[Music]
so brexit within a couple of hours of it
being announced that we had voted to
leave the European Union the key
campaigners for brexit had backtracked
on their key pledges perhaps most
significantly the pledge that an extra
350 million pounds a week would go to
the NHS alongside the political
misrepresentations prior to the vote
there have been a number of problematic
claims made subsequent to the vote
here the most dominant narrative has
been that brexit was delivered by a
disenfranchised left behind northern
white working-class who were upset at
the processes of economic globalization
and the possibility or the lack of
possibilities of progressed within the
country and yet if we look at the
figures as Danny dialling professor of
geography at the University of Oxford
has done we see a very different picture
he argues that 52 percent of the people
who voted for brexit were from the
southern were from southern England not
from the north 59 percent of people who
voted for brexit were from the middle
class not the working-class and from the
lowest to social classes the proportion
of people who voted for brexit was only
24% so the typical lis voter was not
someone from the northern white
working-class the typical lis voter was
propertied pensioned well-off and likely
to be from the white middle class living
in the southern of living in southern
England
Lorenza antonucci who’s a researcher
here in the city she’s done subsequent
follow-up research
and she’s found that there is no
association between a self identifying
yourself as working class and voting
leave however there is an association
between self identifying as middle class
and voting leave if we look at the
figures for the BM II population that is
the black and ethnic minority citizens
we see that 67% of Asians voted to
remain 70% of Muslims
voted to remain and 73% of
afro-caribbean and black British
citizens voted to remain if this had
been a vote of people who were
disenfranchised and upset at the
consequences of economic globalization
then we would have expected the vote for
brexit to be much higher amongst these
populations not least because as the
recent race audit has demonstrated these
are the populations who have suffered
disproportionately as a consequence of
such processes so if brexit is not about
the white working-class then what is it
about
I would suggest here that we need to go
back to one of the key refrains that was
part of the discourse during the lead-up
to the vote and the key refrain at that
point was that we want our country back
we want national sovereignty and the
idea that was play at play during this
time was the idea that Britain is a
nation and it has a history as a nation
and yet Britain isn’t the nation it’s
never been a nation Britain came into
being in 1707 through the union of the
kingdoms of England and Scotland both
England and Scotland had colonies prior
to Union and after Union they went on to
establish the British Empire the largest
empire that the world had ever seen it
covered one quarter of the world’s Earth
Territory and it governed over one-fifth
of its population this political
formation stayed in place until 1948
when as a consequence of forms of
decolonization and the various parts of
empire the empire transfer
formed into being the Commonwealth and
then in 1973 we entered the European
Economic Community the precursor to the
EU by entering the economic the European
Economic Community in 1973 one of the
things that got displaced in our sense
of ourselves at that time was the impact
of decolonization decolonization over
the late 20th century was turning
Britain from an empire with global
status into a small island but we never
had to experience what it felt like to
be a small island because we entered the
EEC and by entering the EEC we went on
to continue to have status on the world
stage and so in a sense I would suggest
that the vote for brexit is a vote that
represents the delayed resentment at the
loss of Empire and at the loss of
privileges associated with Empire it’s a
vote against the multicultural community
that Britain had become and this is
nowhere better evidence than the fact
that walking down the street it hasn’t
been uncommon in the months after breaks
it for me as a darker British citizen to
hear we voted to leave why haven’t you
left yet and so in this way the vote for
brexit was not just about the status of
non UK EU citizens in Britain it wasn’t
just about our relationship to the
European Union it was also about the
question of the legitimacy of belonging
of those who look different to
understand this we need to understand
the history of British citizenship just
as many people think of Britain being a
nation and not an empire people often
think that British citizenship is
something that has existed for a very
long time in fact British citizenship
only came into being in 1948 with the
British Nationality Act what this act
dated four was two main forms of
citizenship one was that you could be a
citizen of the UK and its colonies note
here that there’s no separate
citizenship for being in the UK and a
separate citizenship for being in the
colonies it’s one common shared
citizenship the other form of
citizenship is Commonwealth citizenship
and this is a form of citizenship that
was given to anybody who lived in a
country that had previously been
colonized by Britain and was now in the
Commonwealth
so in 1948 Britain gave citizenship to
in excess of 800 million people you
might wonder why on earth would any
government do that well remember that at
the time the direction of movement was
not from the rest of the Commonwealth to
Britain Empire was established by the
migration of Britons to the rest of the
world and so migration had never seen
been seen to be a problem up until the
point that those citizens from the
darker parts of Commonwealth that is
India the Caribbean Pakistan and other
places started to come to Britain then
suddenly there was a moral panic about
coloured immigration about the effects
