. – Paul Mason1

Nationalism is never simply a means to other political ends, not least left collectivism. Nationalism is always, in the final instance, about its own exclusionary racisms – anything else is a convenient bedfellow rallied to make its appeal more likely. – Sivamohan Valluvan2

In this chapter, we consider the puzzling and yet continuing appeal of nationalism for the progressive and anti-racist left, despite the many horrors unleashed by nationalist forces in our time. Most of all, we try to unpack

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what is at stake in the various calls for a ‘progressive nationalism/patriotism’. Such calls have been particularly insistent in the United Kingdom, despite, or perhaps due to, the uneasy binding of nations that are ‘united’ in this overarching ‘nation’. Yet the explicitly stated goal of the Scottish Nationalist Party – to hold another referendum on Scottish independence and secede from the United Kingdom – is only intermittently included in musings on the progressive potential of a differently imagined nationalism. Similarly, the political aspirations of Northern Ireland seem far away from the attempts to remake Britishness in a manner that can encompass the multicultural. Given these peculiar silences, we can presume that when British commentators propose a progressive nationalism, they mean a nationalism that can include and perhaps even embrace black and brown people, rather than a nationalism that addresses and resolves the challenges of the union. So, if talk of progressive nationalism must be understood as talk about race, ironically, it is also simultaneously a refusal to acknowledge the unresolved and volatile issues which continue to unsettle this nation of nations. In the previous chapter we emphasised the importance of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech for setting the terms of debate on issues surrounding race and immigration in British politics. It is on the discursive terrain shaped by Powellism that attempts at liberal and left nationalisms compete with their authoritarian counterparts. While New Labour’s use of focus groups and the processes of population segmentation perfected by corporate marketing teams might look rather quaint against our

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new algorithmic horizons, the habit of viewing the electorate as divided into tidy sociological categories has come with disastrous effects, not least in shoring up the view that people’s beliefs and desires are inherent rather than shaped by political processes. For New Labour, this view birthed the myth of triangulation: the idea that one simply had to promise policies that would mediate between two data points, a third way, thereby appealing to a large enough cross-section of the electorate to win an election. It is in this attempt to find a third way between nationalism and anti-racist socialism that the left too often paints itself into a corner. * * * The basic premise of the progressive nationalist argument is that patriotism is at once desirable and a basic, immovable fact of the British national psyche. The problem for progressive nationalists is that the right (and worse, the far-right) have obtained a political monopoly on its use and thus fill it with regressive or conservative content. Race and racism play a key role in the construction of this argument. The right’s nationalism is problematic for the progressive nationalist because it is used to articulate nativism, racism, jingoism, xenophobia, etc. Rather than interrogating how the nation has become the primary mechanism through which racism is articulated in Britain, progressive nationalists instead tell us we simply need to fill this signifier with new, progressive, maybe even anti-racist content. In fact, they argue that not doing so is precisely the reason why right-wing nation-

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alism is winning this particular ideological battle. In The Progressive Patriot, Billy Bragg put it thus: ‘Reluctant to make any concessions to reactionary nationalism, we have, by default, created a vacuum, leaving it to the likes of the BNP and the Daily Mail to decide who does and who doesn’t belong here.’3 More recently Zoe Williams wrote: ‘bad nationalism’, the suspicious and anti-immigrant kind, the ‘hostile environment’ kind, the static kind, the kind that, out of nowhere, thinks sovereignty is the burning issue of the day and that building a wall will solve anything, thrives not because the majority secretly thought this all along, but because there is no countervailing narrative of ‘good nationalism’.4 A key part of the progressive nationalist argument is therefore about changing the national story Britain tells of itself. This, we are told, will allow for a patriotism no longer grounded in the love of British (white) supremacy but instead found in histories of working-class solidarity and social justice. Williams described this as ‘Danny Boyle Nationalism’ in reference to the ‘radical’ and ‘inclusive’ story told by Boyle in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Here, the ‘Greatness’ of Britain was retold through the abolition of slavery, the Suffragettes, the making of the NHS, the arrival of SS Empire Windrush, and J.K. Rowling. However, such ‘radical’ re-imaginations of British history have produced an uneasy consensus across the political spectrum. In the aftermath of the 2019 general election, Labour MP Liam Byrne diagnosed Labour’s

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electoral defeat as rooted in its inability to contend with ‘the allure of patriotism’ and emphasised its importance in reviving support for the Labour Party. Curiously, a few weeks later, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP, also suggested Labour’s electoral defeat could be explained by Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of patriotism. In their interventions, both Byrne and Hannan expressed a pride in the Levellers, Chartists and the Suffragettes.5 The invocation of radical history in the service of patriotism is clearly not restricted to the left, then. Indeed, in 2014, on winning the parliamentary seat for Rochdale for the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP), MP Mark Reckless declared that his party stood in the tradition of the Levellers and Chartists, adding, ‘The radical tradition, which has stood and spoken for the working class, has found a new home in UKIP.’ That explicitly racist and xenophobic political forces have been able to cash-in on ‘progressive’ articulations of nationalism should perhaps give left-wing advocates pause for thought. Indeed, this cross-party consensus betrays the racial work performed by nationalist discourses. Each offer selective readings of British history where the nation’s constitutive imperial violences are suppressed precisely to enable feelings of pride and love. Whereas right-wing nationalism practices an imperial nostalgia, progressive nationalism appears to depend on imperial aphasia – a deliberate forgetting of a colonial past. At the same time, the histories that make the cut of progressive nationalist narratives tend to erase ostensibly ‘working-class’ or ‘radical’ movements that placed the imperial-national formation of Britain itself into question.6 We are encour-

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aged to remember the Chartists but not the Mau Mau; the Suffragettes but not the British Black Panther Party. The allure of progressive patriotism therefore relies on a set of assumptions about the value of differently racialised people; foreigners are placed outside of progressive narratives of a nation supposedly grounded in working-class solidarity. These foreigners might be included as desirable and redeemable, but only when placed in the service of the nation. When they do not perform this function, they remain undesirable or unseen. In turn, the existence of the nation and its reproduction is placed beyond question or challenge, especially when that challenge is expressed by Britain’s Others. Progressive nationalism, in spite of its disavowals of xenophobia and its celebration of multi­ culturalism, reproduces an imperial ordering of British politics. The ideological contortions of progressive nationalism are most clearly visible in contemporary debates around immigration. Indeed, the ‘progressive’ often comes to a battle over nationalism armed with little more than a paternalistic notion of immigration as the source of some welcome ‘cultural diversity’ and, more importantly, a seemingly bottomless ‘migrant work ethic’ that runs our economy. In this fashion, the left finds itself using the same playbook as the so-called centre. As a ‘Remainer’ on the BBC’s Question Time asked, ‘If we stop migration, who will serve us our coffees in Pret?’ While ostensibly offering a sensible pro-migrant position, such interventions articulate colonial logics of value extraction, whereby racialised Others are allowed to survive on the condition that they

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service our consumption requirements, or clean up our (sometimes literal) shit. The left’s focus on migrants as workers – even if it is emphasised that they pay in more than they take out – merely sharpens the tensions that right-wing nationalism claims to reconcile. The migrant worker, with his robot-like body and his ability to work for hours and hours without toilet breaks, a living wage, or complaint, does indeed appear as a threat to your job and your livelihood. The progressive nationalist logic accepts that because racialised minorities are undervalued, it is inevitable that their labour will be sold on the market for less. The poor conditions for migrant workers are presented as a rational outcome of market forces – a constructed social inferiority coupled with an imposed ‘migrant work ethic’ which undermines the collective bargaining power of native workers. While Powell’s infamous speech focuses on culture rather than economics, it nonetheless supplies a highly compelling emotional repertoire for progressive nationalism; we have to keep them and their robotic bodies out, so we aren’t forced to compete unfairly with them in the labour market. The Powellite instincts of progressive nationalists thus preclude alternative political possibilities: what if we were to challenge the movement of capital rather than labour? What if we were to prioritise improving the working conditions and collective bargaining of migrant workers? What if migrants who did not work at all were still ‘valued’? Such responses would require progressive nationalists to question the borders which separate workers into citizens and migrants, and thus the very boundaries of the nation

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that they seem at such pains to protect and reproduce. In contrast, an understanding of race as a construction undermines bordering as a solution. If we see race as something put on us, rather than coming from us, it is clear that the state doesn’t respond to race but endlessly remakes it – borders are the mechanism that categorises and racialises us, making some of us cheaper, less entitled to welfare, care and safety than others, and positioning migrant workers in a perpetual state of violence, neglect and intraclass conflict. * * * When Jeremy Corbyn’s first engagement after his surprise election as leader of the Labour Party in 2015 was to speak at the Refugees Welcome rally, we saw a glimpse of possibility that a left-wing electoral project might resist the urge to compete on the dangerous terrain of nationalism. Indeed, the energy and optimism of the Corbyn project suggested a decisive break with the technocratic politics championed by Labour since Blairism. The emergence of the Corbyn project showed that this technocratic approach was one that could potentially be discarded. In the explicitly socialist rhetoric of ‘the many not the few’ there was the potential to revive an understanding of social divisions as political and, as a result, subject to change. Further, there was an implicit understanding of a multiracial working class as the constituency whose needs and desires the Labour Party ought to represent. Unfortunately, many associated with the Corbyn project happily swallowed the myth of the ‘white working class’ as a

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discrete social group and regurgitated the New Labourite project of triangulation as the means to win their support. Their indulgence of this myth, though indefensible, is not difficult to understand. Following the success of the Leave campaign and Trump’s victory in the USA soon after, the media coalesced around the Powellist idea that the ‘white working class’ had been ‘left behind’ by globalisation. The Brexit vote was viewed, then, as the ‘white working class’ in revolt. Commentators attached to the Corbyn project, but sceptical about its ability to win an election without appealing to the ‘white working class’, sought a return to triangulation, in the form of a Labour immigration policy that would offer the necessary racist sop. Pundits closely aligned with the Corbyn project, such as Paul Mason, have been disturbingly quick to adopt this approach.7 In 2017, Mason stated: ‘Free movement does not just suppress wage growth at the low end. It says to people with strong cultural traditions, a strong sense of place and community (sometimes all they have left from the industrial era) that “your past does not matter”.’8 The claim here is that ‘mass migration’ negatively impacts wage growth – although it is not made clear how migration is to blame for precarity and poor labour market regulation – while also having negative ‘cultural impacts’. These negative ‘cultural impacts’ are presented as primarily felt in crestfallen postindustrial towns, those forgotten places always contrasted with apparently thriving metropolitan cities. This distinction between the ‘metropolitan multicultural bubble’, and the ‘left-behind post-industrial town’ is a trope that captivates pundits across the political spectrum

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despite the fact that age, profession and home ownership work as much better predictors for voting patterns. Depressingly, these lazy binaries between city and town, multicultural and white, thriving and forgotten, have been echoed increasingly by people associated with the Labour Party in the wake of the 2019 December election. To the extent that such distinctions between city and town hold, they are an effect of the UK’s constituency-based, firstpast-the-post electoral system, wherein voters in marginal seats hold all the electoral sway. Rather than critiquing this system, and the limitations it sets on the formation of left-wing constituencies, these commentators have decided to reinvigorate tropes about the ‘left behind’ and their ‘legitimate concerns’, joining the chorus of politicians floundering to resolve the issues in ‘towns’ and ‘heartlands’. Even the Corbyn continuity candidate, Rebecca LongBailey, made a play for ‘progressive patriotism’ in her bid for leadership, while in April 2020 the party’s new leader, the apparently ‘forensic’ Sir Keir Starmer, entertained some erstwhile Labour voters in Bury, Greater Manchester, over a Zoom call, reassuring them that he did not think their vote for Brexit, love of the monarchy, or flag-waving, represented anything like racism. He later confirmed, ‘I wouldn’t be leader of the Labour Party if I wasn’t patriotic’, to preface his pro-police, pro-armed forces positions.9 One might argue that there is no purity in party politics, and winning elections takes strategy and compromise. For some this might indicate a limit point for any electoral project, for others a question over what constitutes an acceptable ‘compromise’. For many left nativists, however, the desire to exclude ‘immigrants’ is not only about

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winning over voters or even protecting workers. Many on the left imagine politics in decidedly national terms; questions of liberty, equality and justice become questions about British people and the relations between them. This means not only abandoning internationalism but also, often, blaming immigrants. In this view, immigrants not only undercut wages, they also bring disintegration and unwanted social change: terrorism, crime and alien cultures – too many, too quickly. And this concerns more than the numbers; immigrants represent the disruption of an imagined working-class community, established across generations and firmly rooted in place, at home. This, the story goes, has been the basis of labour movement strength in this country: industries located in communities where traditions of work, of mobilisation and of resistance all flow down through generations and beyond the workplace into the community. This is a model of labour organisation that relies not only on people knowing each other, but also on knowing each other’s people – a familial saga where class identity and political education are remade as part of the experience of being together in a place. The incursion of ‘newcomers’ brings new challenges and, in the most frenzied of left nationalisms, is regarded as an attack on the working class. Versions of this nostalgia for a different moment of class experience can be seen in Gordon Brown’s uncomfortable call for ‘British jobs for British workers’ in 2007, and its anticipation of Brexit’s reheated Powellism. The pop-sociological arm of this nostalgic nativism can be found in David Goodhart’s warped claims for rootedness as a defence against the metropolitan elite (‘Is your

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tribe the “Somewheres” or the “Anywheres”’?).10 Finally, as discussed above, in the flurry of post-voting punditry (following both the Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election), we saw the entire left commentariat offer their strategy for how to capture the hearts, minds and votes of the ‘left behind’, those town-dwellers in former heartlands. Our point is that many who are broadly aligned to the left also desire nationalist certainty and patriotic homeliness, and there is a troubling convergence between left and right on issues relating to race and nation. The ‘progressive’ in ‘progressive nationalism’ might translate as ‘we will exclude immigrants for the sake of workers and equality’, but the forms of statecraft and the racist logics licensed by these arguments are much the same. This is why the Corbyn project was so hopeful, such a sharp turn from the ‘controls on immigration’ mugs of Ed Miliband’s 2015 campaign. Corybn’s political programme and his base was much less easily seduced by the politics of nativism, and much more unwilling to concede ground in the race-to-the-bottom politics of excluding immigrants. This was not because the movement was especially ethnically diverse, or always avowedly anti-racist (although both of these things may have played some part in some places), but because Corbynism mobilised more substantively ‘progressive’ forces, people on the left who had otherwise engaged in social movements rather than parliamentary politics. The danger in the wake of the 2019 election result – and the mass desertion of the party by radical, socialist and anti-racist younger members – is that Labour’s misguided

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attempts to ‘win back voters’ will now fall back on the lowest common denominator: the popular, violent and wholly negative desire to punish, exclude and expel ‘foreigners’, ‘criminals’ and racialised outsiders of various stripes. Early signs from Keir Starmer suggest that this looks likely. * * * The electoral left’s attempts to capture the pull of nationalism have been predictable and dispiriting, as was the failure of the Corbyn project to cultivate a politics of pro-migrant internationalism that could challenge nativist racism. Yet it is worth remembering that in the 1960s, Powell was an outlier, not just from polite society but also from his own party. The first to call for privatisation, Powell upturned assumptions by revealing that a host of working-class Tories could be won by nationalist appeal, anti-immigrant politics and the aspirational possibilities that would later define Thatcherism. Powell’s movement previewed the break up of the post-war social-democratic consensus, but sixties Britain was the wrong moment, and this kooky imperial throwback the wrong man. After ‘Rivers of Blood’, Powell left the political main stage humiliated, but, unbeknown at the time, Powellism laid the foundations for the remaking of Britain. The thinktanks that had championed Powell, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, had the ear of the Conservative Party, and the anti-immigration army Powell inspired were waiting for another leader to speak to their fears. Following a few false starts, ten years after ‘Rivers of

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Blood’, the new right found their messiah. Thatcher rode to power on a path cleared by Powellism, privatising industries and passing the British Nationality Act 1981, making real things that seemed impossible in the 1960s. There is now the idea being advanced across the left that, following the rejection of Corbynism at the 2019 general election, the only path to victory for Labour in the future is to triangulate towards nationalism.11 We are being told that we must accept that Powellism has so fundamentally transformed the British electorate that the left can only hope to win voters back by embracing ‘legitimate’ fears around identity, immigration and culture. This is the wrong lesson to learn from Powellism. It may have been a joke at the time, but Britain has now sold almost every state industry, almost every newspaper spews daily anti-immigrant bile, and Nigel Farage was, for a time, the country’s kingmaker. The failure of Corbynism as an electoral project in 2015–19 is absolute. Corbyn was toxic to a Brexit-hungry Britain. But the idea that this era can be dismissed as a cult of personality, or student politics writ large, or a throwback to the 1970s, is misplaced. Though Jeremy Corbyn is no longer the leader of the Labour Party, ideas like the Green New Deal or Universal Basic Income are not going away (even more so following the state responses to Covid-19), and neither are the constituencies that formed around the Corbyn project likely to disappear completely (we must hope that we will assemble in new and imaginative ways). The networks of new media and intellectual hubs are here to stay. The 18–30 year olds, with their precarity and uncertain futures, are highly politicised and remarkably

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quick to mobilise, their younger comrades even quicker. More importantly, the issues that pushed Corbyn into his unlikely leadership will remain with us – in fact, they will likely get worse with income inequality, precarious jobs and housing crises, the threat of climate change and automation all gathering speed. In another historical moment, with another leader and with the lessons of this failure having been learnt, the historical forces and ideas that drove ‘Corbynism’ may yet still remake British politics. Let us conclude by re-emphasising the key problem faced by left nationalisms: they must, from their very inception, draw boundaries between what or whom is inside the nation, and what or whom remains outside its borders. This necessity does not simply disrupt solidarity, it is necessarily anti-solidarity. Describing ‘progressive patriotisms’ as nativist is not simply name-calling. Nativism literally means the politics of ‘natives first’, and while people might pursue a ‘left nativism’ in a desperate bid for electoral gain, this hand is always played better by the right. The deck has been rigged in their favour, and the characters positioned by the Powellist narrative make much more sense on their terms. Importantly, once mobilised, the forces of nativism cannot be contained, especially in times of uncertainty, abandonment and neglect. Yet the progressive nationalists still imagine that there is some middle ground up for grabs where they can win votes and stem the forces of racist nationalism. In our critique of progressive nationalists, we often accuse them of ‘throwing migrants under the bus’, but perhaps this is the wrong metaphor. Progressive nationalism means letting ‘them’ drown and watching ‘them’ fall

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from the undercarriages of planes. In times of deepening global crises and ecological catastrophe, any arguments for controlling immigration converge with lifeboat ethics, in which some must die so others can live – ‘they’ must die so that ‘we’ can live. In this context, ‘internationalism’ is not only a well-worn socialist slogan, but a strategy for survival on a drastically changed planet, and one that is much harder to dispense with for the migrants and ‘minorities’ already here, whose familial, cultural and affective worlds do not end at the white cliffs of Dover. Considered this way, the apparently ‘progressive’ character of patriotism reveals itself, like the cliffs, as necessarily white, even if it likes to accommodate some colour for marketing purposes.

CH APT E R SI X

The Limits of Representation

Our head of state [the Queen] represents the nation and its people, and symbolises our values and culture. In a diverse multicultural society, surely it is wrong to automatically, a priori deny this honoured, revered role to our non-white citizens? – Peter Tatchell1

Together, we stand in solidarity with the Black community – our employees, customers, and partners – in the fight against systemic racism and injustice. – Amazon2

As we have shown, the electoral and trade union-affiliated British left continues to flirt with nationalism, law and order, and other elements of Powellist politics, in an attempt to win over the mythic ‘white working class’. To challenge and dismantle this dangerous configuration, we need to nurture vibrant anti-racist political cultures and institutions. However, anti-racists of several generations have often been ensnared by the politics of representation. This can be seen in calls to bring diversity to the police force, to the boardrooms of the FTSE 100, and to any and every institutional space we inhabit. The implication underlying such calls is that changing the faces of those ‘in

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power’ will, in itself, change the outcomes of institutional power, where anti-racism becomes little more than representation, inclusion and diversity. This is a non-solution to the problem of racism. The call for representation promises to combat the exclusion of racialised minorities from spaces of prestige and influence (often articulated through the language of ‘erasure’ or ‘taking up space’), while offering a point of identification and affirmation for other people of colour. The politics of representation feels as if it should work because it can be a relief to finally see someone who looks like you in your place of work making institutional decisions. Representation is not empty – it means something when people who are not white, not middle class, and not men take up roles from which they were formerly excluded. And of course it matters how people feel, and what reaches their hearts; the emotional register of being is an essential element of any effective political project. However, we want to argue that more is at stake when we are persuaded to scale back our political imaginations in this way. In this sense, the politics of representation limits claims; it says ‘no more than representative participation and no more transformation than having enough of each constituency’. It also leads us into a very particular conceptualisation of the space of politics and the workings of racism. Importantly, representation serves to anchor anti-racist mobilising back within the tight confines of the nation. The normative logic of representative democracy, in which your MP represents your views, filters through the omnipresent discourse of racial essentialism to suggest that someone who looks like you will represent your views

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better. This plays out in miniature elsewhere, but the idea remains tied to the notion that anti-racism is essentially a demographic question in which the only way to offset the (inevitable) marginalisation of being a ‘minority’ is to be better represented among the powerful. Let us begin this critique of representational politics, somewhat unimaginatively, with the university. In the last decade, student campaigns have appeared at multiple universities, often under the heading of ‘decolonising the university’ but comprising various demands and approaches. The most cited demands in the mainstream media have been for universities to diversify both teaching staff and the curriculum. However, there have been many more demands, some of which take more symbolic forms (removing statues, changing decor), or take student welfare and belonging as their central concern (better well-being services for students of colour). In these demands, many of which might improve university life on some level, the university itself – its formal structures, its purpose, its organisation – remains intact. Other demands are more structural – calling for universities to divest from research linked to military funding, to lower or abolish tuition fees, to cut the rate of rent in student halls – and would involve a more radical reorganisation of the institution. Yet these too presuppose the desirability of the university and often take place at relatively elite, Russell Group or University of London universities. Part of the reason it matters that these conversations take place in elite spaces is because of the ways in which they tend to focus on the experience of students of colour in a predominantly white environment – which is not the case at many

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lower-ranked universities. As such, many of the demands (both the more symbolic forms, as well as those relating to curriculum and academic staff) aim to change the experience of isolation for students of colour. The point here is that representational politics, in the first instance, tends to begin from those who already have some kind of institutional affiliation: university students, professionalised employees, British citizens. Part of the reason for its seductive power then is the practical ease with which it can be incorporated into institutional structures. Though demands for diversity are still sometimes met with hostility (both from within the institution in question, and beyond it), we nonetheless underscore the ways in which representational politics often sideline the question of what is being diversified. To give a historical example, Cambridge University was more diverse in the early twentieth century than it is now, as it was a key site for the education of native elites, who were instrumental to indirect rule in the British Empire. We can see, then, the central function of class in questions of representation. Though articulated across the political spectrum, including by many working-class people, representation is largely an elite discourse. The question of who would clean the ‘decolonised’ university is rarely asked. These days, it seems as though every institution is ripe for a conversation about diversity. When Meghan Markle officially joined the royal family, the press searched for responses from liberal anti-racists. Many lined up to offer their celebratory assessments, claiming that the inclusion of a black (or ‘mixed race’, depending on the pundit) woman into the monarchy was evidence that Britain had

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progressed far beyond its racist past (or in a less enthusiastic register, that if we want evidence of Britain’s ongoing problem with race and racism, then we need look no further than the media’s negative coverage of Markle). While commentators rejoiced or cautioned, more critical observers noted that late capitalism loves multiculturalism, so there is little reason why late feudalism shouldn’t also be giving it a go – such institutions of power need to reform in order to conserve and reproduce their power. Anti-racist thinkers, from Sivanandan to Gilroy, have remarked on the cynical opportunism of individuals from racialised minorities in Britain, who have stepped forward to be representatives of both black politics and the British state or big business. All that is required of these liberal anti-racists, therefore, is for them to shout loud enough for capital and/or the state to hear them – with social media providing a useful platform for their worthy bellows. The number of supposedly radical or anti-racist figures who happily take up their place on the honours list – in which recognition is explicitly tied to the celebration of empire – offers a biannual example of how an anti-racism focused on representation treats the nation as the sole receptacle of politics. Within this logic, the nation state’s symbolic head, the monarch, appearing more diverse is a common-sense victory for anti-racism. By positing racism as a process of exclusion from sites of power and of public visibility, we imagine politics as a bounded community where to be included is to overcome racism. The validity of the British nation is consequently treated as beyond question, now naturalised and legitimated through the politics of representation.

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Representative anti-racism also offers its own distinctive form of anti-racist nationalism through a set of assumptions about precisely who or what is represented. Usually this ‘who’ or ‘what’ is understood as a coherent and discrete ‘community’ defined by some homogeneous and absolute racial, ethnic or cultural lineage. While this might furnish the representational authority of ‘community leaders’, it is also the same assumption that informs racist demands for racialised communities to speak out against so-called ‘atrocities’ or ‘crimes’ carried out by their members. It is now a common part of Britain’s racist repertoire to demand ‘the Muslim community’ denounce acts of ‘terror’, or for ‘the black community’ to distance itself from ‘gang crime’. A common and quite legitimate anti-racist response to such racism is to question why a shared ethnicity should imply shared responsibility or accountability, especially when this demand is never directed at white people. However, this anti-racist criticism is often forgotten – even by its own proponents – when applied to the wider politics of anti-racist representation and identification. In fact, the notion of homogeneous and coherent ‘communities’ is conjured afresh when individual experience and identity is centred as a source of authority on ‘black’ or ‘brown’ issues (or even, indeed, ‘white’ guilt). Discrete, homogeneous and coherent ‘communities’ reappear when anti-racists encourage individuals to root out specific forms of racism or other oppressions in ‘their own communities’. Equally, when inclusion, diversity or representation is advocated, one underlying assumption is that representatives – community leaders, CEOs, MPs, etc. – will either better support the interests of their ‘communities’

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or enable some sort of anti-racist trickle-down that will be to the benefit of the whole ‘community’. The assumption here – that a sociological category of people share a discrete and homogeneous set of beliefs or interests – flattens significant political, class, gendered and other differences between people who ostensibly share the same ‘community’. While disavowing the possibility of political difference, this anti-racist nationalism rests on (and actively reproduces) an ethnic or racial absolutism whereby distinct and hermetic communities exhaust the identities and politics of individuals within them. Here, race is seen less as a construction, even less so as a historically specific power relation, and more as some fixed and pre-social essence that determines social being. A politics of representation thus reproduces not only the nation but also the same understandings of race, ethnicity and nation that underpin racist thinking. In its most grotesque forms, representational anti-racism finds itself policing community boundaries and judging the validity of anti-racist politics on the basis of pseudo-biological categorisations and ethnic lineage. * * * While, at best, demands for representation by anti-racists in previous generations, both in Britain and its colonies, were accompanied by more radical critiques of the state, representation for the sake of inclusion and not transformation is the norm today. Such liberal anti-racisms have built transnational links across Europe, with ‘People of Colour’ networks across the continent being developed,

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unseen in previous generations. These networks can be partly attributed to emergent communities of colour across Europe establishing themselves following migration from the continent’s various colonies. But rather than these networks – convened mostly online and at conferences – providing a gateway for black and brown Brits to build transnational links with non-Anglophone peoples and struggles in the Global South, the conversations remain Euro-parochial. Questions of where in Europe representation is better or worse dominate debates, with the renewed language of ‘coloniality’ emptied out of its anti-colonial content and used to refer to a simple lack of institutional representation. This politics of representation can often rely on a reading of anti-racist histories which both begins with post-war migration and remains focused on the confines of European nation states. Its narrative in which hopeful ‘economic migrants’ from the colonies arrived in Europe, looking for a new life in the mother country, but were shocked to experience racism, presents the history of anti-racism as a campaign to be represented. This is flawed for two broad reasons. First, the diversity quotas, affirmative action policies and representation drives demanded by liberal anti-racists are not new to European governance. The colonial project required very similar initiatives. For indirect colonialisation, the training of civil servants led to huge numbers of ‘natives’ becoming state representatives. As noted above, senior colonial state agents were trained at Oxford and Cambridge. French overseas departments such as Martinique in the Caribbean required similar processes of black representation. Furthermore, decolo-

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nisation in colonies with settlers, such as Kenya, led to a second wave of diversity initiatives as ‘natives’ were incorporated into the highest seats of state power in an attempt to ensure their allegiance to the old colonial power. The second problem with this ahistorical and parochial reading of the genealogy of anti-racism is that it separates anti-racism from anti-imperialism. Rather than simply a series of nation-building projects, seeking national sovereignty for each colonised nation (perhaps the preeminent form of representation), anti-imperialism understood its goal as breaking the global colourline. This meant dismantling the world system in which states compete for power and building a new world system based on solidarity and co-operation. This fundamentally anti-state and anti-capitalist component of anti-racism’s genealogy remains, at best, a legacy to which lip service is paid by liberal anti-racists demanding representation. For example, a short film circulated widely on social media, putatively aimed at celebrating the lives of Olive Morris and Claudia Jones, was brought to the viewer in partnership with Uber. The grotesque contradiction of this corporate tie-in was obscured by the film’s presentation of these women as examples of the power of black feminism, actively obscuring the anti-imperialist, socialist politics for which they fought. Previous generations of anti-racists looked to the Global South for transnational links, and we can partially attribute this to the polarised political landscape of the 1960s and ’70s, in which decolonisation and struggles against apartheid provided clear goodies and baddies, as well as winners and losers. Palestine remains the most

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committed site of anti-imperial solidarity today, precisely for this reason (although the repeated claim that criticism of the Israeli state is motivated by anti-Semitism has rendered this conversation more messy and difficult).3 With the rise of the far-right in states such as India, Turkey and Brazil, there is a renewed urgency to connect anti-racism with radical change in the Global South. While we do not wish to romanticise the anti-racist movements of previous decades, there can be little doubt that connections to the Global South, socialism and anti-imperialism were stronger (although such interconnecting solidarities are becoming more amplified again as we write). The question therefore is how can the visible injustices often most easily illustrated by a lack of representation be used as an avenue for a more material anti-imperialist and anti-racist political praxis, in a world which is no longer decolonising, and in which new internationalist possibilities need desperately to be affirmed? This is a question which becomes all the more difficult as anti-racist debate and discourse becomes not only limited by the succour of inclusion, representation and celebrity, but must also be performed and broadcast within the confines of 280 characters. * * * Digital media does not act as a neutral medium for the transmission of political ideas but actively shapes contemporary politics. The politics of representation are no exception. Arguably, the liberal politics of representation have been uniquely transformed by social media, which

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has reshaped our sense of the individual, community and society. It is on social media that ostensibly radical demands for representation are pursued with the most vigour and volume. Twitter threads, YouTube vlogs and Tumblr pages have been effective ways for individuals and groups to harness digital technology and reach large audiences. While some of these uses of social media platforms provide an alternative and radical criticism of state and corporate media outlets, others demand inclusion, representation and often, most importantly, payment. Pay and conditions for workers are some of the oldest demands of leftist politics, but today’s timeline demands remain rooted in individual, neoliberal logics. Ensuring an institution pays an anti-racist organiser or educator for their labour is of course not a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is when demands for payment sit within the logic of market competition rather than collective bargaining. While these market logics are structurally reproduced by the atomised nature of work, they lead to zero-sum games, where cultural producers, educators and journalists are compelled to compete with each other over limited spaces online, in exhibitions and on other platforms. Who, or what, takes up space in these areas of social, cultural and political life becomes about who is doing the work rather than what work is actually being done. This environment compels people gendered or racialised into different categories or identities to compete with each other, to be the most underrepresented, the most oppressed, and therefore most worthy of platform, space and payment. Rather than seeing connections between different forms of oppression, a hierarchy is constructed,

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in which one oppressed category, identity or group is implicated in the oppression of another, based on where they sit in this hierarchy. In its crudest form, this can look like a mathematical appraisal, in which some social privileges put people lower down the hierarchy of oppression. Recounting your list of identities by beginning a political statement with those two all-important words ‘as a…’ demonstrates the degree of validity, authenticity, accurateness and radicalism of the observation or analysis which follows. Declaring the oppressive attitudes you have expressed in the past, or that exist within ‘your’ community, is one of the ways people pre-empt being ‘called out’ or ‘cancelled’. Anti-racism becomes a challenge for activists to ‘talk to your racist uncle’, as if intercommunal bigotry were the source, rather than the symptom, of racism. Similarly, a political criticism can be easily rejected if it is posed by someone from a privileged identity, even when the identity in question is unrelated to the criticism in question. Much of the language of this form of liberal online anti-racism is wrapped up in the language of radical politics. Its advocates demand representation and rehearse individualising analyses of privilege, but they also cite revolutionary activists and thinkers, asserting that racism is ‘systemic’ and considering their politics to be ‘decolonial’. Yet, unlike earlier anti-colonial traditions which articulated a separatist nationalism – the creation of a black nation with its own institutions and power structures, for example – more recent articulations appear more ambiguous as to their end goal. Their criticisms of the system are structural and revolutionary, but the tactics

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proposed are generally individualistic and demands are limited to reforming institutions to better pay, include and represent individuals from specific identity groups. This process is best illustrated through the ways in which campaigners like Olive Morris or Claudia Jones are presented through the prism of identity, as described above. What is important is that they are working class, not communists or socialists. The focus is on the fact that they are black women, not black feminists. Thus, the identities of these organic intellectuals and activists are not a starting point for their political campaigns and ideas. Rather, their identities are their politics. Crucially, lionising a member of the working class, a black person, or a woman is compatible with state and profit-making institutions. The problems arise only when a political position which seeks to dismantle the state or capitalist social relations is taken into account, and therefore ideas, or better yet quotations from such individuals, are carefully selected and curated to mystify radical politics, or reduce them to the status of footnote. The winner, here, is the social industry – the tech platforms making money from Angela Davis memes and images of Jayaben Desai on the picket line in a sari – while anti-racist movements are reduced to a dazzling digital spectacle. We observe on social media a particular tendency towards what Paul Gilroy variously terms ethnic absolutism, purity-seeking and the longing for racial fixity, certainty and closure.4 These anti-humanist tendencies have been fashionable for a long time, well before the introduction of timeline media, but they are perhaps taking new form, or new salience, in the context of Twitter

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politics. While Twitter can be a medium for expressions of solidarity and care, it is scandal that tends to prove most generative of likes, retweets and replies, and therefore proves most valuable to Twitter’s (algorithmic) business model. This inbuilt tendency to scandal fuels a culture of outrage and malice in which individuals and their character are subject to often brutal assaults – in particular when they are determined to have been inauthentic and deceitful, and especially when this relates to their racialisation. Conflicts over who speaks about what seem particularly heated online, and in ways which are often disconnected from a wider critique of power. This is a reflection of the zero-sum game politics we discuss in Chapter 12, but it also rewards forms of ethnic and racial authenticity which we view as profoundly troubling. Conversations about political blackness – as well as the erasures inherent in the government-speak, ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ (BAME) – are especially tense sites of conflict in this context. While we recognise that there is an important conversation to be had about relations of power and voice within anti-racist organisations, debate online often seems totally disconnected from political action and strategy – and from a wider critique of the state and big business. To give one example, when the British army posted a tweet as part of its #blackhistorymonth campaign, the tweet was widely condemned not because it came from the army, which saw fit to use black history month as a marketing opportunity, but because the tweet wrongly included Asians. The moral of the story is that Asians are not black, and the army showed its disdain for black people through its lazy disregard for racial specificity,

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rather than in their attempt to recruit them to contemporary imperialist wars via the opportunistic white-washing of colonial history. Social and timeline media fuel the prevalence of forms of race-talk which hinge on privilege and cultural appropriation, where racism becomes what Fanon calls a ‘mental quirk … a psychological flaw’.5 It is in the realm of sovereign experience that the ultimate truths of racial difference and hierarchy can be gleaned, and these can then be shared through online testimony. Of course, people are not wrong to be outraged by interpersonal, racist humiliation, but in our view the affective registers of social media tend to reward expressions of outrage and distrust, leading us all to the inevitable conclusion that multi-racial coalition is impossible because we can never understand the experiences of someone with a different identity. The purity of experience finds a particular affective charge on the timeline, and this explains why we saw young white people joining the 2020 BLM protests holding signs that read: ‘I will never understand, but I stand.’ Why does not understanding constitute a necessary and primary qualification in the context of a street mobilisation against racist police violence? Another sign read, ‘I am racist because the system is racist.’ White guilt and self-flagellation have become the order of the day, and this is clearly connected to the centring of experience and testimony online. When experience is centred in this way, authenticity and purity hold sway, and this often proves toxic when political movements and organisations seek to build coalitions and develop their strategies. Scandals concerning impurity and inauthenticity abound. Sadly, in-fighting

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has always been characteristic of progressive movements, because we really care about what we are fighting for. But online it is not even clear that there is any, even vague, shared project. Our interest here is not with fixing social media as one thing; all darkness and doom. Our own friendships and collaborations were mediated by social media, as we too vied for attention, offered our own ‘hot takes’, and ended up incredibly anxious after public Twitter spats with the politically adjacent. We inhabit the same fraught terrain (even if some of us have deleted our accounts). It is important to remember, then, that the highly addictive attention economy trades on our outrage and on scandal, but we also know that alongside the compulsive consumer hits there is the emergence of something like a political education based on sharing and non-deference, where there is little distinction between serious analysis and comedy. The timeline can be a component of a dispersed and uncontainable alternative political culture, memefied but not hopeless.

PART 3

State Patriarch

CH APT E R SE VE N

Our Heart Belongs to Daddy

The expansion of Europe was not just a matter of ‘Christianity and commerce’, it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage. – Ronald Hyam1

Families matter. I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad … where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and anger. So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start. – David Cameron’s speech on the fightback after the riots, August 2011

Our moment, in which capitalist production is increasingly digitised, has enabled a hitherto unknown proliferation of sexual representation. In fact, the not-soslow creep of social media into all aspects of everyday life leads to an increasingly blurry line between sexual act and sexual representation. Alongside its other functions, the internet continues to serve as an enormous global porn

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machine. Sex is present everywhere, spoken covertly and overtly, but the fiction of its separateness from geopolitics, nation-building and state power must be continually maintained. We are encouraged to view sex through the prism of private, individual choice, reducing ‘sexual politics’ to a question of removing any barriers to individual sexual freedom. This limited and neoliberal conception of sexual politics emerges from a racialised social formation in which sex has long been a barometer of ‘civilisation’, and discourses of respectability have proven both flexible and durable. As we know from the contribution of post/anti-colonial feminist theory, sexuality and gender have always been central to the constitution of race. Alongside skulls and jawbones, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomy and anthropology textbooks displayed diagrams of the genitals of colonised, and specifically enslaved, peoples.2 The perceived ‘overdevelopment’ of sexual organs such as the penis, clitoris and labia was read as empirical evidence of a biologically determined, dysfunctional, sexual excess. This is extrapolated to mean an animalistic and morally deficient or unevolved character. Sex is therefore part of the process of racialisation that has persisted across colonial and postcolonial settings. Imperial discourses in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe constructed national cultures around ideals of respectability, rationality and honour.3 The prescribed order of the nuclear, heteronormative family represented the appropriate form of socialisation for national citizens of European states. The poor of the British mainland, but more acutely the ‘savage’ cultures found

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in the colonies, became the antithesis of the respectable British family. The absence of respectable family structures was enlisted to explain the inability of both groups to comply with social and legal norms. For colonised subjects, only civilising missions, colonial penal justice, or the whip gave any hope of reform. The legacies of this family-nation nexus continue to play out in the spectacles surrounding migrant Others in Britain, with their purportedly alien cultures, steadfastly unwilling or unable to commit themselves to the familial norms of European civilisation. In the European imagination, sexual deviance is a vital signifier for identifying how and why racialised Others come to embody moral degeneracy. By unpacking this process, we point to the manner in which the patriarchal nation/state remakes itself in our time, with the moral panic surrounding ‘grooming gangs’ explored in the next chapter as a central case study. As we know, sexuality and gender have been central to justifications for twenty-first-century imperialism. This logic is epitomised in Spivak’s famous idiom, ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, which neatly summarises gendered colonial logics, from the British Raj to the occupation of Afghanistan.4 Spivak’s formulation focuses on the position of the racialised woman who must be ‘saved’ from her backward culture and barbaric menfolk. More recent work such as Jasbir Puar’s conceptualisation of ‘homonationalism’5 and Sara Farris’s ‘femonationalism’6 extend this principle in order to theorise how contemporary formations of Euro-American imperialism are justified as a means of defending the rights of women and/or LGBT+ communities, most

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often from ‘Islam’. In the mid-2000s, new migrants to the Netherlands were shown a video of two men kissing and a woman sunbathing topless and asked to give their opinion as a test of their suitability for Dutch society’s ‘liberal’ mores. More recently, a test administered as part of the Prevent regime in the UK asked children for their opinion on homosexuality. By baking a particular brand of liberal gay rights into state practices, the state confirms itself as the arbiter of sexual norms. Those who fall outside of these norms – or, indeed, are perceived to do so – are viewed as threats to the nation. We also know that sexuality plays an integral role in the constitution of the state. Jyoti Puri’s seminal work on the sexual state outlines how, particularly in times of crisis or weakness, the state turns to the government of sexuality in order to (re)produce itself as cohesive and in control.7 With this in mind, we want to think about the state in terms of the figure of the patriarch. If the state can usefully be described as a patriarch, then what kind of a patriarch is it? In the post-war years, the welfarist state sought to organise populations through the management of gender roles and family units, rewarding some normative behaviours and penalising the deviant through the allocation of welfare. This involved creating systems of discipline designed to corral the wayward back into socially acceptable and economically productive lifestyles. This previous moment referenced the role of the patriarch explicitly, positioning the state as a substitute for inadequate, absent or improper fathers. The fantasy of happy (white) nuclear families is there in Beveridge’s original vision of the welfare state, with the family allowance and national insurance

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designed to supplement and bolster the fragile nuclear household. For the citizens who received the benefits of universal provision, there was an attendant obligation to demonstrate worthiness; if not respectability, at least the ability to be made respectable. After so many years of austerity, we are in danger of forgetting the humiliations of the previous era of welfarism. Even when the payment was there to be made, performing abasement, gratitude and forbearance was all part of demonstrating deservingness. Since then state policies have been remade and state bureaucracies transformed. The state no longer enters everyday life as the audience for our respectable conduct. The safeguards put in place to ensure poor and low-income individuals weren’t ‘cheating’ the system have shifted. This was illustrated by New Labour’s ‘No Ifs, No Buts’ campaign against benefit fraud, and the Conservative’s image of benefit claimants ‘with the blinds down’ while the rest of us go to work. These moral panics conjured images of the hypervisible claimant taking home two salaries, or the invisible claimant hiding from respectable society – markers of which had to be avoided by those attempting to navigate the welfare system. More recently, screen cultures have depersonalised encounters with state power, stripping away the opportunity to explain personal circumstances and impending catastrophe, and displacing respectability as a useful element in dealing with bureaucracies. The online portal does not care about your manners, or the cleanliness of your children, or whether you are signalling an aspirant attitude. It is open only to hear if there is any reason to bar you from access or to delay your punishment – upload

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documents here (‘Computer says No’). The increased punitiveness and conditionality at the heart of the benefit system has seen hundreds of thousands of people sanctioned and their benefits removed each year, while the number of rough sleepers has doubled. It bears repeating that such policies of cruelty and neglect led to an estimated 130,000 excess deaths in the years 2010–17.8 Yet, despite this decimation of the welfare state, the nation remains a family matter. We are schooled to consider ourselves as (largely undeserving) members of a national family, albeit a family in crisis and decline. It is this long shadow of familial thinking in the name of nation that returns us to considerations of the state and state power as the actions of a patriarch. Again, our question is: what kind of state patriarch emerges in a time of post-welfare securitisation? * * * We started this book by describing the last ten years of state practice in terms of cruelty and neglect, and these are surely terms – ‘cruelty’ and ‘neglect’ – that summon gendered images of power and protection (or lack thereof). Like an unloving and angry father, the state patriarch is cold and often brutal. Increasingly, he abandons and expels those within the family, kicking us out of the house, renouncing his role as protector of our welfare, even as he puffs up his chest at any mention of possible foreign invasion. Most of the time he ignores us, no matter what we do to get his attention, until there is some wider gain to be made from him playing saviour. Perhaps it is too

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easy to imagine the state as a man in this way (when in fact the state is never just one thing). Yet it is important to remember that the very languages of power as well as the terms we use to critique them have gendered associations and implications. When Britain is described as a ‘soft touch’ for migrants, for example, it is clear that the feminisation is inseparable from the complaint; these are institutions that should be tough and firm, not soft. In our view, by sharpening our appreciation for the work done by gender, and thus by characterising the state as a patriarch, we might be able to describe contemporary statecraft in useful ways. The mantra of the state patriarch is that its citizens and those within its jurisdiction live by the grace of the state. What they get is neither a question of what they deserve nor of what they are entitled to. Rather, what they get they should be grateful for and they should not depend upon its continued provision. The welfare state, rather than ensuring that basic needs are met within a system based on solidarity, is now a bureaucratised torture chamber, symptomatic of the state patriarch’s contempt for its ‘unproductive population’. The neglectful state prioritises punishment above redistribution. In fact, this shift in style arises from a concerted attack on the attempts to institute a redistributive state. The transformation of welfare (and of all state services) is the culmination of a long-standing campaign to discredit state-managed endeavours in general. We have been trained to regard the state as a poor manager, an inefficient distributor of resources and an inhibitor of human innovation.9 Only by protecting our individual freedom, defending borders, neutralis-

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ing foreign threats and maintaining law and order, can the state be trusted. In other words, the state patriarch is neglectful, inefficient and abusive, and we cannot rely on him to support us – but he is good in a fight, or so he says. The job of the state patriarch today is to convince the national population that his role is and should be limited to securing the nation from war and terrorism. The state patriarch’s focus on national security and law and order as its primary motivation means the national project remains a racial project, one in which a besieged whiteness continues to connote innocence and (partial) entitlement, in a context in which people racialised as black or Muslim, in particular, are constructed as violent and threatening. While the threat of death from a terrorist attack is seen as violence from which the state is obligated to protect its citizens, premature death as a result of not having the means to keep oneself and one’s family alive is, most often, considered the failing of an individual and their family. Keeping citizens alive is only necessary when the threat is posed by deviant Others, not by the slower, but more pervasive, more deadly, violence of post-welfare capitalism. Again, the patriarch will not have anyone else coming into his home and harming his children, but if they die or are killed on his watch then that is nobody else’s business. When large numbers of people die suddenly due to structural violence, such as was the case in the Grenfell Tower fire, the coronial and legal process is only interested in the immediate causes of death. Once this is determined, the matter of premature death is laid to rest. Whilst the law has

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never been concerned with the individual as embedded in a social reality, its depoliticising role is amplified in a context in which the state has increasingly withdrawn from providing for its citizens’ basic needs. The law plays an important role in legitimising the state patriarch’s organised neglect and cruelty towards its citizens and those within its jurisdiction. What in fact keeps citizens and those within Britain’s jurisdiction alive in these crises are the responses of civil society, religious organisations, charities and philanthropists. Whereas once upon a time those of us on the left might have criticised or warned against these interventions for fear that they replace the state, or send a signal that the state need not fund particular initiatives, now we are forced into a position of both accepting and building such community responses – now we know that the alternative is that people are left to die, as many have been as a result of austerity policies. As we have argued, the techniques of dispossession and disrespect have already been trialled on black and brown populations, both through the previous incarnations of institutional racisms and in the long-standing violence of immigration control. We might add that a segment of the ‘white working class’ – the roughs, those who would not or could not become respectable – has shared this long history of understandable distrust of the state patriarch. Yet the palpable disappointment in the face of such rapid national decline has been experienced by many as a loss of racialised privilege and status. The problem is less that foreigners have arrived to take over public services than the sense that the loss of access to public goods is a loss

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of the wages of whiteness. This story of loss at the hands of racial Others takes on a violently misogynistic cast in relation to ‘grooming gangs’, our focus in the next chapter, in which the bodies of white girls are implicitly viewed as the threatened property of white men.

CH APT E R E I GH T

‘Pakistani Grooming Gangs’

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is? – Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, 2017

British citizenship is a privilege that confers particular entitlements and benefits, including the right to a British passport and the right to vote in general elections. It is not in the public interest that individuals who engage in serious and/or organised crime, which constitutes a flagrant abuse of British values, enjoy those entitlements and benefits. – Home Office in notice of decision to deprive three members of the ‘Rochdale grooming gang’ of their citizenship

The term ‘child sexual exploitation’ was used officially in the UK for the first time in 2009 in a Department of Education document. Since then, Britain has seen a series of high-profile convictions of groups of men found guilty of child sexual exploitation. The vast majority of publicised convictions have been of British Asian men, which was quickly translated into the media-speak of the

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‘Pakistani Grooming Gang’. This moral panic replayed familiar mythologies of the ‘gang’ – characterised by alien cultural practices, operating under a racialised honour code, and demonstrating an uncontainable deviant masculinity – and yet the spectre of the Pakistani grooming gang also added something new to the repertoire of both official and popular racisms. The far-right English Defence League rebuilt its crumbling organisation on the basis of revulsion to what they termed ‘rape jihad gangs’. Sarah Champion, then Labour MP for Rotherham, was forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet after authoring an article in The Sun titled ‘British Pakistanis ARE raping white girls … and we must face up to it’ – an article quoted approvingly by (even) more explicitly racist columnists, and criticised by both the Muslim Council of Britain and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. For our project, these troubling events exemplify a particular moment in the reshaping of state racism. The ‘grooming gangs’ story has been a key site of contestation in recent years – always with a racial modifier, whether ‘Asian’, ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Muslim’. The interchangeability or collapsing of the racialising term here is important but not our main focus; we will refer to ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ for the rest of this chapter, not least because the old slur ‘Paki’ sits within the discourse as a silent but animating term. The term ‘gang’ is heavily freighted and operates to connect this moral panic to others that have emerged during moments of crisis (see Chapter 3). Claire Alexander’s work on ‘the Asian Gang’, which emerged as a folk devil in the late 1990s, is helpful here. She suggests that ‘The Asian Gang carries with its more

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embracing generic counterpart the assertion of threat, of anger, of alienation, of violence, but it also carries its own culturally specific twists – of culture conflict, religious antipathy, of alienness and unknowability, of introspective, intra-ethnic hatred.’1 The return of this idea of ‘the Asian Gang’ in a new, highly sexualised register builds on this older discourse. Further, and as argued in Chapter 3, ‘the gang’ in general is a racialised signifier that is in a constant state of renewal in Britain, but which always refers back to black youth coded as criminal, feckless, hyper-masculine and dangerous; a reboot of the ‘mugger’ folk devil of the 1970s. In the coinage of the ‘Pakistani grooming gang’ the various associations act upon each other, allowing for multiple and overlapping racial registers to interact and become strengthened in their connections. The ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ have been leveraged for Islamophobic purposes by both state and non-state actors with remarkable success. ‘On street CSE’ (Child Sexual Exploitation) is viewed as the result of a degenerate, uniquely Muslim, culture of sexual deviancy. The narrative goes that white girls are chosen precisely for their whiteness, as Pakistani men have a unique disdain for white women, viewing them as ‘easy targets’ while apparently respecting girls in their own community whose ‘honour’ must be protected. ‘Culture’ and ‘honour’ here are the operative racialising terms, signalling an incorrigible otherness defined by atavistic and insular gender roles, and a violent, excessive masculinity that is, in the end, an overcompensation for an inherent lack of genuine manliness, which is coded as respectable, bourgeois and

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civilised. In this discourse, real men are restrained but not too restrained, and kept in check by the nuclear family. The idea of degraded white femininity plays an important role here too. The statutory bodies charged with protecting young people (social services, children services, the police, the CPS, and so on) knew that many teenagers were being systematically abused but viewed this as a result of a set of poor lifestyle choices made by feckless, underclass girls with chaotic lives who were beyond the help of the state. Essentially, these institutions viewed white girls as choosing to engage in voluntary sexual relationships with much older men, in voluntary group sex, in voluntary prostitution. The ethnicity of the perpetrators becomes evidence of a sexual deviancy in the victims too, confirming them as beyond the help of the state because they have betrayed the codes of whiteness-as-respectability, both in the ways that poor women, across race, are always coded as sexually excessive, and more specifically because of their association with Pakistani men. Take, for example, a case in Rochdale which the CPS didn’t prosecute because they thought there was no chance of a conviction, despite physical, DNA evidence. Essentially, it did not think a jury would believe the victims. The disbelief and disregard shown by state services is projected onto the public. As well as breathing new life into age-old discourses surrounding the sexual excess and dysfunction of ‘dangerous brown men’,2 the grooming gangs framework consolidated key far-right talking points about the state that have now found their way into the mainstream. The far-right argued not only that brown men were more likely to commit sexual violence – and that the sexual violence

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of brown men was more savage and degrading than that of white men – but that the inaction of the authorities was a consequence of the state being too soft on immigrants and minorities. It became the ‘gotcha’ question levelled at anyone mildly progressive, positioned as irrefutable evidence that this whole anti-racism business (understood through the prism of ‘political correctness’) had gone too far – that police and local government did not take action because they were afraid of being seen as racists. A spectre filled the British public’s imagination, of towns like Rochdale and Rotherham being run by ‘Asian gangs’, who were so locally powerful they were above the law and local politics; whole towns were ‘no-go-zones’ for whites. It was a manifestation of Enoch Powell’s dystopic premonition (see Chapter 4), that ‘one day, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. The state was portrayed as ‘soft’ on migrants and ‘minorities’, even afraid of them, and in turn as betraying the nation, which had been mapped onto the bodies of young white girls. The possibility of there being grooming victims of colour was not only ignored, but actively refuted. The moral panic relied on the idea that ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ targeted white women because they were white. As a result, there has been very little press attention when girls of colour have come forward regarding the same men, as in the case of Shabir Ahmed, whose identity was concealed from the press during the first trial as a second was pending. That the second trial involved an Asian victim had no discernible impact on the narrative that white women were targeted for their whiteness. Indeed, the vulnerability and naivety of the young white

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women came to represent the weakness of the liberal state, besieged by multiculturalism. The nation, made vulnerable by unfettered immigration is, like these young girls, in need of protective intervention from the sensible, firm authority of the nationalist state. The idea of state and financial elites (what Steve Bannon calls ‘globalists’) as allies of immigrants and people of colour against the ‘white working class’ was strongly consolidated in this story. This framing achieved several things: it created political space for excessive performances of state force to compensate for this appearance of weakness; it consolidated and reinforced racialised notions of belonging and ‘invasion’; it gave the far-right an opportunity to position itself as the only voice willing to ‘speak the truth’ on behalf of the victims, providing the space for legitimisation and support; and it enabled the far-right to position itself as the primary anti-state/antielite force, creating a sense of ‘emergency’ and need for ‘intervention’ at the state level. Importantly, this racialising set of processes also meant that the interaction between patriarchal violence and state neglect, which led to so many young people being harmed, was minimised and obscured. * * * Despite our concerns about the racist forces mobilised around so-called ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’, we are also cautious about enlisting ‘grooming’ primarily as a hook on which to hang an analysis of resurgent racisms or reconfigurations of the state. It is also important to sit with

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the scale of this organised sexual exploitation and abuse of young women and girls in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, even while dissecting the racism which frames how it became a public scandal. That said, we resist the idea that any attempt to historicise and understand can be seen as an expression of sympathy, a tendency that has been amplified through online culture. None of what we identify constitutes ‘an excuse’. Instead, our concern is to comprehend how and why certain issues became speakable, and how this speakability was framed as a reassertion of white nationalism. In 2014, Operation Stovewood was created as the largest law enforcement investigation into non-familial child sexual abuse in the UK. This occurred in response to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation led by Alexis Jay, which estimated that 1,400 children in Rotherham had been subjected to sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. The scandal of Rotherham contributed to a greatly increased public awareness and understanding of child sexual exploitation. The early coverage focused almost exclusively on the allegation that Pakistani men were predisposed to acts of paedophilia against white girls. Meanwhile, the parallel scandals of large-scale abuse by the celebrity Jimmy Savile, plus the long-running cases against the Catholic Church brought by victims of child abuse, were treated as matters of criminal justice and individual pathology, not national security or societal breakdown. The institutional culture of the BBC or the religious teachings of Catholicism were not enlisted to explain widespread abuse and subsequent cover-ups. More broadly, while the sexual exploitation of

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children by Muslim men became speakable, it was not connected to the more widespread issue of abuse within families and households. The nuclear family, the most consistent and prevalent site for sexual abuse, continues to be flagged as a bulwark against sexual violence, rather than as an incubator of it. Of course, it is unsurprising that the revelations in Rotherham and other northern towns were immediately explained through Pakistani and/or Muslim cultural practices. The ‘grooming gangs’ story had especially visceral political effects because of the wider force of anti-Muslim racism. Muslims have been constructed as ‘enemies within’, the foremost racialised outsiders of the twenty-first century, a century thus far disfigured by the unending violence of the ‘War on Terror’. Therefore, the sexual violence of particular Muslim men against particular white girls readily came to symbolise a wider existential threat. Without attenuating the scale of the violence in places like Rotherham and Rochdale, the most important factor in the making of a public scandal and national crisis was the fact that the perpetrators were Muslim. This much should be obvious. However, we also want to extend this account to consider, albeit briefly, some less discussed factors that shaped the grooming scandal. We suggest two important and under-remarked frames to the belated recognition of large-scale abuse. Firstly, the impact of feminist-informed practice among key workers in local government and social services. The transformation in public understanding of child sexual exploitation and the sexual abuse of children more generally has arisen through the concerted efforts of activists and profession-

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als, influenced by the availability of feminist approaches to practice.3 Certainly, it has been a struggle to persuade a range of authorities that sexually active teenagers could be ‘victims’, but in the belated recognition of this fact by some practitioners, it was possible to push back against the misogynistic dismissal of these young women. Secondly, we are particularly interested in how the processes of institutional retreat in deindustrialised landscapes frame this story. Rotherham, along with other increasingly mythologised ‘northern towns’, exemplifies one aspect of changing urban geographies. The landscape of smaller cities and towns in England, particularly in the Midlands and the North, reflects a longer history of deindustrialisation, the death of local high streets, and a crisis of local services and institutions exacerbated by austerity. We might note that this remaking of public space without amenities, either public or retail, and the attendant retreat from occupying public space in day-to-day life, is experienced across many locations. For our purposes, what is of interest is the manner in which the remaking of public space, the retreat of official institutions and the decline of the formal economy come to be narrated together as a racialised story. There are some points to note: the so-called ‘night-time economy’ outside larger conurbations revolves disproportionately around take-aways and taxi ranks.4 For most of Britain, this is what the 24-hour economy looks like – low-cost take-aways and transport alongside old and new forms of low-paid work such as cleaning, call centres, security and logistics. Whereas larger cities have sought to regenerate their local economies through enhancing

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hospitality industries (as can be seen in Newcastle and Birmingham for example), smaller towns have had little access to the new economies of conferences, hotels, bars and restaurants. Instead, segments of economic activity which were already highly racialised come to make up the landscape of local ‘night life’ – small-scale take-aways often associated with particular minority communities, and taxi and chauffeur work undertaken disproportionately by British Pakistani men. For young people who cannot or do not want to go home, these are the only places to go. The combined impact of cumulative deindustrialisation, uneven state presence and the increasing visibility of alternative networks of economic activity coincided with another set of racialised anxieties. As local political landscapes became less predictable – a trajectory that anticipated the outcome of the EU referendum – the accusation that some racialised communities had infiltrated mainstream politics and official institutions through the use of illegitimate networks of kinship and alliance came into play. After scandals around the alleged misuse of postal votes among South Asian communities in Britain, the idea of the ‘kinship network’ that evades and overrides official structures in order to grab political power has become associated with Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in particular.5 The heightened inspection of Pakistani and Bangladeshi political participation arose also as a result of surprise and suspicion at the relatively rapid ascendance of these communities in the tightly gated world of UK party politics. Particularly at a local level, the ‘clan’, a group bonded by kinship and able to bypass

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the niceties of formal politics or business, was regarded as the secret source of community power.6 When the long-running horror of street grooming and child sexual exploitation became associated with Pakistani men, the implication that secret clans had colonised previously respectable places, replacing or overriding or corrupting reliable systems of authority, hovered in the background. * * * The significance of the ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ as a symptom of our current crisis is, we think, the way that the state’s systematic marginalisation and neglect of vulnerable people is then mobilised to justify a rapidly expanding authoritarianism. Sexual moral panics offer an effective way to do this as sex is always viewed through the ahistorical prism of morality – sex is assumed to be totally private, yet sexual deviance quickly becomes the subject of public scrutiny. This moral panic is particularly durable because it seems to threaten the stability of white gender roles and, crucially, the white family. National sovereignty becomes a way to rescue a beleaguered white masculinity which has the capacity to defend its women. However, the nation state has no monopoly on the exploitation of this moral panic – the far-right have made more effective and triumphalist use of it. That said, in taking an extraordinary approach to sentencing, the state has sought to keep pace with the far-right. Abdul Aziz, Adil Khan and Qari Abdul Rauf, who were convicted alongside six others in Rochdale, have been stripped of their citizenship and are due to be

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deported to Pakistan at the end of their prison terms. The idea of citizenship as a ‘privilege’, something which can be taken away, is an ascendent and aggressive trend in British politics. Its presence here is notable, we think, for what it shows us about the tremendous animating force of race within the state’s authoritarian arsenal. Traditionally this power has been used as part of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, with ‘suspected terrorists’ stripped of their British citizenship, usually while abroad, and sometimes to allow for their extrajudicial execution via drone strike. Though there was some initial controversy regarding this policy of denationalisation, it was easily folded into the authoritarian logics of the War on Terror. But the case of Aziz, Khan and Rauf is the first instance of citizenship stripping following serious criminality without a national security component. It represents an important case in the expansion of powers to denationalise and therefore to banish. Another deprivation of citizenship case which made the headlines – causing controversy and stimulating public debate – was that of Shamima Begum, who in 2019 had her citizenship stripped for travelling to Syria to ‘join the Islamic State’.7 This decision was made surprisingly quickly given that she was born in the UK and had only ever lived in Britain until her departure in 2015. In this case, the government suggested that Shamima Begum and her child (implicitly guilty by dint of parentage) should apply for Bangladeshi citizenship, which she, and her child, would be able to claim through their parents or grandparents. Not only does this enable the British government to circumvent legal protections against making

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its citizens stateless, but it also speaks to the relationship between race and national citizenship. The framing of Begum as a ‘jihadi bride’ speaks to the fantasy of Muslims as hyper-fertile, a claim Samuel Huntington maintains in his meticulous cataloguing of birth rates in majority Muslim countries in The Clash of Civilisations.8 Despite Begum having been a minor when she left Britain, she is not framed as a misguided victim like the British girls targeted by ‘grooming gangs’, but as an enthusiastic participant in archaic, repressive and authoritarian Islamic family relations. These differently sexualised teenagers became contrasting representations of the nation’s moral decline. While the white girls of Rochdale and Rotherham symbolised the (threatened) purity of the nation, the treacherous Begum became its antithesis. Begum became not-British, only British-born. In her legal expulsion from the nation, we see in starkly material terms how black and brown Britons are made foreign, demonstrating with particular clarity the link between racist culture and legal process, which operate together to ensure that minoritised British citizens can be sent ‘back’ to where they are ‘really from’. For both ‘groomers’ and ‘ISIS brides’, citizenship stripping is made both possible and acceptable by their racialisation as Muslim, which implicitly connects these acts of sexual violence and abuse to issues of national security. Defending the respectable national family becomes the primary job of the state patriarch, to be achieved by whatever means necessary, international and human rights laws be damned.

C HAPTE R NI NE

(Powerful) Men Behaving Badly

If parliament were a reality TV show the whole lot of us would have been voted out of the jungle by now. But at least we could have watched the speaker being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle. – Boris Johnson, first speech to Conservative Party conference as leader

Yet the factor that more often than not the fascist leader appears as a ‘ham actor’ and ‘asocial psychopath’ is a clue to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity, he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the follower, he has to be a ‘great little man’. – Alberto Toscano, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, 20171

The state patriarch is a figure through which we imagine the changing incarnations of state practice and power. Of course, he is a character – a way of thinking of the state as embodied. This embodiment is a kind of domestication, maybe even an eroticisation; it’s a way of thinking of the state as a man. In this chapter we ask, what kind of a man is he? And although we are poking fun a little, we also adopt this approach as a continuation of far more orthodox accounts of statecraft. While we reject the naturalisation of the nation state as a family, we take seriously

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the impact of this common-sense conception. If the nation state is a family, the public behaviour of its patriarchal head is a sign. In a time of insistently mediatised sociality, the performances of masculinity by government are part of how the state’s patriarchal imperatives – the processes of neglect and expulsion we have described – are enacted and justified. So, we see a kind of old-style ‘being a man’ become, once again, central to the theatre of UK politics. As always, phallic women can ascend in the ranks, though never in the role of buffoon, which has now eclipsed that of the statesman in this drama. Meanwhile, the performance of a gentle or ambiguous masculinity retains its stigma. When we say this, it can seem too obvious and too familiar. Of course, we know already that the state engages in displays of hegemonic masculinity, and puts forward the body of the leader as a point of identification. If anything, we learn our languages of political performance through these histories of display; the monarch enacts the power of the office, but also embodies that power with reference to the hand of God; the elected leader presents himself as the essence of the nation, whether as an everyman or as an emblematic fragment of the national whole. However, in the rise and convergence of authoritarian leaders we see the displacement of a familiar slick, managerial masculinity with something more aggressive. As others have noted, we appear to be living in the age of the buffoon. Not only Boris Johnson, all mumbles and blond dishevelment, but also Trump’s violently assertive stupidity, Bolsonaro’s inexplicable denial of coronavirus, and Modi’s claim that drinking cow urine could guard against Covid-19. We

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are witnessing the emergence of the elite buffoon as the incarnation of state power in our time of democratically enabled authoritarianism. The buffoon appears as an apparent response to the disappointments of formal politics. A significant component of the performance of political buffoonery revolves around purporting to understand and share popular dissatisfaction and distrust of the political class. Buffoonery is a method of disassociating from the political class, which is viewed as inauthentic because it is controlled, managed and overly concerned with its image and the need to triangulate every issue. The buffoon bypasses these niceties of political propriety. Instead, we are led to believe, he is just like us – undisciplined, authentic, out of patience with politics as usual. Wilful idiocy becomes, then, a seemingly fitting response to the limits and disappointments of politics as we have known it. It would be a foolish person indeed who underestimates the attraction of the clown in such circumstances. The buffoon’s power is that he offers an alternative to the carefully calibrated messages of the managed politician. This is not a polished deception. The clown wrecks the place and looks to us – the audience, taught for so long to know our place and be grateful – for approval. Don’t we all want to wreck things, break the rules, tear it all apart? The buffoon plays out our fantasies of destructive power; he acts as our undisciplined avatar, reaches into our unruly hearts and says, forget about civility and obedience, this is what power really looks like. The buffoon is a version of the familiar irreverent man-child, remade for our anti-political times. Physi-

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cally undisciplined, sexually questionable, clownish in his disregard for the niceties of self-presentation and personal grooming, these are men who seek to embody power in a way that asserts they are beyond ridicule. Laugh as you wish – it doesn’t change who is in charge here. Say they are inappropriate or uncouth and you reveal only the limits of your own understanding. The point is that the whole repertoire of the inappropriate – the employment of improper speech, the call to the profane as a gesture of populism – is central to this particular project to personify power. There is, perhaps, a harking back to an anti-clerical mode of politics, where disruption is performed as a release from authority. But in this carnival, it is the already powerful who adopt the costume and mannerisms of the irreverent fool. This is the king playing court jester, rather than the jester mocking the king. Of course, the buffoon is never really one of us. Far from demonstrating a disruption of politics, his antics act to consolidate unaccountable power. Perhaps you still believed in some outdated fictions of democracy? Perhaps you thought that power should be accountable? The buffoon is here to let you know that power is immune from reason and there is no evidence, no argument, that can sway the actions of the state patriarch gone rogue. If anything, the wilful performance of idiocy itself becomes a demonstration of power. If the buffoon pretends to be beyond reason or argument, then reason and argument become irrelevant as checks on the exercise of power. This process should be understood as another aspect of the refiguring of the state patriarch. It works to dismantle expectations of state accountability because how can a

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fool be accountable to anyone? This wilful embrace of irrationality, which produces a dangerously unpredictable political terrain, has become part of the new legend of power. We all search for the meaning behind and the reason for the decisions of the government, only to find that power has no need to make itself legible to us. In Westminster’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, we saw this play out with fatal consequences as numbers were fudged, deaths were dismissed and scientific evidence was discarded daily. The neglectful state presents the buffoon as the best we can hope for, as the father-figure for whom we long but who can only let us down. He is the embodiment of the state patriarch for our times of tactical neglect; the veering between know-nothingness and aggression confirms how little we can expect from this particular mode of the daddy-state. The theatre of politics constructs a façade that persistently and aggressively distracts from rather than blocks out the processes of neglect, expulsion and hostility that characterise the neglectful state. This theatrical rendering of political manoeuvres is purposefully hapless, though we all know that the bumbling is a front. Indeed, we’re supposed to know that it’s a front; like the lies, the silliness is a demonstration of power. The disintegration of the already bankrupt political system into a series of personality contests, set pieces, Twitter spats and petty scandals ensures that the workings of government feel foolish and distant, emphasising the huge gulf between the political elite and the rest of the population. This gap serves to underscore a sense of powerlessness, much like the workings of austerity. Everyone knows that the system

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by which your benefits are sanctioned is immoral and illogical, but it cannot be challenged. Just as everyone knows the government is not fit for purpose and suspects that the mechanisms of representative democracy are incapable of holding the buffoons to account. This age of the buffoon feeds on the popular resonance of elite masculine misbehaviour. We know that rich men behave badly – we are inured to this ‘fact’. Knowing it is part of joining the world of the citizen-observer. So we witness one scandal after another, each seemingly more unlikely and ridiculous, and with a particular focus on sexual scandals. But this all passes as little more than entertainment. Admittedly, there is something pleasurably anti-establishment in poking fun at the powerful, but it is a distraction nevertheless. At the same time, the famous buffoons of our age are revealed to be sexually ill-disciplined and also (probably) guilty of sexual assault, yet the repetition of such revelations ensures that such candidates build a following and public presence where such matters are already accounted for. Their misogyny is a ballast against the #MeToo movement rather than something that can be held to account by it. In the process, it is confirmed again in the minds of the public that political leaders are, necessarily, buffoonish. Perhaps our ability to recognise and laugh at their buffoonery works to reassure us that politics is not so serious, that the collapse of effective political institutions is unimportant. We have not been fooled this time, we congratulate ourselves, we understand that politics is the arena of fools. But while the public is persuaded increasingly of the worthless and laughable character of leading members of

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the political class, in the process accepting that democracy is broken and we should now just enjoy the spectacle of scandals, the resources of the state are redeployed for other ends. There are, after all, still publicly owned assets to be diverted into cronyish hands. Networks of the global right to be squeezed into new arenas of public life. Private providers to be introduced to the opportunities arising from state retreat. Speculators interested to benefit from the turbulence unleashed by politically powerful buffoons. Dispossession is experienced and narrated as racialised rage – because what was once (imagined to be) given as an unquestionable right of citizenship, with citizenship here unquestioned for white populations, must now either be earned or cannot be accessed at all. There is little sign of this rage turning against the political class. Instead, there is widespread disinterest and disillusionment with political institutions. How can we be angry at such fools? Their wilful triviality seems to devalue our anger – eager to turn any disagreement into another trivialised moment of entertainment, with no arena for serious politics. Politics seems unable to be serious now, despite the hardship and the deaths. Why waste our breath trying to engage with those unable to do anything at all except pursue their own individualistic careerism? The neglectful state has trained us to lower our expectations of both institutions and political process. Even if we get his attention, this state patriarch can do nothing but terrorise.

PART 4

Send in the Army

C HAPTE R T E N

Longing for Authority

If these thugs want war, let’s give it to them. Either send in the Army to sort them out, or better still, put them in the Army and arrange for them to be sent to Afghanistan and bring our brave troops home. – P. Adams, Bexhill, East Sussex, letter to the Daily Mail following the 2011 riots

Ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal. – Sunday Times, 29 July 2018

The UK armed forces ‘stand ready’ to intervene in the knife-crime epidemic, the defence secretary has said. Gavin Williamson said military personnel ‘would always be ready to respond’ to calls for help, while the Ministry of Defence ‘always stands ready to help any government department’. – Independent, 6 March 2019

Up to 20,000 military personnel are being put on standby in a new Covid Support Force and could ‘backfill’ police counter terrorism roles, act as prison guards or help with Border Force checks. – Daily Express, 20 March 2020

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The military will support the Home Office in their work to combat Channel crossings. – Ministry of Defence source, BBC News, 10 August 2020

In the last few years, calls to ‘send in the army’ have become recurrent and increasingly insistent. This reveals something important about our present crisis. The demand to ‘send in the army’ points to a popular desire for authority and order – a desire that blurs into the enraged will to contain, constrain and ‘order’ those untidy Others who seem to threaten the nation. In other words, calls to ‘send in the army’ reflect the intensity of the anger reserved for racialised ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘gangsters’, those internal enemies we discussed in the first part of the book. At the same time, calls for paramilitary intervention to deal with social problems, or perceived social problems, are reinforced by a widespread, social obligation to honour the armed forces and official versions of their history. What, then, might we learn about racism in Britain through reflecting on these intensifying calls to ‘send in the army’? If ‘criminals’, especially racialised figures such as ‘terrorists’ and ‘gangsters’, are defined as failed and unwanted citizens, who deserve nothing from state and society, and who should be excluded and expelled, then soldiers are their polar opposite. Soldiers – our boys (and for progressive nationalists, our girls) – put their lives on the line for queen and country, and by extension for us, the people. British people, therefore, owe them a debt which is to be paid in unlimited, unwavering support. Soldiers, we are constantly told, understand better than anyone else the

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importance of the nation, its security and its interests. The compulsory requirement that we honour, respect and remember ‘our boys’ constructs the soldier as the model British citizen, which is a central tenet of militarisation. In this way, the soldier-citizen could not be further from the ‘terrorist’ or the ‘gangster’, even as both groups are imagined as working-class young men engaged in collective violence. The British citizen who chooses to join the armed forces, and so to serve queen and country, thus reminds us that the ‘terrorist’ and the ‘gangster’ also choose not to serve but to defile this great nation. But why do people long for the intervention of the military, rather than the police or non-coercive forms of state intervention? In part, it is because the basic requirements of life are not in place for many and are only uncertainly accessible for others. The army stands in here as an effective authority, unlike the failing and ineffectual post-welfare state. The longing for authoritarian intervention belongs to this sense of disempowerment: things have always been like this and there is nothing we can do – but there is someone stronger than us, if only they can be called upon. The call for the army is also a refusal of the niceties of human rights and the assorted procedural conventions of civil society. So, despite the worrying acceptance of violence and violation, the call of popular militarism is a call to be saved from the disorder and overindulgence of modern life; a call for protection from the enemies that exist in foreign lands, at our borders and on our streets. Alongside these appeals to patriarchal authority, summoning the army is also an admission of weakness and frailty. It concedes to our desperate and

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lonely existence, recognising that promises of fulfilment and autonomy, to be achieved through the (technologised and hyper-mediatised) market, are ringing hollow. For all the rhetoric of choice, the call to send in the army reveals the fear that there are no meaningful or effective social agents in sight. Not me, with my personal brand and my atomised existence, nor anyone else. For all the talk about doing for oneself, there is a pervasive uncertainty about how the world might be shaped and a doubt about our ability to make any mark on it. This is also a time in which the state, if acknowledged, is regarded as weak or failing or corrupt. ‘The people’ cannot rely on this broken machinery. Instead, we are encouraged to imagine another non-democratic state that can really meet our needs, unencumbered by the procedural politics of quangos, red tape and ‘experts’. Into this terrain, the army enters as a forgotten agent from an earlier time. This is the agency of the state, but instructed by emergency and therefore regarded as above the corruptions of political life. The army wields state power, but deals in matters of life and death, emerging to defend the nation in times of existential crisis. Importantly, it is regarded as above and apart from the political class. When it acts, it is not based on self-interest, but on the national interest. The army becomes the vernacular term for ‘the law’, the real law beyond the ugly skirmishes between competing groups, the law writ large that cannot be escaped. The deployment of the law may be violent, even to the point of death, but it is not unfair. Consequently, embodying both the law and the nation provides the army with impunity and protection from government, courts and national culture.

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There are, unsurprisingly, a number of racialised elements to this formation. The army suggests an underlying ability to distinguish between full citizens and hidden enemies. If the structures of entitlement are in disarray, the army promises to be among the last institutions to ‘know’ who is the us that deserves protection, and who requires exclusion, expulsion or incarceration. Inevitably, militarism is a reassertion of the nation. The army is the martial expression of the nation and the ability of the army to act, as the last standing effective political agent, rehabilitates the nation. The rush to militarise everyday life through incursions into schools, television and high streets, as well as celebrations of military endeavour and guilt-trips about what the government is and is not doing for ‘our heroes’, are all attempts to resurrect a kind of national backbone.1 These martial overtures allay the deep-seated fears that we are alone, weak and unable to do anything to defend ourselves against the multiple threats we face. The enactment of state violence upon the bodies of variously racialised groups serves as a kind of distraction from the extent of political decline. This is everyday militarism as spectacle, at once designed to reassure and threaten, doling out punishments to those who do not quite belong as a counter-intuitive method of quieting the fears of others. However, this longing for the intervention of the armed forces cannot be explained without a close interrogation of the policies designed to inculcate this very longing. In other words, it is not simply that the British people currently long for military authority because of state failure and economic woe, but also because lots of money

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and resources have been committed to positioning the armed forces in particular ways over recent years. Military values are not organic and bottom-up, and policies surrounding the armed forces also reflect the specific actions of military leaders and elites who have lobbied successive governments into taking particular positions. There is a complicated story to be told here about the relationship between military leaders, the government, and different sections of the public. In more general terms, we may consider war and army-worship to be central to all processes of nation-building, but in the UK we can observe since the 2003 invasion of Iraq a very concerted effort to ensure the armed forces are honoured, memorialised and made visible. For example, in 2007 Gordon Brown ordered a review of the armed forces which made tens of recommendations that were subsequently implemented. These included recommendations for: the wider wearing of uniforms, a British Armed Forces Day, improving contact between the military and civilians, and encouraging support for servicemen and women through military and veterans’ cards and military discounts. The review also suggested efforts to increase engagement with the armed forces among young people, for instance via the expansion of Combined Cadet Forces in state schools, putting military topics into the national curriculum and bringing soldiers into schools (for example, in 2012 the government introduced the ‘troops to teachers’ scheme, designed to support people leaving the armed forces and to promote military values in schools). Furthermore, the centenary anniversaries of the Great War, celebrated in 2014 and 2018, carefully curated

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the memorials so as to edit out the anti-war sentiment that ran through so many of the cultural offerings of those who lived through the conflict. Instead, the centenary exhibitions romanticised the sacrifice of the soldiers of yesteryear through over 2,500 memorials across Britain (there are now so many that Historic England is unable to keep count) as well as temporary installations such as a sea of poppies covering the grounds of the Tower of London. These efforts to consolidate the standing of the armed forces must be situated in the context of the long and difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was unpopular from the beginning, while the war in Afghanistan became increasingly so as the number of troops dying in Helmand increased markedly from 2006 onwards. Indeed, while the armed forces are overwhelmingly venerated in public opinion, war is often not. However, as these wars became less popular, soldier worship only intensified (at least as a policy, if not necessarily in the public imaginary). It is in this context that we might interpret the calls to ‘send in the army’ at home. The army should be sent in not only because it is above and outside both politics and political correctness, but also because soldiers themselves will be much safer when deployed at home. A win-win scenario emerges in which the absolute authority and overwhelming force of the army can be channelled to restore order and neutralise the nation’s outlaws, while ‘our boys’ will be invulnerable to death and maiming. Expensive and pointless wars abroad should be aborted and the armed forces should be redeployed here, as and when necessary. We see similar arguments made in relation to ‘aid’: why are we spending all our money

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abroad when we can’t look after our own? This extends the meaning of those calls to ‘bring our troops home’. The troops, once home, might remain troops, fighting in wars they cannot lose against the nation’s internal enemies. * * * In the context of fears surrounding the UK crashing out of the European Union without a trade deal, the armed forces were again called upon to deliver food and medicine, to assist with traffic problems at ports and to deal with shortages of fuel and other essentials in the event of Britain withdrawing without a deal. It was notable that some supporters of the UK’s departure from the EU turned to the (fabricated) memory of rationing to argue that the British people could easily weather any shortages inflicted by a no-deal Brexit: I was born before the start of World War Two and brought up during the war … we all suffered from extreme food rationing, fuel shortages, cold houses, clothes rationing, walking everywhere, and the rest. Folks moaned a bit but, generally speaking, we got on with it. We kept our freedom from foreign domination, and that’s all we want now. (Letter to Derby Telegraph, 21 December 2018) The latest absurdity from the renewed Project Fear is that a no-deal Brexit would lead to serious food shortages. Quite apart from the fact that we managed perfectly well before we joined the European project,

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I remember that, in my early childhood, we lived with food rationing, and did not suffer unduly. We did so because we valued our democracy more than we feared any temporary inconvenience. This is true today, as we struggle to regain our freedom to control our own affairs. (Letter to Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2019) The EU referendum created the conditions for a resurfacing of an all-too-familiar British imperial nostalgia, although one that works most often without any explicit reference to empire. The narratives on what a vote to exit the European Union could offer Britain were expressed in terms of ‘taking back control’ over our laws and borders. Clearly, discussions of reclaiming sovereignty and putting the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain invoke the history and loss of imperial greatness, even if this cannot be spoken. This is why the Second World War is made to carry the apparently great and noble history of this white island nation. As Valluvan argues, the ‘pivot towards the Second World War circumvents the ghosts of colonial brutality that otherwise threaten to haunt Britain’s past’.2 In this way, invocations of Second World War triumph – with their Keep Calm and Carry On spirit, all rationing and the Blitz – hark back to a time when the nation knew itself, before mass migration, ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘black street crime’, a time when Britannia ruled the waves, not in the name of naked imperialism but in the service of civilisation, liberty and development. In comparison to the romanticised tragic glory of the world wars, the era of imperial Britain’s global supremacy is remembered in far less detail. Culturally, the world

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wars have been immortalised as the essential moments of Britain’s self-image. From the cinema of The Dam Busters and Dunkirk, to the literature of The Railway Children and Birdsong, the experience of enduring the world wars is so seared into the national consciousness that Winston Churchill was voted the greatest ever Briton in a 2002 BBC poll for his inspiration as a wartime leader. By contrast, the key figures and details of the British Empire are hazy within our collective memory. The East India Company or Royal Niger Company attract nowhere near the same level of memorialisation, and once famous imperial folk heroes like the missionary David Livingstone or Charles Gordon (the martyr of British Sudan) have largely disappeared from the British public consciousness. Even Churchill’s own history as an imperialist was hardly mentioned in his celebration as the greatest Briton. Furthermore, what is notable about all of the books and films that have built up Britain’s ongoing fascination with the world wars is that they reimagine both wars as a primarily domestic story, making Britain the site of the conflict. Britain never endured an invasion during either war but this doesn’t stop them operating as popular touchstones for imagining the consequences of not aggressively policing Britain’s borders. The popular memory of the Second World War goes straight from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz in 1940 to the D-Day landings in 1944. Major British operations in the intervening years – such as the Battle of Cape Matapan fought off the Mediterranean coast in 1941, or Operation Torch in North Africa from 1942 – barely get a mention in these cultural representations of the Second World War, perhaps because

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they would underline the global scale of both the war and the British Empire. They might also disrupt the self-image of Britain by showing how it spent the majority of the war years defending the empire as opposed to saving Europe from the Nazis. The (warped) memory of the war does a great deal to reinforce the feeling that Britain – the country that has invaded the most nations on earth – is a land haunted by an ever-present threat of invasion. Those who promise to prevent such invasions, the brave British armed forces, remain peerless national heroes. This psychic structure reveals a deeply set imperial amnesia which allows Britain to be constructed in political discourse as an isolated island-nation, standing small and alone in the face of threats to its sovereignty from the imperial EU.3 Britain’s perceived loss of sovereignty to the EU is symptomatic of a politics that is articulated and enacted as a zero-sum game, wherein one individual or group’s political gain is necessarily understood as another’s loss. Such thinking seems to resonate because of its alignment with a well-worn common sense in the practice of international relations and diplomacy: that the conditions of security for one nation are by necessity the conditions of insecurity for other nations; that the national interest, understood as security and survival, is never the same as that of other nations; and that authority can only be legitimately practised within the boundaries of the nation. That this ‘realism’ has re-emerged in the last few years with exceptional popular vigour is telling. It articulates a distrust of a ‘globalist’ political class that has supposedly prioritised liberal cosmopolitanism over the nation (for

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example through the EU, market integration, standardisation of laws and norms, and freedom of movement). Against these ‘globalists’, our new realists insist on preserving the priority and sanctity of the nation as the most desirable, indeed the only possible, form of political community and authority. This produces an ideological alignment between demands for sovereignty and a politics of racism articulated through various perceived threats to the nation: the loss of authority to the EU and ‘globalism’, but also the migrants the EU brings, the terrorists whose travel the EU facilitates, the human rights legislators of the European courts that protect various ‘gangs’ from punishment or expulsion. Appeals to sovereignty animate British racism with renewed legitimacy while appearing to offer the solution to various racialised ‘problems’, namely the authority to put up borders against external threats and punish or expel internal ones. This is perhaps why for Britain the unforeseen cataclysm of Brexit funnels pre-existing tendencies – colonial nostalgia, distrust of the political class, disengagement from democratic processes and mainstream media, loss of employment stability and the ability to plan one’s lifecourse, and the all-round decline of some regions – into a political rhetoric that appears to centre almost exclusively around the question of sovereignty. Our view is that sovereignty here functions as a kind of fetish-object, collapsing a range of desires and anxieties, but is never itself the thing at issue. Instead, it might be more helpful to think of this as a moment of longing for someone else to take power. Despite the calls to take back control, what is being enacted is a deep desire to be controlled, to be under control, for

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someone to make the situation controlled. It should come as no surprise that the military (sexy uniforms, a flair for violence) repeatedly appear as one possible candidate for this job. As the state retreats from much of its former biopolitical role, and the landscapes of everyday life are remade as dangerous spaces of contest between increasingly desperate populations, the call for violent state intervention enters the repertoire of populism. It infects the discourse of both left and right as well as an everyday populism with no established political home. Anti-politics might be a global phenomenon, but in contemporary Britain it is racialised in a manner which reflects both a colonial past and a declining imperial present. This is why calls to send in the army resonate most clearly when the sources of disorder are marked by ‘race’, alien religion and a stubborn foreignness. The call to enable the military to act with impunity – articulated as a response to human rights gone too far, particularly in relation to attempts to hold British military personnel to account for war crimes against civilians – signals a wider wish to institute an authority beyond any accountability. Such fantasies of authoritarianism are only a hair’s breadth away from other dangerous fantasies of the supremacist nation. Even when ideas of nation and race are not referenced explicitly, the desire to replace inadequate, corrupt civilian institutions with efficient, honourable military ones becomes tied to other illiberal tendencies that enable a revamped state racism. This includes the view that political institutions do not ‘work’, that is, do not deliver the basics of life or security. Instead,

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we are persuaded that forces unconstrained by the niceties of political accountability are more effective and, because of this, more able to give us what we want and need. In this context, state racisms against recognisable racialised folk devils serve to answer the popular call for an effective authoritarianism, demonstrating the coercive power of the state and repositioning the population as grateful recipients of unquestionable authority.

C HAPTE R E LE VE N

Militarisation on the Mainland The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people. The shooting side of this business is only 25% of the trouble and the other 75% lies in getting the people of this country behind us. – Sir Gerald Templer, 19521

‘You are not a criminal, but you are on the wrong side. You must be restrained until this trouble is over.’ It was of course contrary to the principles of British justice but it was merciful. – Sir Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs [in British Kenya], 1960

We’re in a far more dangerous society than we have ever been and so we have to have the correct equipment to deal with that … We’re not asking for mandatory arming of all officers, but what they are asking for is for more specially-trained officers. We have to stick to the stringent criteria, and the criteria for handling a firearm in the UK is still the toughest in the world … If you look at the last two to three years, the number of assaults on police are going up unrecognisably. The average constable doesn’t hold the same authority. When I was a child, you didn’t dare blink at a police officer. Ken Marsh, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, 20172

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Honour, self-restraint and efficiency were the selfdeclared defining features of UK militarism in the twentieth century. Respect for civilians, commitment to the rules of engagement and the pursuit of ‘just wars’ against tyranny are fundamental to Britain’s national self-image in the history of European power politics. Nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz provided the canonical account of international conflict between European states with his famed treatise, On War. Warfare between recognised states came to be determined by a set of traditional markers: uniformed combatants, clear and measurable military objectives, an idea of a point of conclusion and a distinction from the operations of everyday, peaceful life. However, conflicts within the colonial sphere did not take the form of Clausewitzian warfare; they blurred the lines between war and policing. Colonial and imperial wars differed from inter-state conflicts among European nations, and this was particularly pronounced in the twentieth century, as European powers sought to hold onto crumbling empires in a changing global order. The British state has prided itself on its ‘hearts and minds’ military tactics in the colonies, and its approach to ‘policing by consent’ on the mainland – apparently only using violence as a last resort in both instances. However, Britain’s approach to countering ‘terrorism’ has seen military occupations, spectacular violence, and in some instances resettlements and expulsions on a scale approaching ethnic cleansing. Indeed, both direct and indirect colonial rule worked partly because the threat of direct domination was always apparent. India in the 1850s, Morant Bay in Jamaica in the 1860s, Malaysia in

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the 1940s and Kenya in the 1950s are just some examples of when the British army rounded up suspects in their tens of thousands, incarcerating, interrogating and massacring ‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’ and ‘rebels’ in an effort to maintain colonial order. Mass arrest, indefinite detention and violent paramilitary policing were key policies in these ‘Emergencies’, and went on to stain Britain’s enduring legacy in the north of Ireland. Across the British Empire, on the front lines of colonial occupation, policing and militarism were often indistinguishable. State violence was designed not to detect or prevent crime but to maintain order. In colonial conflicts, little distinction is made between armed combatants and everyday civilians. This kind of conflict does not have a fixed point which allows one to say, ‘the war is won’. Rather, militaristic violence becomes part of the fabric of everyday life under occupation. Despite these realities, Britain’s reputation as a civil, respectable and law-abiding military force remains essential to the nation’s image of itself, and cultivating the myth of a peaceful end to empire, and an orderly transition into the British Commonwealth, is as important as Churchillian myths about Britain’s brave and solitary resistance to fascism in the Second World War. This moralism at the heart of British militarism underwrites the popular campaigns which have railed against the application of human rights law in cases against ‘our boys’ for their actions in Afghanistan or Iraq (after all, murder is not murder in the ‘fog of war’).3 Soliciting equal fury among these same patriots and armed forces enthusiasts are the calls for apologies, or even reparations, for colonial crimes. Pundits and politicians are aghast at this dredging up of alleged crimes from

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a different time, for which they claim there is little substantial evidence (perhaps it was lost with the burning of colonial records?),4 and which they say were far too long ago to render a trial fair or appropriate now anyway. Several scholars have argued that a reckoning with colonial histories can help us understand the character of war and militarism today.5 Of course, many people thinking and writing about war have observed the decline in traditional warfare since the end of the Second World War – the increasing proportion of civilian casualties in conflicts and wars against counterinsurgents rather than other states – but this becomes less novel when considered in light of colonial conflict. The distinction between military and civilian, war and peace, battleground and safe zone has been further eroded in the twenty-first century, not least because of developments in total surveillance and precision drone strikes. Nightmarishly, the zone of conflict can now be totalled in on an individual – within a room, within their house.6 The global War on Terror is everywhere and without end. Importantly for our purposes, these logics of contemporary militarism inflect how racism functions in contemporary Britain. Of course, the British nation is produced through its exclusions, and the language of war remains pivotal: the War on Terror, the war on county lines, the ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture’.7 Dominant ideas about enmity, counter-terrorism and security, with their colonial lineages, today frame the militarisation of British political culture, and this helps explain how militarised policing practices are justified with regard to familiar racial foes: the Muslim, the immigrant and the black criminal.

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* * * The militarisation of everyday life in contemporary Britain may appear to be a new phenomenon, but, like so many innovations, it is a colonial aftershock, making its belated appearance on the shores of the mother country. The British state ‘sending in the army’ to deal with a civil crisis is often considered an historical exception, confined to events like the Peterloo Massacre or the Troubles in Northern Ireland (the military occupation of Ireland is, of course, only exceptional in as far as it is a colony which became part of the United Kingdom). However, Britain’s more distant colonies were, and in some cases continue to be, subject to paramilitary force when the natives were considered threatening or unruly. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that today people from formerly colonised populations living in Britain are not only framed as exceptionally threatening or unruly, but are also subjected to militarised forms of governance. As we have argued throughout this book, the racialised folk devils of the terrorist, gangster and immigrant are all subjected to policies and practices which, in one way or another, legitimate ‘sending in the army’. The creeping militarisation of the police in contemporary Britain follows the emergence of non-white Commonwealth migrants moving to and settling in the mother country. The Troubles in Ireland provided the material infrastructure for militarised policing on the British mainland, while the ever increasing presence of racialised immigration provided the discursive justification. From the 1980s onwards, in response to the urban

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revolts which began in St Paul’s, Bristol in 1980, and Brixton, south London, before spreading across England in 1981, paramilitary policing techniques were transplanted from the colonial context. Armoured police were trained to use rubber bullets and CS spray: the latter of which was used for the first time in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1981, while police armed with rubber bullets were deployed to contain the Broadwater Farm uprisings in 1985. While officers were not ordered to fire in the latter case, Sir Kenneth Newman of the Met Police warned that such tactics were now necessary for dealing with urban disorder (rubber bullets have been fired in Northern Ireland but never on the British mainland). We should here reflect on the civil unrest in August 2011, sparked by the police killing of an unarmed black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot dead in a manner reminiscent of the shoot-to-kill policies of the paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland. Duggan was being pursued by the police as part of the decade-long Operation Trident, established to focus specifically on serious violence within the black population; referred to as ‘black on black’ crime in the early 2000s, but now more frequently referred to as ‘gang crime’. The police killing of Duggan followed a three-year spike in police use of stop-and-search powers designed to combat so-called ‘gang violence’. In August 2011, David Cameron, speaking from a professionally graffitied youth centre in his Oxfordshire constituency, announced his ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture’. He described gangs as a ‘major criminal disease’ that had ‘infected our streets’.

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As noted in Part 1, the policing of ‘gangs’ involves ‘intelligence gathering’ using (native) informants, cultural analysts surveying social media, and the broader criminalisation of those who simply live, study or socialise together. This rounding up of suspects is not dissimilar to counterinsurgency policing in Britain’s colonies, and the militarisation of policing provided additional weight to Cameron’s declaration of war, accompanied by the increased use of tasers, the purchase of water cannons and the expansion of the number of armed officers. A decade before, Tony Blair had launched his own war at home with the domestic ‘War on Terror’, proudly proclaiming, ‘the police tell me what power they need and I give it to them’. Part of these new police powers allowed officers ‘to take account of a person’s ethnic origin in selecting persons to be stopped in response to a specific terrorist threat’.8 This power was eventually repealed following a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. Despite such successful legal challenges, the War on Terror continues: teachers, doctors, academics and social workers are all incorporated into Britain’s counterinsurgency programme through the Prevent policy, enlisted to identify signs of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ among ‘service-users’. This policing of sympathies – the desire to identify and record ‘radicalisation’ and support for ‘terrorism’, and to chart the interiority of the nation’s potential ‘internal enemies’, which of course ends up capturing much broader anti-imperialist impulses – has been accompanied by more overt forms of militarism. One year on from the ‘2011 riots’ following the police murder of Mark Duggan, thousands of uniformed soldiers were deployed to provide security

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for the 2012 London Olympics, the biggest deployment of troops on the mainland since the Second World War (13,500 troops in total). London was ‘wired up with a new range of scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centres and checkpoints’, while surface-to-air missile systems scanned the skies and unmanned drones surveilled the stadiums.9 We now expect to see police officers armed with machine-guns at major travel terminals, and armed operatives trained by Northern Ireland paramilitary forces exercising shootto-kill operations in civilian areas, such as that which led to the police killing Brazilian plumber Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. The firearms unit that killed Menezes were part of Britain’s domestic counter-terror police, but received their training from the SAS. The shoot-to-kill policy which saw Menezes executed as he walked through Stockwell underground station mirrored the tactics of British Special Forces. Through a global circulation of counter-terror military strategists, practices and consultants, paramilitary policing in Palestine, Northern Ireland and Britain now all share the hallmarks of lethal force as first resort. Here, the British military mythology of minimum force, due process and ‘hearts and minds’ becomes exposed for its frank absurdity. The racial nature of paramilitary policing is hard to miss here; a Catholic Brazilian plumber is mistaken for a Muslim Arab due to them both ‘having Mongolian eyes’, according to the officers responsible for the killing, which illustrates the slippery character of ‘the

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Muslim’ as a racial category and the persistence of the racial taxonomies of colonial science. Perhaps the most consistent racialised folk devil, for which the armed forces must be called into action, has been the spectre of the recently arrived, or imminently arriving, migrant. Migrants are often constructed as potential ‘terrorists’, ‘criminals’ and ‘sex offenders’, but they are more widely demonised for taking jobs, claiming out-ofwork benefits and putting a strain on public services. ‘The migrant’ is effectively an empty vessel into which myriad anxieties can be poured. This has found renewed urgency in the last few years, as increasing numbers attempt to enter Britain on small boats travelling from France. This requires we ‘send forth the navy’. Right-wing commentators have recently declared the need for gunboats to patrol Britain’s maritime borders, while politicians claim sea-crossing migrants must be turned away as a matter of deterrence.10 In summer 2020, we saw the Home Office request that the Ministry of Defence deploy navy vessels in the Dover Straits, while Home Secretary Priti Patel appointed a former Royal Marine to the new role of ‘Clandestine Channel Threat Commander’. While this reassertion of naval power silently reaffirms the hope that Britain might once again ‘rule the waves’, it also reflects the paranoiac convulsions of a political culture obsessed with scanning the border for signs of danger and restlessly pursuing the expulsion of all foreign pollutants. These anti-immigrant anxieties and revulsions inevitably culminate in militarised calls for further securitisation, closure and expulsion.

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It seems worth reflecting for a moment on the case of the Stansted 15, a group of radical environmental-migrant activists who successfully grounded a mass deportation charter flight in March 2017. After their action prevented the deportation of roughly 60 migrants to Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the Home Office changed tactics. Rather than fly from commercial airports, some mass deportation charter flights now fly from Royal Air Force bases, such as Brize Norton. Of course, charter flights were already a form of militarised border control; they emerged largely because of difficulties entailed in deporting people on commercial flights, especially in the wake of some passengers and pilots refusing to fly with people resisting deportation. Charter flights – usually leaving from Stansted airport, even if by cover of darkness in the early hours – were therefore a means of undercutting the possibility of resistance and solidarity, especially in its spontaneous forms. The use of military bases for charter flights marks another escalation, crystallising the sense that migrants, by virtue of not being citizens, are not civilians either. Their expulsion, like that of ‘terrorists’, occurs in a murky extra-legal space created by an excess of state sovereignty and a disregard for human rights. Having watched the prosecution and sentencing of those undertaking similar actions before them, the Stansted 15 protestors expected to be charged with aggravated trespass. They were, at first, only to then have the charges upped to ‘intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome’, a terrorist offence introduced under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act, a law passed in response to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. The 15

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activists were convicted of these offences in Chelmsford Crown Court in December 2018, and potentially faced sentences of up to life imprisonment for endangering the safety of the airport. Fortunately, none of them were incarcerated. They were given fines and community service. But their treatment – particularly as a mostly white, university-educated group with an excellent legal team – is indicative of some important shifts. They were treated not as civilian protestors, acting on conscience, defending human rights and exercising their right to free speech within a liberal democracy, but as enemies of the state – not only criminals but terrorists. In their treatment we see the ways in which dissent is increasingly viewed as treachery and sedition. The observation that they would have received prison terms had they been black or Muslim – which became one of the hot takes on Twitter around the time of the trial – was not only obvious and patronising (clearly this was something the groups had considered and strategised around), it also missed the most disconcerting aspect of this case for all of us who might want to engage in acts of dissent and resistance. If middle-class presenting and mostly white activists can be convicted of terrorism offences for non-violent political actions, then the goalposts have shifted. The terrorism net has been cast even wider, and this limits all of our political horizons. As David Gee explains: a culture of militarism is part of our way of life as a society. A militarist outlook is embedded in certain perceptions of British nationhood and its security, in

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political orientations and the policies that come from them, in our fears and hopes for the future, in the language we use and the stories we tell about the way the world works, and in our entertainment, arts, and media productions.11 Another important way in which the army is being called in is through the interpellation of people as surveilled and securitising subjects, willing to report and always reminded that the threat of terror is everywhere (‘see it, say it, sorted’). If militarisation can be defined as ‘the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence’,12 then contemporary processes of militarisation rely on the persistent production of banal yet ubiquitous threats. In daily life, a whole range of people are encouraged, and sometimes instructed, to participate in the practices of everyday security (this is true with the Prevent duty for example). These instructions and encouragements are not designed to ‘change our minds’. These are not practices based in conceptions of consciousness. You do not have to believe in the War on Terror, for example. What you must do is be edged into co-operation through actions, so that the bureaucratic organisation of public life or working life or educational life places you in a position of participation and complicity. There is something in this that prefigures a deeper authoritarianism. Once participating, you are no longer the suspect. When they come for the suspect, you are just another bystander.

C HAPTE R T WE LVE

Zero-sum Game

All I ever wanted was to love women, and in turn to be loved by them back. Their behavior towards me has only earned my hatred, and rightfully so! I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy. Humanity struck at me first by condemning me to experience so much suffering. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t start this war … I wasn’t the one who struck first … But I will finish it by striking back. I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth. – Elliot Rodger manifesto (killed six and injured 14 in Isla Vista, California)

Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns. – Piers Morgan, 2019

Following the Conservative victory in the 2019 general election, news surfaced on social media of an upswing in racist abuse. Incidents of people of colour being goaded, mocked and jeered at in public spaces were undergirded by more intimate kinds of aggression, including black and brown families being informed by their neighbours that the Tory victory meant they ought to pack their bags; repatriation was nigh. In many ways, this was a rerun of

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the days following the Brexit referendum result in 2016. Then, much of the tone was elated, triumphant – we won! Following the Tory landslide in 2019, the triumphalism took a new form. Instead of merely cawing over their victory, the right seemed to be most virulent when celebrating our defeat. Even as the final results were trickling in on December 13th, a jubilant white man took to the streets of Brixton, shouting ‘you lose! you lose!’ at black and brown commuters entering the tube station. Our loss was their gain, but it was our loss that tasted sweetest to them. More importantly, this man and many others viewed this zero-sum game through the prism of race; it was a triumph not only against the Remoaners, and not only against the racialised folk devils we have been discussing, but against all immigrants, their children and their children’s children. It was also seen as a victory against constraint of all kinds, against the idea that one must keep one’s bigotry behind closed doors. That said, bigotry has been out in the open – selling newspapers, winning election campaigns and greasing the wheels of nationalism’s constitutive exclusions – for decades. But the myth that people are policed by the diktats of ‘political correctness’ or ‘woke culture’ nonetheless holds firm. As a result, Johnson’s record of calling gay men ‘tanktop-wearing bumboys’, saying that women who wear the burkha look like ‘letterboxes’, and having an altercation with his girlfriend that sounded so aggressive the neighbours called the police was, for many, an attractive, perhaps even a reassuring, prospect rather than a sign of being unfit for office. In Johnson, many saw their own bigotry, albeit with the money, position and

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power necessary to cast those views as common sense (see Chapter 9). As such, it should be no surprise that it was not just racist attacks that rose following Johnson’s victory, but also an onslaught of homophobia and transphobia.1 The gender politics of the authoritarian turn bear some consideration here. We are witnessing the rapid development of ‘culture wars’ that thrive off a zero-sum thesis on all resources, material or otherwise: one person’s gain is another’s loss. If basic respect is shown to black and brown people, it must come at the cost of white people’s access to dignity. The culture wars can thus frame the increase in relative power and dignity of women or trans people as a threat to men or cisgender people, laying the foundation for men’s rights campaigners and TERFs (‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’). The zero-sum thesis is the key driver of the culture wars; it offers some rationale for why highly insignificant phenomena (a vegan sausage roll, a stranger’s gender) can become charged sites of conflict. If you believe the fulfilment of another’s desire is always at the expense of your own, then someone else’s gain, however minor, will always be your loss. The logic of a zero-sum game underpins the network of interconnected moral panics, some of which we map out in this book, around which political discourse converges and congeals. Social life is understood in increasingly Darwinian terms; the survival of the fittest has been reimagined as a shoot-em-up platform game – singular, disembodied, territorial, violent, masculine, exhilarating, yet simultaneously scared, defensive, nativist in the most privatised of conceptions with lesser and/or dangerous

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others representing a threat that must be quashed if the embattled family is to survive. We see this in TERFism, which claims that trans women are in fact devious men threatening and usurping the place of ‘real’ women, as well as their sexual dignity. There are only enough resources (emotional and moral as well as material) either for trans women or for cis women, but not both – it’s them or us. We might note the prominence of an organisation called Woman’s Place UK2 in the TERF landscape as an interesting example of the retrograde politics produced by this logic – the name at once spoofing a previous patriarchal framing of the world yet also seeking to reclaim an imagined territory of women’s rights, a place where the sovereign claims of cis-women are beyond question or disruption. TERF logic relies on strict hierarchies and schematic divisions – women have a particular place, violated by men, they must also guard it against trans interlopers. An event held by an anti-trans organisation called ‘We Need to Talk UK’, entitled ‘“Transgenderism” and the War on Women’, offers an instructive example. The name of the organisation echoes a key tenet of the culture war, which is that opinions that diverge from or contest a set of liberal orthodoxies are being silenced. Further, the event was originally to be held at Millwall football club but had to be moved after the venue received complaints. As a result, the group collaborated with Conservative MP David Davies to hold the event in the House of Commons – the same David Davies who voted against gay marriage, is sceptical about climate change and is a staunch critic of the Human

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Rights Act. Trans exclusionary radical feminists find themselves making strange bedfellows indeed. The expanding terrain of digital subcultures organised around renewing the primacy of masculinity operates through a similar premise. The gains made by feminism over the second half of the twentieth century are viewed as having displaced men from their rightful place of dominance. Crucially, the story goes that feminism has not brought us closer to equality but has created a situation of female supremacy: a feminisation of society that puts men at a disadvantage, a disadvantage imagined as the coming together of a loss of ‘jobs for men’, a loss of the unquestioned social status of manhood apparently enjoyed by previous generations, and a loss of sexual access to women’s bodies. Though this backlash against the successes of the women’s liberation movement has been a staple of public discourse for decades, the early 2000s saw a new iteration in the form of the claim, stridently expressed, that men were, in fact, the victims of a society run by and for women. Fathers4Justice were the most prominent exponents of this idea; they sought to redress what they viewed as institutionalised discrimination against fathers, particularly in family courts. While the case for co-parenting after divorce, and the expectation that men share equally in the labour of childcare, are prominent feminist concerns, Fathers4Justice viewed feminism as the source of their suffering. This position chimed with the ‘postfeminist’ rhetoric of New Labour, which viewed equality as a question of legislation and common sense and attempted to sever the residual connections between the Labour Party and the feminist, anti-racist and anti-war movements that had come out of

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the New Left. As a result, while the stunts Fathers4Justice pulled were viewed as unnecessary or hysterical, the underlying premise that feminism needed to be kept under control and equality managed by the state remained, and has helped to usher in these digital subcultures. Within this new global ‘mens’ rights’ network, disproportionate rates of male suicide3 and homelessness,4 as well as poor provision for male victims of domestic violence, are taken to be the outcome of feminism.5 Further, the fact that men are, globally, more likely to be conscripted as soldiers becomes similarly implicated in female supremacy. The fact that Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) focus on these gendered discrepancies – rather than aligning themselves with anti-war activists, housing campaigners or organisations for survivors of domestic violence – helps to illuminate the porous membrane between MRAs and the wider alt-right political movement. Incels (short for involuntary celibates), on the other hand, turn their attention to the iniquities of the sexual marketplace. Incels view the world according to strict sexual hierarchies, with ‘Chads’ and ‘Staceys’ (conventionally attractive men and women) at the top. This rather adolescent understanding of sexual life takes a more sinister turn in its detour through evolutionary psychology, through which incels assert that even women on the lower end of the sexual hierarchy are ‘programmed’ to be demanding, high maintenance and committed to dating men who are at the top of the scale, leaving ordinary men, such as themselves, at a disadvantage. It is worth noting here that this elaboration of the old adage that ‘nice guys finish last’ evidences forms of loneliness, alienation and resentment

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that could be taken as paradigmatic of the current conjuncture. Yet it is their organisation along the lines of the zero-sum game that connects this emotional terrain to the militarisation of social life and the turn to authoritarian nationalism. However, across all of these domains, men understand themselves to be under threat – whether physically, socially or psychologically – from powerful and malicious women protected by the conspiracy of ‘political correctness’ or ‘woke culture’. Taken together, we can see TERFS, incels and Men’s Rights Activists as key players in the ‘culture wars’ that now dominate the political landscape, and which both feed off and intersect with the more explicitly racial dynamics. However, as indicated, the zero-sum game is at its most visible when it concerns race. The language of ‘white genocide’, perhaps the most explicit rendering of this idea, has gained significant purchase in the mainstream, including in universities. As mentioned previously, Professor of Politics Eric Kaufmann asserts that people have ‘natural’ racial affinities and that ‘racial self-interest’ is an intelligible sentiment, distinct from racism. In his book Whiteshift, Kaufmann develops his particular brand of demographic racism, arguing that as ‘white people’ become a smaller global plurality, Western nations ought to orient their immigration policies around the ‘cultural comfort’ of these white national majorities. To promote his book, Kaufmann appeared at an event hosted by the libertarian (perhaps, more accurately, contrarian) website Spiked, whose panellists were asked to respond to the question: ‘Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the West?’ The fact that these moral panics regarding shifting demograph-

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ics, gender norms and sexual practices express themselves in the language of ‘debate’ is notable for retaining a rhetorical connection to the old forms of democracy (and to their theatrical forms) which are, increasingly, viewed as anachronistic, idealistic and failed. Yet the notion of rational debate serves to rehabilitate these ideals, and recast the left, feminists and anti-racists as the enemies of free speech – the real agents of repression. These ‘debates’ are highly visible as televised spectacles, but they begin on social media, which functions as a kind of anti-democracy, like looking at democracy in a funhouse mirror. The appearance of being able to say whatever you want to the whole world is a powerful and seductive illusion. In fact, utterances on social media are highly ritualised within a dense set of formal codes. In many ways, the world of social media is the perfect microcosm in which to view the internal workings of ideology; the sheer volume of material and relative ease of identifying trends and tropes allows us to watch ideas form, fracture and renew. But the chaotic, cacophonous chamber of social media hides the direction of power. Consider the way in which social media backlash offers the illusion of collective power; a celebrity or brand will say something racist or sexist, tweets and Instagram posts will accrue, critiquing their mistake and demanding redress, and the company or celebrity will issue an apology. This process is often swift and exhilarating – it can feel highly compelling, like watching a sport – and gives the sense that powerful figures are accountable to ordinary people. In fact, these processes strengthen our affective ties to

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celebrities or brands, while also making profit for social media platforms. The sense of democratic potential operates through a binary functionality; like/don’t like, retweet/ignore. This binary functionality precludes most forms of uncertainty or nuance but, perhaps most importantly, interpellates us all to have an opinion. It demands engagement and encourages us to view that engagement as a social necessity. This binary functionality has an educative function for the new authoritarianism. We become accustomed to polarised, violent, divisive, individualistic and mob-like discourse, centred around moral purity and evacuated of political content. These technologies are also highly anxiety-inducing, which further encourages the desire for forms of collectivity, calm and certainty. The falling standards of living induced by neoliberal capitalism and an aggressive programme of austerity, alongside increasingly violent forms of detention, incarceration and social death for the poorest and the racialised in Britain, must be taken as primary. Nonetheless, the modes of mediation and consumption that structure everyday life are indivisible from the operations of the authoritarian state. What we can begin to see is the way in which these binary discursive regularities encourage a desire for older forms of political collectivity centred on the nation. Portions of the left (and some liberals) who desire this kind of collectivity (or, interestingly, assume others do) are trying to harness these desires through the non sequitur of progressive nationalism, while most others have dropped the progressive part altogether, and are advocating for variations on the theme of militarised nationalism. This has

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become audible in the refrain – sung by MPs from across the political spectrum, as well as their compadres in the media with whom they share the hymn sheet – to ‘send in the army’. This desire for a military presence is more than a capitulation to the sense of eternal and omnipresent threat orchestrated by the everyday theatrics of the War on Terror; rather, it is a kind of forward-looking nostalgia. It is both the desire for the Blitz-spirit version of national collectivity (hence all the elated talk of postBrexit rationing) and the yearning for the certainties of collective national stability post-democracy, overseen by a militaristic state patriarch.

PART 5

What Now?

CH APT E R T HI RTE E N

Covid-19: A Real Crisis

We go out and we clap. We clap awkwardly. We clap reluctantly because healthcare workers should not be troopified, because they are not our blood sacrifice, because they should not have to go to work and put themselves and their families at risk. We clap reluctantly because Boris and Matt Hancock are clapping too, the very people who are responsible for the social murder of hundreds of thousands of people, by refusing to act against the spread of the virus, but also by presiding over a decade of austerity. We clap because our neighbours are clapping, even the ones who irritate us, the ones who closed the door in the face of canvassers, telling them they don’t vote. If they’re clapping, this has to mean something. We don’t want to clap. We want to rage, but we clap anyway. Why? Because this is as close to anything in-person and collective as we have encountered in this crisis. We are tempted to give in to the cynicism which would see us retreat inside, but we don’t. We continue to clap awkwardly. We want to shout, ‘don’t fucking vote Tory next time’, but we don’t, because we don’t want to break this. Not yet. We are already grieving. We can’t sit still. Our hands shake and we need to keep them busy. We can’t think about what we thought about before. We feel guilty eating nice things, guilty when the postman comes to the door. Yesterday a 13-year-old child died alone. His parents and sisters can’t

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go to his funeral because they are all in isolation. There are people on ventilators, there are people choking on their own phlegm, there are people who can’t breathe, there are people, so many people, dying alone. * * * We have been writing about ‘crisis’ throughout – that has very much been the point – and yet to call the coronavirus pandemic ‘another crisis’ obviously underplays the epochal transformations now underway. In short, this is what a real crisis looks like. Millions abruptly unemployed; the prime minister telling people to ‘stay at home’; police given powers to disperse any individual from public space; and the skies empty of planes and full of police helicopters, while the ambulance sirens reverberate, so often, too loud, on otherwise quiet roads. We do not yet know what will come in its wake, but a deep global economic recession seems unavoidable. The crisis will also shift state practices and political subjectivities in ways that we cannot yet predict. However, before looking, despairingly or otherwise, to what lies in store, we first reflect on how the arguments presented so far can help explain the UK government’s woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic. If any doubted the extent to which state neglect has become normalised in Britain, the Covid-19 crisis has confirmed the ascendancy of that neglect as an active, wilful, targeted technique of state power. Under Boris Johnson, the UK has lurched from one half-articulated non-policy to another – in the process, seemingly referencing many of the recurring symbols of British popular

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nationalism in a manner that goes beyond farce to all-out horror-show. Throughout this book we have tried to describe the neglectful state from several angles and with different lighting. Much of what we have discussed belongs to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash: austerity amalgamated with the securitisation practices honed through the War on Terror, and the bordering machinery that has become so central to disciplinary techniques across the world. However, this moment might just be passing, and this book has been our attempt to understand the world moving beneath our feet. We have suggested that the will to balance targeted neglect at racial others with some meaningful appeal to belonging or entitlement for a significant section of the population seems almost gone. The ability of the state to administer a totalised machinery at all, even if only to administer differential neglect, is now in question. If anything, we are entering a new phase of rapid realignment in state practices and an active disruption of what has gone before. And yet, just as we were working on concluding this book and trying to reflect on the new Boris Johnson-led government, with its particular brand of authoritarianism, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and with it the contours of our political, economic and cultural conjuncture twisted and warped. The deadly costs of the neglectful British state have been made tragically clear over even the first stages of the Covid-19 crisis, which seems likely to haunt the political and economic structure of the globe for the foreseeable future. At the time of writing, a combination of incompetence, malice and an investment in the economy above

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people have led to the UK suffering the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe. However, we can already see that those in power are appealing to the nation’s patriotism and nativism to distract from their murderous mismanagement which has caused Britain’s death toll to be so much worse than comparable European neighbours. It is this dynamic – of fatal neglect cross-cut with exuberant jingoism, of corporate state capture behind a flimsy screen of strongman theatrics – that we have explored through this book and which has intensified during the present crisis. The actions – and more importantly the inactions – of the British state in the face of the global pandemic appear to confirm our earlier analysis of the emergence of a neglectful state that works through the militarised figure of the patriarch. We have been alarmed to see how prescient our terms for the embodiment of parallel state practices have been. Unsurprisingly, the language of war has been mobilised. We were called to enter into battle. We were asked to protect NHS workers on the frontline by staying at home. We would summon our Blitz spirit to get through this as a great nation. We were now in a war with an invisible but deadly enemy. We were told to pull together to ensure victory. As a result, the government press releases and the mostly unhelpful journalistic commentary (a poor substitute for investigation and proper reportage) amounted to little more than health and martial metaphors falling in on one another, or tying one another in knots, without actually telling us very much. But the martial metaphors were not only that. In fact, the state’s most decisive and immediate action was to introduce emergency measures

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through the Coronavirus Act. The Act introduced ‘certainly the most severe restrictions ever imposed, going further than the regulations made under, respectively, the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939] during the two world wars’.1 This was not just a metaphorical war, but a war made real by emergency laws and state practices. The Coronavirus Bill breezed through Parliament with literally no opposition from the Labour Party or the Lords, despite it quite evidently being extreme, authoritarian, lacking proper oversight and with an expansive time limit. That the emergency might become the norm was already predictable at this early stage of legislating, while the government still floundered on public health policy and responsible action to save lives. The celebration of the 75th anniversary of VE day in the midst of the lockdown allowed for the romanticisation of the Blitz, Dunkirk and all things Second World War that we have argued creates an image of Britain as the heroic underdog, rather than an oppressive imperial overlord. As people up and down the country broke lockdown to celebrate the myth of an innate, British spirit of sacrifice, the line between historical re-enactment and history repeating itself became eerily blurred. Comparisons between the coronavirus lockdown and the Blitz emerged almost immediately, despite the deaths this time being caused by state mismanagement rather than Luftwaffe bombs. Nativism has also served as an answer to this existential crisis of the British state, with echoes of the anti-Chinese rhetoric that was common in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century following the aftermath of

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the opium wars. Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage claimed that coronavirus shows us that ‘it is time we all challenged China’, and blamed the initial location of the virus as the cause of the problem, despite that reasoning’s inability to explain the striking difference in the death toll between Britain and, say, Germany. Any mention of the disproportionate number of deaths suffered by Britain’s black and Asian communities during this crisis has been dismissed as ‘divisive’, or, perhaps more perniciously, as attributable to genetic difference. As ever, biological ‘race’ retains its allure, especially in matters of health and medicine, as the certainties of absolute genetic difference safely cloud the ongoing force of structural racism as social fact. In the days following UK lockdown, online cultures began to comment on the (perhaps uniquely British, in its popular articulation) love of boot-licking. To lick the boots of the strict and unresponsive authority figure is a jokey recurrent theme in the British pornographic imagination – arising, no doubt, from the disproportionate cultural influence of militarised forms of upper-class schooling and the ritualised sexualised punishment within these spaces. This image is an apt index of and uncomfortable commentary on Britain’s oddly unresolved class politics. Despite histories and presents of militant working-class resistance, the idea that many of us bow to our masters, and, more than this, love the process of prostration, registers something peculiar but undeniably persistent about British political culture. In both his militarised and neglectful incarnations, the state patriarch can be positioned as the recipient of boot-licking abjection – and he is suitably unresponsive to such gestures. However, what,

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Covid has painfully revealed is the absence of any effective authority figure wearing the boots. The British state has been floundering, talking tough or talking us down, but revealed every day as unable to exercise the titillatingly militarised authority promised before Covid. Instead, we, the population, look to our habits of boot-licking only to find the emptiness and the terror of longing for authority when that authority reveals its inadequacy. * * * The myth that drove Conservative austerity policies in the aftermath of the last economic crisis – the myth that ‘we are all in it together’ – appears to have been jettisoned by the new leadership of Boris Johnson and his chief strategist Dominic Cummings, seemingly the only person to whom Johnson feels an undying loyalty. Johnson and Cummings make little pretence that their policies are for the greater good. They represent and defend ‘their people’ and feed off the politics of division. Both built their careers through the Brexit referendum by tying Britain’s relationship with the European Union to a culture war about British identity, and calling on their supporters to relive the imagined glories of yesteryear. Specifically linking Brexit to the most romantic moments in British military history, Johnson argued that Remainers had forgotten that ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out ... The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.’ After that approach proved successful in the referendum, Johnson and Cummings have continued to repeat a similar refrain as they have gained greater and greater state power.

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The entry of Boris Johnson to the elected office of prime minister with a large majority (previously his ascent had bypassed the electorate) has empowered, apparently, the still shadowy figure of Cummings. Cummings’s own understanding of British history is one in which, following the Shangri-la of the Victorian Empire, Britain spends the twentieth century making ‘colossal error after error’;2 now that he has his hands on the instruments of state, Cummings appears determined to use them to once again provide the British ruling class with the power it had enjoyed in the past. Under his direction, we have seen displays of carelessness towards previously settled niceties of political life. Despite the highly questionable partisanship (in favour of the Conservative Party) of much of the news media, key journalists were asked to leave an early Johnson press briefing in an orchestrated display of overturning public accountability. Any dissent within the cabinet, however weedy, has been shut down, most notably with the theatrical expulsion of Sajid Javid. Judges have been put on notice – with government plans to limit access to judicial review, a particularly chilling threat after the battle between Johnson’s previous government and the judiciary on the issue of proroguing Parliament. A few months later, in August 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel attacked ‘activist lawyers’ and promised that her new immigration laws would ‘send the left into meltdown’. What we are being promised, it seems, is not a better functioning state (the axing of Public Health England in August 2020 is telling here), but rather the fulfilment of the electoral promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’, and to ‘crush the saboteurs’.3

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We seem set for another strange experiment, the imposition of the shock doctrine on a domestic population. If this is the endgame of empire, then it really is a nasty case of the colonial subject coming home. In this openly celebrated coming disruption, breaking apart institutions is always considered a good thing. Such a gambit can be popular, for a while, because institutions of state have failed so miserably to meet the needs of much of the population. However, despite its claims to be decentring a political elite, this is no democratising project. Instead we see a still undecided process of realignment within the ruling class. The British state has been captured by a far-right cabal and, despite the forwarding of imperial nostalgia, is subject to the whims and interests of a transnational capitalist class, even as this class is undergoing transformation. Already in its first months, the Johnson government announced legislation that disregards and bullies ‘business interests’, who are told to give up their reliance on migrant labour, learn to retain staff, automate or die. It is hard to shake the sense that this is a planned chaos, which includes actively shrinking the economy (for a time at least), perhaps introducing even more punitive policies, including varieties of workfare and fast-tracking automation with all of the resulting political disruption. While some voters might have been attracted by the implicit promise that whiteness would count for something again, what comes next might be shocking and painful for us all. Without wishing to be over-dramatic (and in the full awareness that the left frames every defeat as an opening for fascism), the odd standoff between the new government and ‘business interests’ reveals something new

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at play. On the one hand, the expulsion of dissent from cabinet also enabled the inclusion of another well-connected member of the transnational billionaire class (Rishi Sunak, unexpected and unlikely heart-throb of middle England). On the other, British business is being ordered to withdraw from practices established through a relative ease in hiring migrant workers and an expectation of relative ease when trading across borders. The changing set of class alliances, brokered by a state machinery willing to abandon recent practices of elite alliance-building, is something to which we must be alert. In 2019 the Home Office announced that it was moving forward with the government’s promise to introduce ‘a points-based immigration system’, dropping the previously oft-repeated rhetorical descriptor, ‘Australian-style’. In vox pop Twitter videos, Priti Patel, surrounded by scientists in white coats, repeated the mantra that Britain is ‘taking back control of its immigration system’. What this means in reality is far from what the Australian system actually entails. The UK’s proposals make for a far more restrictive immigration system which significantly limits permanent settlement prospects for skilled and qualified migrants. Those who come must fulfil the English-speaking requirement, and the proposals make no allowance for visas for ‘low-skilled’ migrants. The government’s rationale is that UK businesses will need to adapt and adjust to the end of free movement, and we will not seek to recreate the outcomes from free movement within the points-based system. As such, it is important that employers move away from a reliance on the UK’s immigration system

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as an alternative to investment in staff retention, productivity, and wider investment in technology and automation.4 Essentially this is a reiteration of the British jobs for British workers slogan, but one which envisions British workers properly as being machines. Meanwhile, there is some allowance made for ‘seasonal workers’, who will be able to come to perform particular agricultural tasks for a maximum period of six months, ensuring that settlement is not an option for so-called low/unskilled migrants. The ‘seasonal workers pilot’ increased the number of seasonal workers the agricultural sector is permitted to employ from outside the EU from 2,500 to 10,000 in time for the 2020 harvest. This scheme is described as a response ‘to the specific temporary requirements’ of the sector. The government is taking its cue from the right-wing, nationalist political moment, stating in its press release that it has ‘listened to the clear message from the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general election and will end the reliance on cheap, low-skilled labour coming into the country’. It is clear that the government considers itself to be delivering on Brexit’s promise to ‘take back control’. It proclaims it is ‘ending free movement, taking back control of our borders’. It is well aware that its new immigration policies will create a gap in terms of labour market needs, stating that: ‘It is estimated 70% of the existing EU workforce would not meet the requirements of the skilled worker route, which will help to bring overall numbers down in future.’5 How quickly the tables have turned, then, as Britain struggles to come to terms with the woeful unprepared-

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ness of its health service in the midst of a global pandemic. The NHS in particular is ill-equipped and unprepared for coping in a pandemic after more than a decade of underfunding and privatisation. During lockdown, migrant NHS staff whose visas were about to expire were told that they would be automatically renewed so that they could focus on fighting Covid-19. Having faced daily abuse from patients, asking if they can see a white doctor – and harangued by a media unquestioningly rehearsing the line that there are too many migrants in Britain, taking jobs not for them, not paying taxes and draining the welfare state – NHS staff are now being told they are needed. They were applauded weekly by the public, as though they were soldiers marching into war. ‘Key-worker’ migrants, working in the NHS, in transport, as refuse collectors, were told they were needed more than ever and must put themselves and their families at risk to save a people who so recently elected a government on the promise that it would rid the country of people like them. After the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crash and Brexit, the Covid-19 crisis appears to be the fourth horseman heralding a dramatic redeployment of state violence in the twenty-first century to redraw the contours of British society. Johnson announced a ‘New Deal’, drawing on the language of American social reform, to convince his new supporters in the former Labour heartlands of his commitment to investing in the ‘left behind’ areas. Of course, Johnson will offer some rewards to those who catapulted him to electoral victory in December 2019. However, the cabal of transnational capitalists associated with the Johnson and Cummings project – both

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those within government, such as Somerset Capital Management partner, Jacob Rees-Mogg, or those outside of government, like James Dyson – will act as a counterbalance to even the most limited form of nationalist social welfare. The ultimate aim of the Johnson government until the next election is to use this moment to open up new opportunities for British capital, both at home and overseas, whilst also depriving cultural institutions that have been set up as ‘enemies of the people’ – the BBC, universities, artistic institutions, an independent judiciary – of the ability to challenge the narrative set by the state.

CH APT E R F O URTE E N

Shared Grief, Hope and Resistance

We began this book by observing that Britain is not a happy place, not least for those of us committed to challenging racism. However, throughout the process of writing the book, events plunged us into new depths of despair. For those who had campaigned for the Labour Party in the 2019 election – including us – the days following the decisive defeat were marked by painful, thwarted and largely unsuccessful attempts to grieve the lost opportunity. Even before the votes were counted, think-pieces amassed trying to explain why the mythic ‘Red Wall’ had crumbled, and each factor (Corbyn, anti-Semitism, the media, Brexit, deindustrialisation) was seized upon and discarded in turn. Solutions were offered (community organising, protest, Keir Starmer), in an attempt to stave off the depression. These proclamations, refutations and solutions were marked by a kind of desperation; the turn to authoritarianism was undeniable, irresistible. Though the Tories had fought the election on a manifesto so thin and sloganeering that it was difficult to determine the precise outlines of the Cummings–Johnson agenda, it was clear that it would be contoured by an intensified nativist racism. And then 2020 hit, with a global pandemic that only sharpened the dividing line between those who get to

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live and those who are left to die. And yet, even as we tried to close out this book with some final words on Covid-19, the country was rocked by the largest anti-racist street mobilisation in British history following the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. How to make sense of it all, again? Our sense is that while the apocalypse looms globally, the end-times take on a particular flavour in the UK. The core argument framing this book is that we cannot describe this moment in Britain solely in terms of the rise of something, of nativist authoritarianism perhaps, but must also pay attention to the overbearing sense of decline – the decline of Britain’s greatness, the end of empire. This acute awareness of being at the end of one thing, and the beginning of something else, whose form is unstable and unclear, is a condition that inspires both hope and dread. In the few months since lockdown, we have watched with horror as fascists effectively mobilised in ‘defence’ of everything – from Brexit, to Tommy Robinson, to the statue of Winston Churchill. But the lows of witnessing Nazi salutes in Parliament Square were matched by the highs of watching a multi-racial crowd pull down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, before throwing him into the Bristol harbour where his ships used to dock. The cacophonous moment we are in suggests multiple, contingent openings through which the languages and grammars of a new world might emerge. Looking at the form and reception of the UK Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020, it is clear that something significant has shifted since the first iteration of BLM four years ago. As in 2016, the protests against racist state violence

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emerged hand in hand with demands for the toppling of statues of colonisers and slave traders (in 2016, it was Rhodes Must Fall). Activists, again, made connections between histories of colonial violence and contemporary forms of state racism. But the scale and context of the 2020 movement has revealed new outcomes and opportunities. Protestors in 2016 were denounced as fringe, far too radical to be entertained. The removal of statues was rejected outright – with Oxford chancellor and former colonial governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten calling on protesting students to ‘think about being educated elsewhere’, proposing China as a potential destination.1 By 2020, institutions from the Metropolitan Police to the Conservative Party clamoured to express sympathy for the movement – especially while it still remained largely a conversation about the US. The hundreds of thousands who took to the streets condemning systemic, institutional racism shook the British establishment. Suddenly, the removal of statues appeared an easy compromise, in the face of the largest anti-racist protest movement in British history. Removals of statues which uncritically commemorate colonialism from museums, universities and town squares proliferated in 2020. Concurrently, such a concession has enabled the more radical demands of BLM, such as defunding the police, to enter mainstream political debate. Before Covid, we had already observed the resurgence of a more expansive street politics, more multiple, more promiscuous, something beyond the usual deference and good manners of British political life. This re-awakening of the street is, in part, what powered the Corbyn moment;

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the coming together of an assorted multitude, spanning street and community organisers, new or reinvigorated party members, Momentum, trade unionists and all sorts of people who didn’t really believe in a parliamentary road to socialism but could not pass on the possibility this particular Labour leadership might open. All of this chimed with the re-emergence of a street politics that seemed to confirm a general understanding of politics moving beyond formal institutional practices and out into the spaces of everyday life. Even before the Corbyn moment, the twenty-first century was already a time of renewed street politics, including in Britain. While the heady hopes of Occupy or of the revolutions of the squares remained distant for most of the country, the habit of protest has extended. Now, Britain too has an established culture of street protest, perhaps characterised by dressing up, face-painting and twee and/or scatological placards. The energies unleashed in the protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq laid a foundation here. The coming together of very diverse segments of the population, including notably the whiter middle classes with Muslim and migrant working-class communities, combined with memorable home-made protest accessories, signalled an opening to previously rare forms of political communication and conversation. Fast forward to Remain – a movement unable to shake its middle-class cultural references, despite a wider base among supporters. Once again, tweeness stands in for a particular political sensibility – respectable outrage, performance of a shared consciousness; jokes and costumes abounded. The reported good humour of Remain events

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became part of the political message, insinuating that Leavers were angry, violent, lacking in such genteel good manners. Some anti-racists whispered quietly their uncomfortable suspicion that Remainers had never had their sense of entitlement questioned before. Worse still, it was difficult to avoid the more cosmopolitan nationalist undertones of the EU flag-waving. In its own way, this performance subtly (and not so subtly) excluded racialised Others seen as not belonging within the borders of the European project. But still, at least people were out on the street. When Extinction Rebellion came on the scene, the critique of hidden and not-so-hidden racism and nationalism was less whispered. XR presented a particularly and peculiarly British incarnation of the authority-loving rebel. Despite the rhetoric of rebellion, the overly friendly relationship with the police revealed the imagined membership of such actions. Groups involved in legal observing at protests and support for those suffering police violence warned against the XR approach, with its failure to understand the persistence of state violence and police racism. Yet, in the context of many years of wilful state neglect and a takeover of formal political spaces by the performance of buffoonery, we might understand the plaintive tweeness of both Remain and Extinction Rebellion as a kind of call for an effective state patriarch. Despite the costume of protest, often quite literally the most costumed of protests, these are movements that long for authority to take control and to make things work again. Remainers were openly nostalgic for a time they characterised as a European idyll of tolerance, free movement

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and excellent cheese and wine, handily skipping over the violences of Fortress Europe and the archipelago of camps and detention centres making up the other landscape underlying ‘free movement’. If only we could return to a grown-up politics where a sensible authority figure could put their foot down, overturn the silly tantrum of the referendum vote to leave the European Union, and make things go back to normal. XR, despite a more astute reading of the enormity of the climate crisis, also revealed a deep love of authority, garlanding the police force in the hope that a renewed authoritarianism could be repurposed to save a humanity who really don’t know what is good for them or for the planet. This critique is not an attempt to write off the movement altogether, and certainly not the many thousands of people who took to the streets in both XR and anti-Brexit protests. We recognise that the specific motivations and prescriptions of participants in these mass protests are not homogeneous. That said, we think the whole idea of mass protest to force governments to take action on climate crisis often represents a form of longing for an effective and more authoritarian state. For some of the younger climate protesters on the other hand – especially the school strikers – there was no longing for the caring state that came before the neglectful one, and no cuddly deference to the police. This generational shift is also racially contoured, and it should therefore be unsurprising that these young activists held placards that read ‘Fuck the Home Office’, intuitively connecting climate breakdown to global migration flows and the dehumanisation of people moving across and into Europe. This was in stark contrast to XR’s comms strategy,

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which emphasised the ‘destruction of all we hold dear’ precisely by invoking our nation, our people, our ecosystems and our future generations to come. XR deferred to the nation, even if strategically, in ways that the school strikers found uninspiring and irrelevant. Related questions of generational change and difference were also manifest in the BLM mobilisations. Again, it is worth remarking on the sheer scale of the BLM mobilisation in May and June. Following the police murder of George Floyd, protests against police brutality and anti-black racism spread across the globe. In Britain, we witnessed several weeks of repeated protests, sometimes every day, and not only in multicultural cities but in towns and villages with seemingly no memory of anti-racist street mobilisation. Indeed, the protests were recurrent and country-wide. It is particularly significant that the issues Corbyn’s Labour conceded on most – the case against police, prisons and violent borders – became the very issues around which one of the most geographically and racially diverse street mobilisations in generations galvanised. Indeed, from 2017–19, Corbynism moved from its more grassroots and explicitly anti-racist political positions towards its own particular brand of law-andorder posturing. Apparently as part of its anti-austerity programme, Labour promised to invest in border guards, prisons and police, offering citizens the personal and national security that Tory cutbacks failed to deliver. The failure of this manoeuvre undoubtedly contributed to the shift from the ballot box back to the street as the focus of collective anti-racist energy. The youthfulness of the protestors was especially notable on the streets, in London at

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least (which is not unrelated to the dangers of Covid-19 infection for older people). The people organising the protests were also young, often engaging in radical politics for the first time, learning as they went. The protests in smaller towns, sometimes in very white places, were especially interesting, and reflect not only a sense of disgust at violent police murder, but a wider rejection of the Johnson–Cummings project, a rejection of the ways in which people are being interpellated as white natives by the authoritarian government. In other words, it was not only about the video of George Floyd – although we should not underestimate the power of repeatedly watching and sharing the footage of a person being brutally murdered – it was also a wider chorus of people saying: if this is the project of whiteness, we do not want it, not in our names, we want other cultural coordinates, not this absurd closure to the world, not this inflated sense of national significance and superiority. It matters, then, that the protests emerge as the far-right consolidates global power. People on the streets were screaming their fury at Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Brexit. Put simply, far-right nationalism has bolstered people’s energies for anti-racist solidarity. But it is also hard to imagine these protests emerging in the same way without the pandemic and the lockdown. With Covid-19 and lockdown, everything was blown open. People were spat out of their normal, routine, regulated ways of being, and suddenly lots of things were up for grabs. We were told to stay at home, millions of people were paid not to go to work, schools were closed, cities went quiet and we grew bored, frustrated, fearful

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and appreciative. Despite the suffering, there was a sense of renewed possibility. Business as usual went on pause and it became clear that things could be radically remade, in terms of how or if we worked, how we related to each other, how we spent time and money. We discovered that our jobs are fake or bullshit, and that our employers and governments put profit before our welfare. We came to appreciate that we were really living through history, and there was a new world being reborn. In the UK (and in the US), the pandemic revealed the neglect and withdrawal of the state in all other functions but the punitive. The state could not distribute basic masks for nurses, but retained an incredibly well-resourced, militarised, police force. They now patrolled the parks, asking people to sit further from one another, or to keep moving, or to go home, sometimes fining people, especially black people, for breaking the new Covid-19 rules. Meanwhile, the extent to which employers were willing to exploit and disregard the safety of workers became more clearly exposed. Covid confirmed that we are living in a failed state (or what Pankaj Mishra usefully termed a ‘flailing state’),2 and the bobbies on the beat seemed to offer scant protection from a deadly virus. In this context, the widespread protests against police racism were about several things: a reflection of various forms of frustration combined with a new sense of opened possibility; a rejection of the Johnson government and its nativist appeals; and a feeling for some that when society is remade after Covid-19, these are the kinds of political projects we want to align ourselves with. That said, there are more guarded and cautious ways to interpret the ubiquity of support for the BLM cause. We

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shared our collective annoyance at overbearing displays of white guilt and self-flagellation, along with empty celebrity and corporate promises to ‘take responsibility’. As white individuals asked, often very publicly: how can I abdicate from my privilege? The answer was often, by ‘doing work on yourself ’, or, perhaps more usefully, by shedding money. This was a kind of (neo)liberal reparation. In this version, structural racism is hardly the product of state power or capitalist exploitation, but a collective lack of privilege-checking on the part of a white majority. Moreover, the immediacy of George Floyd’s death in the UK clearly reflects the dominance of events and frames from the US. Police racism in the US is often afforded more press attention, and reported on more critically than similar instances in the UK. Consequently, this can further embolden arguments which acknowledge the need for radical change in America, but reduce racism to individual bias in ‘far less racist’ Britain. Yet at many of the protests, people held posters and chanted the names of some of the many people who have been killed by the police, or in state custody, in the UK – Mark Duggan, Joy Gardner, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell, Sarah Reed – and it was clear that a certain kind of historical and political education was happening as the mobilisations developed and endured. The United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC), a coalition of families from across the country campaigning for justice for loved ones killed in state custody, was an important presence at the BLM protests, and a key site of political education. UFFC, which holds a protest march on the last Saturday of October every year, is not

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a campaign that anyone chooses to join, but one that families and friends are forced to join when their loved ones are killed at the hands of the state. As a result, UFFC is not a campaign made up solely of black people, because those who are killed by state agents are not divided neatly along racial lines, even as black people are disproportionately impacted. Neither state violence nor anti-racist organising are neatly configured along racial lines, and in Britain our families – the ones we choose and those we do not – are often not set up that way. There are always other people in the room. And so any sense of static racial hierarchies, with those always at the bottom and those always at the top, comes into conflict with what happens on the ground. UFFC reflects this. It remains a campaign for which the most visible leadership and spokespeople are black women, but it is still necessarily a multi-ethnic group. Importantly, radical black politics is a vital part of the campaign, defined by a version of anti-racism which draws links between colonialism, class struggle and police racism. We make this point because during the BLM mobilisation, and attendant debates online, we witnessed the co-articulation of some very radical and some very essentialist ideas. Arguments that separated racism from class struggle were most commonly conveyed through the idea that white people should be individual ‘allies’. This call for individual self-reflection and change, though important, came to replace a tradition of collective struggles (in solidarity) with people of colour. UFFC is one example of how resistance to state violence exceeds neat divisions of fixed racial categories or racialised experiences. This complicates the individualising categories of victim and ally by

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demonstrating how struggles for collective liberation are shared and the possibility of solidarity is explored (and perhaps tentatively realised) not through abstract debate but through collective struggle. The connections made between the Grenfell campaign and BLM were especially heartening in this regard. Until now it has been difficult for the Grenfell Tower victims’ families to politically organise around questions of racism as a causal factor in the fire. This is partly due to their racialisation as Muslim and/or migrants, unable to articulate their subjection to racism in the context of the War on Terror and a hostile environment that excludes migrants from housing and social rights. Indeed, the Grenfell Tower inquiry excluded the question of racism from its terms of investigation. But in the context of the BLM uprisings, Grenfell survivors responded by making the crucial connection between the fire and racist police killings, asserting that their loved ones couldn’t breathe either. Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in the fire, drew parallels between the killing of George Floyd and the fire. He said, ‘When my sister rang the fire brigade she said, “We cannot breathe.” This is a similar phrase used in America at the moment.’3 On Monday, 6 July 2020, the words ‘We can’t breathe’ were projected onto Grenfell Tower. This powerful action pronounced that the Grenfell disaster was also an effect of racist state violence. Leslie Thomas QC, who is representing a group of bereaved families at the inquiry, stated: The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum … A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people

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of colour. Grenfell is inextricably linked with race. It is the elephant in the room. This disaster happened in a pocket of one of the smallest yet richest boroughs in London. Yet the community affected was predominantly working class. That is the stark reality that cannot be ignored.4 This development marks a powerful and necessary embrace of a coalitional anti-racist politics and an acknowledgement of the limitations and depoliticising effect of formal channels such as that of the inquiry. It is through interventions like those made by Grenfell United and UFFC that the connections between anti-racism and class struggle are forged, articulated and emboldened. Despite the essentialising tendencies of some of its supporters, then, the BLM protests have been the largest anti-racist street mobilisation against state violence we have seen, ever, with tens of thousands of mostly young people out in the streets, collectively registering their rage, grief and determination to build another world. Amid these mobilisations, lively conversations on (prison and police) abolition offered an exciting frame through which to forge radical new multi-racial constituencies. Importantly for us, theories and principles emerging out of prison abolition avoid the traps we have delineated in this book. Abolition centres state violence, and focuses on how punitive, surveilling and carceral state practices make and remake racial division and hierarchy. For the new generation of abolitionists, racism is never reduced to the interpersonal. There is a rejection of both the authoritarian state practices and the political subjectivities we have

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charted in this book – a rejection of punishment and retribution – and instead a gesturing towards a politics of care, openness to the Other, and love. These radical critiques of state racism also orient themselves to the future, and therefore snub any nostalgia for the homey nation that orients so many on the ‘white left’. Central to conversations about abolition is also a gendered analysis of the state, and a commitment to supporting survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. If this book has looked at neglect and authoritarianism – as well as the subjectivisation of people as longing for authority, racist closure, the past and daddy – then the abolition frame rejects this offering, and moves us towards that socialist anti-racist future that we stubbornly keep dreaming up, imagining and sometimes tasting. That abolition politics is now speakable in Britain suggests something other than the familiar longing for post-war welfarism; don’t let us mourn for a time before the neglectful state, and don’t promise you’ll send a good cop, instead let us clear out the space for something new and different. If we are to survive these particular end-times, and build liveable futures on a warming planet, we cannot stay oriented to that less bad past. The abolition frame is deceptively simple perhaps because it remains so oriented by something like love; abolish prisons, abolish police, abolish capitalism, but also let us learn to see and care about one another here and now. Empire’s endgame, on the other hand, offers smaller and smaller constituencies less and less. The fear and fantasises of disaster nationalism demonstrate that capitalism really seems not to be working for many of us. As crises multiply, the weaknesses,

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contradictions and empty promises are further exposed, and opportunities for radical new visions emerge. It is impossible to predict the course of this new set of abolitionist energies. The only certainty is that every end is also a beginning. Britain’s decline is an invitation to build futures in which more of us, all of us, can breathe.

Notes

PREFACE  1. Quoted in L. O’Callaghan, ‘Greta Thunberg attacks Star Wars fans: “How can we tackle climate change if the adults are obsessed over a children’s movie series based on Legos?”’, Daily Mail, 13 January 2020.

INTRODUCTION  1. Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p. 4.   2. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004.   3. R.W. Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.  4. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, London: Hutchinson, 1982; Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan, 1978.   5. Stuart Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, in Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara and Ruth Lindeborg (eds), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.   6. Danny Dorling, Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Timebomb, London: Policy Press, 2018.

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  7. ‘Austerity to blame for 130,000 “preventable” UK deaths – report’, Guardian, 1 June 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report.   8. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, New York: Free Press, 1999.

1. WINDRUSH   1. Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, London: Guardian/Faber, 2019.  2. ‘Diane Abbott’s speech on Labour’s plans for a simpler, fairer immigration system’, September 2018, at https:// labour.org.uk/press/diane-abbotts-speech-labours-planssimpler-fairer-immigration-system.  3. Daily Mail, 18 April 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ debate/article-5627811/Windrush-scandal-examplepoorly-Britain-treats-owes-says-SARAH-VINE.html.  4. ‘Windrush scandal: Jacob Rees-Mogg REJECTS Theresa May’s UN-BRITISH hostile environment’, Express, 25 April 2018, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/950928/ wind-rush-generation-scandal-Theresa-May-HomeOffice-immigration-Jacob-Rees-Mogg.   5. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

2.  ‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER   1. ‘London knife crime rise a “new phenomenon” with drug trade “at the root of it all”, says Met chief Cressida Dick’, On London, 27 March 2019, https://www.onlondon.co.uk/ london-knife-crime-rise-a-new-phenomenon-with-drugtrade-at-the-root-of-it-all-says-met-chief-cressida-dick.   2. ‘Home Secretary Priti Patel: I want criminals to feel terror’, BBC News, 3 August 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-49213743.

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  3. Office for National Statistics, ‘Crime in England and Wales: year ending June 2018’, https://www.ons.gov.uk/people populationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/ crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingjune2018.   4. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Routledge, 1987; Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke, Dangerous Associations: Joint Enterprise, Gangs and Racism, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2016.   5. Quoted in Will McMahon and Rebecca Roberts, Ethnicity, Harm and Crime: A Discussion Paper, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2008, http://www.crimeandjustice.org. uk/sites/crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/ETHNICITY%20 HARM%20AND%20CRIME%20A%20DISCUSSION%20 PAPER.pdf accessed 5.5.14.  6. ‘Police defend figures that say black people are 5 times more likely to be stopped and searched’, Leicestershire Live, 25 June 2019, https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/ leicester-news/police-defend-figures-say-black-3012687.  7. Conservative Party Manifesto 2019, ‘20,000 more police with the powers and backing they need to keep our streets safe’, https://www.conservatives.com/our-priorities/police.   8. ‘Met police “disproportionately” use stop and search powers on black people’, Guardian, 26 January 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jan/26/met-policedisproportionately-use-stop-and-search-powers-on-blackpeople.  9. HMICFRS, PEEL: Police effectiveness 2017, https://www. justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/wp-content/uploads/ peel-police-effectiveness-2017-2.pdf. 10. Home Office, Injunctions to Prevent Gang-Related Violence and Gang-Related Drug Dealing: A Practitioners’ Guide, June 2015, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/526389/ Injunctions_to_Prevent_Gang-Related_Violence_prac Web2archived2.pdf.

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11. Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, London: Palgrave, 1983; E. Lawrence, ‘In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty: sociology and black “pathology”’, in CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back; L. Fatsis, ‘Policing the beats: the criminalisation of UK drill and grime music by the London Metropolitan Police’, The Sociological Review 67(6), 2019, pp. 1300–316. 12. ‘Police use “rap translator” to convict gang leader who threatened to shoot rivals in drill song’, Telegraph, 4 October 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/04/ police-use-rap-translator-convict-gang-leader-threatenedshoot. 13. ‘Rappers Skengdo and AM breached injunction by performing drill music’, BBC News, 19 January 2019, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46932655. 14. ‘Police to treat gangs like terror suspects with tough new laws’, Telegraph, 30 May 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2018/05/30/police-treat-gangs-like-terror-suspectstough-new-laws.

3.  GANG LAND   1. ‘Police to treat gangs like terror suspects with tough new laws’, Telegraph, 30 May 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2018/05/30/police-treat-gangs-like-terror-suspectstough-new-laws.  2. ‘As a cop I always used to stop and search’, Telegraph, 13 November 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ 2018/11/13/ex-cop-always-used-stop-search-now-policelive-fear-called-racist.   3. Adam Elliott-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing, Manchester: Manchester University Press (forthcoming).   4. Tara Young, Risky Youth or Gang Members?: A Contextual Critique of the (Re)discovery of Gangs in Britain, PhD thesis, 2016, http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/920/1/ YoungTara_RiskyYouthOrGangMembers.pdf.

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5. Williams and Clarke, Dangerous Associations: Joint Enterprise, Gangs and Racism. 6. Amnesty International UK, Trapped in the Matrix: Secrecy, Stigma, and Bias in the Met’s Gangs Database (London: Amnesty, 2018). 7. Patrick Williams and Eric Kind, Data-driven Policing: The Hardwiring of Discriminatory Policing Practices Across Europe, European Network Against Racism (ENAR), Open Society Justice Initiative, 2019. 8. Luqmani Thompson & Partners, ‘Operation Nexus: briefing paper’, 2014, https://www.luqmanithompson.com/ operation-nexus; Frances Webber, ‘Deportation on suspicion’, Institute for Race Relations, 20 June 2013, http:// www. irr.org.uk/news/deportation-on-suspicion, accessed 11 June 2019. 9. Williams and Clarke, Dangerous Associations: Joint Enterprise, Gangs and Racism. 10. Ibid. 11. Network for Police Monitoring, ‘Campaign condemns London Mayor’s “gang” strategy as racist “collective punishment”’, Netpol, 16 July 2015, https://netpol.org/ 2015/07/16/operation-shield.

4.  NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS  1. Isaac Chotiner and Eric Kaufmann, ‘A political scientist defends white identity politics’, New Yorker, 30 April 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-politicalscientist-defends-white-identity-politics-eric-kaufmannwhiteshift-book.  2. Gilroy, After Empire, p. 121.  3. Sivamohan Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, p. 55.   4. Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, London: Pelican,

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2018; Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2018.   5. Shirin Hirsch, In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.  6. ‘State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron’, BBC News, 5 February 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-politics-12371994.  7. Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity, London: Verso, 2016, p. 9.

5.  PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM  1. Paul Mason, ‘Corbynism is now in crisis: the only way forward is to oppose Brexit’, Guardian, 27 May 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/27/ corbynism-crisis-oppose-brexit-jeremy-corbyn-labour.  2. Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, p. 182.   3. Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging, London: Black Swan, 2006, p. 27.   4. Zoe Williams, ‘Nationalism can be a good thing. We have to make the case for it’, Guardian, 8 May 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/ nationalism-positive-case-immigration-counter-narrativenhs.   5. Daniel Hannan, ‘Why does Labour have such a problem with patriotism’, Telegraph, 5 January 2020, https://www. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/05/does-labour-haveproblem-patriotism.   6. Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, London: Routledge, 2014.  7. The zero-sum understanding of economic redistribution articulated along national lines was perhaps given its most naked and honest expression in a strategic essay penned by Mason in 2018, titled ‘What kind of capitalism is it possible

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for the left to build?’ He reflects: ‘Is this strategy designed to allow the populations of the developed world to capture more of the growth projected over the next 5–15 years, if necessary at the cost of China, India and Brazil having to find new ways to break out of the middle income trap? For me the answer is yes ... It is a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of not delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai’, Brave New Europe, 22 June 2018, https://braveneweurope.com/paul-mason-what-kind-ofcapitalism-is-it-possible-for-the-left-to-build.   8. Paul Mason, ‘We can escape Brexit doom with one small tweak to free movement’, Guardian, 16 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/ 16/we-can-escape-brexit-doom-with-one-small-tweak-tofree-movement.  9. ‘Starmer says Labour “should be prouder of being patriotic”’, The New European, 30 April 2020, https:// www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/sir-keir-starmerlabour-should-be-prouder-being-patriotic-1-6632425. 10. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London: C Hurst & Co, 2017. 11. Hardeep Matharu, ‘Labour must win over England or accept never winning power again’, Byline Times, 5 March 2020, https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/05/labour-must-winover-england-or-accept-never-winning-power-again.

6.  THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION  1. Peter Tatchell, ‘Our system of monarchy is racist’, Guardian, 19 January 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2009/jan/19/constitution-monarchy.  2. See https://blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/amazondonates-10-million-to-organizations-supporting-justiceand-equity.

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3. ‘Black Lives Matter UK expresses solidarity with Palestinians, rejects Israeli occupation plan’, Peoples Dispatch, 29 June 2020, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/06/29/ black-lives-matter-uk-expresses-solidarity-withpalestinians-rejects-israeli-occupation-plan. 4. Paul Gilroy, ‘Nationalism, history and ethnic absolutism’, History Workshop 30, 1990, pp. 114–20. 5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto, 2008, p. 77.

7.  OUR HEART BELONGS TO DADDY   1. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990, p. 2.  2. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London: Routledge, 1995.   3. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.  4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.   5. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.   6. Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.  7. Jyoti Puri, J., Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.   8. ‘Austerity to blame for 130,000 “preventable” UK deaths – report’, Guardian, 1 June 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report.   9. See Stuart Hall’s ground-breaking account of this political project in ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, reprinted in S. Davison, D. Featherstone and M. Rustin (eds), Selected

NOTES  ◆ 209

Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2017.

8.  ‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’  1. Claire Alexander, The Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity, Oxford: Berg, 2000, p. xiii.  2. Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror, London: Zed Press, 2008.  3. For an overview of some of these debates, see Lena Dominelli, Feminist Social Work Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.   4. Virinder Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change, London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000.   5. For a more sober account of how kinship networks could be mobilised as an electoral force, see M. Sobolewska, S. Wilks-Heeg, E. Hill and M. Borkowska, ‘Understanding electoral fraud vulnerability in Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin communities in England’, prepared for the Electoral Commission, January 2015, https://www. electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf_file/ Understanding-Electoral-Fraud-Jan-2015.pdf.   6. T. Peace and P. Akhtar, ‘Biraderi, bloc votes and Bradford: investigating the Respect Party’s campaign strategy’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 17(2), 2015, pp. 224–43.   7. ‘Shamima Begum can return to UK to fight for citizenship, Court of Appeal rules’, BBC News, 16 July 2020, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53427197.   8. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

210  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

9.  (POWERFUL) MEN BEHAVING BADLY  1. See http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-latefascism.

10.  LONGING FOR AUTHORITY    1. Vron Ware, ‘The military in our midst’, Open Democracy, 29 April 2013, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open security/military-in-our-midst.  2. Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, p. 114.  3. Kojo Koram, ‘“I’m not looking for a new England”: On the Limitations of Radical Nationalism’, Novara Media, 9 October 2016, https://novaramedia.com/2016/10/09/ im-not-looking-for-a-new-england-on-the-limitations-ofa-radical-nationalism/

11.  MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND  1. See https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/gerald-templersmiling-tiger.  2. ‘Nearly half of Met police officers want more firearms specialists’, Guardian, 13 February 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/13/half-met-policeofficers-firearms-specialists-union-survey.   3. See A.T. Williams, A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa, London: Vintage, 2013.   4. ‘Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes’, Guardian, 18 April 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/ britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes; Shohei Sato, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s destruction and concealment of colonial records worldwide’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45(4), 2017, pp. 697–719.   5. Vron Ware, Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

NOTES  ◆ 211

 6. Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, New York: Zone Books, 2017.   7. David Cameron, ‘PM’s speech on the fightback after the riots’, 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pmsspeech-on-the-fightback-after-the-riots.  8. The Runnymede Trust, ‘Overview of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000’, https://www.runnymedetrust.org/ events-conferences/econferences/ethnic-profiling/thereport/counter-terrorism-measures/overview-of-section44.html.  9. ‘Olympics 2012 security: welcome to lockdown London’, Guardian, 12 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/ sport/2012/mar/12/london-olympics-security-lockdownlondon. 10. ‘Mediterranean migrant crisis: Theresa May says people making journey “simply for economic reasons” should be sent back against their will’, Independent, 13 May 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ mediterranean-migrant-crisis-theresa-may-says-peoplemaking-journey-simply-for-economic-reasons-10245998. html. 11. David Gee, Spectacle, Reality, Resistance: Confronting a Culture of Militarism, London: Forces Watch, 2015, p. 7. 12. M. Geyer, ‘The militarization of Europe, 1914–1945’, in John Gillis (ed.), The Militarization of the Western World, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, p. 79.

12.  ZERO-SUM GAME  1. Josh Milton, ‘Transphobic and racist hate crime culprits “emboldened by Boris Johnson”, Labour politician claims’, Pink News, 15 December 2019, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/ 2019/12/15/boris-johnson-conservative-party-generalelection-sheffield-transphobic-hate-crime-rise.   2. See https://womansplaceuk.org.

212  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

 3. Alexander Abad-Santos, ‘Men’s rights advocate Earl Silverman leaves a legacy of feminist-bashing’, The Atlantic, 29 April 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2013/04/earl-silverman-suicide/315761.  4. Eithne Dodd, ‘Here’s why you need to care about men’s rights’, Each Other, 12 March 2018, https://eachother.org. uk/heres-need-care-mens-rights.  5. P. Rafail and I. Freitas, ‘Grievance articulation and community reactions in the men’s rights movement online’, Social Media + Society, 9 April 2019, https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305119841387.

13.  COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS  1. ‘Coronavirus and civil liberties in the UK’, Blackstone Chambers, https://coronavirus.blackstonechambers.com/ coronavirus-and-civil-liberties-uk/#_edn1.  2. Dominic Cummings, ‘Gesture without motion from the hollow men in the bubble, and a free simple idea to improve things a lot which could be implemented in one day (Part I)’, blog post, 16 June 2014, https://dominiccummings. com/2014/06/16/gesture-without-motion-from-thehollow-men-in-the-bubble-and-a-free-simple-idea-toimprove-things-a-lot-which-could-be-implemented-inone-day-part-i.   3. Eleanor Penny, ‘Crush the saboteurs’, Verso blog, 26 April 2016, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4306-crush-thesaboteurs.   4. Home Office, ‘The UK’s points-based immigration system: policy statement’, 19 February 2020, https://www.gov.uk/ gover nment/public at ions/t he-u ks-p oints-b as e dimmigration-system-policy-statement/the-uks-points-basedimmigration-system-policy-statement.  5. ‘Home Secretary announces new UK points-based immigration system’, 19 February 2020, https://www.gov.

NOTES  ◆ 213

uk/government/news/home-secretary-announces-newuk-points-based-immigration-system.

14.  SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE  1. D. Gayle and N. Khomami, ‘Cecil Rhodes statue row: Chris Patten tells students to embrace freedom of thought’, Guardian, 13 January 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2016/jan/13/cecil-rhodes-statue-row-chrispatten-tells-students-to-embrace-freedom-of-thought.  2. Pankaj Mishra, ‘Flailing States’, London Review of Books, 16 July 2020, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/ pankaj-mishra/flailing-states.   3. See https://twitter.com/fatimamanji/status/1271151120610 668553.   4. ‘Race at heart of Grenfell Tower fire disaster’, WestEndExtra, 31 July 2020, http://westendextra.com/article/race-at-heartof-grenfell-tower-fire-disaster.

Index

Abbott, Diane 19, 25 Akala 32 Alexander, Claire 114–15 Algorithms see Data Amnesty International 43–4 Anti-imperialism 92–3 Armed forces 135–42, 145, 157 Armed forces day 140 in schools 140–1 Austerity 2, 5, 6–9, 11–13, 121, 130, 173, 175, 179 Deaths from 9, 108, 111 and the hostile environment 29 Avengers Endgame x–xi Bannon, Steve 58, 118 Becky Clarke 43, 46 (see also Williams, Patrick) Benefits (see welfare system) Beveridge 106 Bordering 8, 21–2 Brexit 12, 59, 61, 76, 142–8, 162 Brexit Party 57, 178 see also Farage, Nigel and Johnson–Cummings 179–85 and Rationing 142–8, 170 and Remainers 73, 179

Brown, Gordon 78, 140 Cameron, David 42, 50, 66–7, 103, 154–5 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies ix, 2–3, 10 Champion, Sarah 113–14 Child sexual exploitation 48, 113–23 Operation Stovewood 119 Churchill, Winston 144, 151, 187 Citizenship 14, 25, 44, 50, 113, 132 Good citizenship 23 Citizenship stripping / deprivation 53   Begum, Shamima 124–5   Rochdale ‘grooming gang’ 123–4 Clan politics 122–3 Colonial warfare 149–60 Conservative Party 20, 47, 80, 126, 180, 188 Conservative Party Manifesto 2019 12 Corbyn, Jeremy 72, 75, 82 Corbynism/Corbyn project 14, 76–82, 188–9, 192

INDEX  ◆ 215

Covid-19/Coronavirus 16, 127, 130, 173–85 Coronavirus Act 177 Ethnic disparities 178 Lockdown 173, 177–8 and War Metaphors 176–7 Crime ASBOs 10, 36 Knife crime prevention orders 31–40, 53 Criminalisation of Black people 46–7 Pre-criminal 36–40 Culture wars 163, 167 Cummings, Dominic 179–86, 193 Daily Mail 21, 71, 135 Data Algorithms 8, 44, 70, 97 Social media and policing 39, 44, 51, 155 Data sharing, and hostile environment 21, 28 Davies, David 164 de Menezes, Jean Charles 156 Deindustrialisation 121–2 Demographic racism 179 Deportation 20, 37, 44, 124 and charter flights 24, 158 see also Stansted 15 and Operation Nexus 44 Diversity 28, 84–93 Dorling, Danny 7 Drill music 37–40, 49 Du Bois, W.E.B 12

Ethnic absolutism 90 EU see Brexit Evening Standard 42 Extinction Rebellion (XR) see Protests (street) Family 3, 50, 103–12 black 26, 42 and Islam 48, 125 and Nation 103–12, 126–7 Nuclear 106, 120 Far right 48, 62, 93, 116, 118, 123, 193 English Defence League 114 Farage, Nigel 57, 59, 68, 87, 178 Feminism 92, 165–6 see also Transphobia, TERFs Financial crash, 2008 7–8, 175, 184 Gangs 41–56, 113–25 Matrix 43–4, 51 County lines 33, 49, 51, 152 Gee, David 159 General Election, 2019 57, 71, 77, 81, 161, 183, 186 Gentleman, Amelia 19 Gilroy, Paul 3, 59, 88, 96 ‘Globalists’ 118, 145–6 Goodhart, David 78–9 Grenfell Fire 110 Campaign 197–8

216  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

Hall, Stuart 2–3 Hatherley, Owen 67 Homonationalism 105 Hostile environment 19–29, 197 Human rights 42, 125, 137, 146–7, 151, 158, 159 Huntingdon, Samuel 125 Immigration ‘illegal immigrants’ 20–9, 136 Migrant, the figure of 2, 8, 13, 22–5 Migrant workers 74–5, 184 Seasonal workers 183 Ireland 69, 151, 153–6 Javid, Sajid 25, 180 Johnson, Boris 15, 42, 47, 57, 59, 126, 127, 162–3, 174–5, 179–85, 186, 193 Joint Enterprise 44–7 Jones, Claudia 92, 96 Kaufmann, Eric 57, 167 Knife crime 27, 29, 30–40, 50–3 Operation Trident 42, 154 Lammy, David 24 Law Customary 50–1 see also Colonial warfare Due process, lack of 36–7 and militarism 138

and racism 35–6, 53 see also Joint Enterprise Law and order 3, 27, 52, 110, 192 London Olympics, 2012 71, 155–6 Markle, Meghan 87–8 Masculinity 49, 115, 123, 127 Fathers for Justice 165–6 Mens rights activism 165–70 Mason, Paul 69, 76 May, Theresa ix, 42 Metropolitan police 31, 39, 43, 188 Mishra, Pankaj 194 Morgan, Piers 32 Morris, Olive 92, 96 Multiculturalism 50–1, 62–9 Muslim, see Prevent, Terrorism New Labour 2, 6, 20, 25, 41, 66, 69, 70, 72, 107, 165 NHS 2, 28, 60, 71, 176, 184 Nostalgia Imperial 2, 59–61, 67, 72, 143, 146, 181 Working class/communitarian 78 Patel, Priti 30, 157, 180, 182 Political correctness 42, 62, 117, 141, 162, 167

INDEX  ◆ 217

Powell, Enoch 42, 63–7, 69, 74, 80–3, 117 Prevent (anti-radicalisation policy) 39, 51, 106, 155, 160 Prison 27–8, 42, 192 Prison abolition 198–200 Puar, Jasbir (see Homonationalism) Puri, Jyoti 106 Rees-Mogg, Jacob 21, 185 Robinson, Cedric 1 Second World War 152 Blitz 170, 176–7 Churchill 144, 151, 187 Cultural representations of 143–4 and nationalism 60, 143–4 Sexual assault 131, see Part 3 in general Sisters Uncut 6 Social media xi–xii, 4, 15, 52, 88, 92–9, 168–9 see also Data Soldier, the figure of 136–7, 140–1 Sovereignty, national 123, 145–6 Spiked 167 Spivak, Gayatri 105 Stansted 15 158–60 Starmer, Keir 77, 80, 186 Stop and search 31–6, 41, 42, 154

Stormzy 47 Street protests, 187, 187–200 BLM 2020 98, 187–200 Extinction Rebellion (XR) 190–2 School Strikers, Climate 191–2 Remainers 189–90 Sunak, Rishi 182 Tatchell, Peter 84 Terrorism 2, 49, 50, 52, 78, 110 Counter terror measures 3, 37, 39, 41, 156 (see also Prevent) ‘War on Terror’ 48, 120 124, 152, 155, 175, 184, 197 ‘Terrorist’, figure of 9, 13, 53, 136–7, 153, 159–60 Thatcherism 2, 66, 80–1 Thunberg, Greta x Trans exclusionary radical feminism 163–70 Triangulation 68, 70, 76, 81 Trump, Donald 58, 76, 127, 193 Twitter, see Social Media UK Independence Party (UKIP) 57, 66, 72 see also Farage, Nigel Unconscious bias training 27 United Friends and Families Campaign (UFFC) 195–8

218  ◆  EMPIRE’S ENDGAME

University, politics of representation within 86–7 Urban revolts/disorder 153–4 Valluvan, Sivamohan 59, 68, 143 von Clausewitz, Carl 150 Welfare state 6–8, 12, 14, 28, 47, 52, 60–2, 106–10, 184 Benefits 9, 20–1, 108, 113, 131

conditionality 28 ‘Scroungers’ 11, 22 Whiteness White Britons 12, 24, 46 White women/girls 48, 113–20, 123–5 White working class 12, 52, 62, 76, 84, 111, 118 Williams, Patrick 43, 46 see also Becky Clarke Windrush Scandal 19–29 Zero-sum game 65, 94, 145, 161–70

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