on jobs on education on housing the most
iconic representation of this period of
migration was the empire wind rush this
was a ship that came from the Caribbean
and docked in the Thames and 500 West
Indians disembarked carrying British
passports whilst this is presented as
iconic of both coloured immigration and
also of British multiculturalism I would
suggest that this is incorrect for two
reasons first the British Empire was
constituted by a plethora of languages
peoples and cultures the British Empire
was already a multicultural entity so
how could multiculturalism have come to
Britain in 90
forty-eight when the very imperial forum
was itself multicultural secondly the
point about this being the beginnings of
colored immigration well the five
hundred West Indians who came came as
British citizens they came carrying
British passports with the rights to
live work and settle in Britain at the
same time as Empire Windrush and the
forms of colored immigration that were
going on and that were discussed there
were other patterns of immigration this
involved paler migrants and these
migrations are very rarely discussed so
in the five years after the end of the
Second World War the British government
established the European voluntary
workers scheme in order to help rebuild
Britain after the devastation wrought by
that war this brought a hundred thousand
Eastern Europeans to come and live and
work in Britain people came from Eastern
Europe and from the labor camps in Italy
in Germany at the same time a hundred
and twenty eight thousand polish
migrants were given the right to live
and settle in Britain as a consequence
of their involvement in the Polish free
army a hundred thousand i renamed to
britain annually in this period to live
and work and settle in britain around
the same sort of time just to put things
into perspective what we’re talking
about in terms of caribbean migration is
seventeen thousand people by the time of
the 1961 census five percent of the
total population of britain was foreign
born yet only one-tenth of it was
constituted by darker citizens the other
nine-tenths was made up of paler
migrants and yet there is not one line
of debate in Parliament about the paler
migrants the only discussion is on the
arrival of the darker citizens who came
with the rights
live and work in Britain the moral panic
became so intense during the period of
the 60s that the government ended up
passing the Commonwealth immigration
Acts of 60 to 68 and 71 each one of
these acts progressively took rights
away from darker citizens to the extent
that by the end it was near impossible
for them to come and exercise their
rights to come and live and work in
Britain and yet there was no comment on
the rights of paler migrants and
citizens to come they continued to be
able to come so it’s this racialization
of citizenship that I suggest is so
significant and that requires unpacking
the children and grandchildren of many
of the paler migrants who came
eventually came to be understood as
British in a way that most of the
descendants of Empire Windrush and those
who came from the darker Commonwealth
countries never were indeed not far from
here in 1968 Enoch Powell in his
infamous rivers of blood speech talked
about the dangers of the immigrant
descended and it’s clear that he wasn’t
talking about the children of the paler
migrants rather he was talking about the
children of the darker citizens and yet
it’s precisely their migrant history
that enables many of my white seemingly
English friends to now apply for EU
passports from Ireland Poland Germany
Sweden France and maintain their access
to the European Union whereas I with my
British passport and my British parents
and my British grandparents continue to
be called the second generation
immigrant even by people who work on
these issues and should know better so
where do we go from here the theme of
today is perspectives and I’d like us to
think about what constitutes an adequate
perspective a perspective on the basis
of which we could develop a healthy
politics
and policies that work for the greatest
number one question that we might ask is
does the perspective that’s being put
forward does it properly account for our
history particularly our shared
histories Britain has never been a
nation it’s always been an empire
policies are established on the basis of
your historical belonging to nation not
your historical belonging to Empire this
results in the arbitrary exclusion of
peoples and the present but as we’ve
seen Britain has constructed its sense
of itself on the basis of a series of
exclusions by turning some citizens into
migrants it did this in the 1960s with
the Commonwealth Immigration Act and
it’s doing it in the present with non UK
EU citizens we’re at a critical juncture
where our political community is being
redefined it’s up to us to endeavour
that it gets redefined in an open
inclusive and generous manner then it
gets redefined in a way that puts the
connections both historical and
contemporary and uses them as the
bedrock for how we go on to develop our
political community in the future thank
you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
so brexit within a couple of hours of it
being announced that we had voted to
leave the European Union the key
campaigners for brexit had backtracked
on their key pledges perhaps most
significantly the pledge that an extra
350 million pounds a week would go to
the NHS alongside the political
misrepresentations prior to the vote
there have been a number of problematic
claims made subsequent to the vote
here the most dominant narrative has
been that brexit was delivered by a
disenfranchised left behind northern
white working-class who were upset at
the processes of economic globalization
and the possibility or the lack of
possibilities of progressed within the
country and yet if we look at the
figures as Danny dialling professor of
geography at the University of Oxford
has done we see a very different picture
he argues that 52 percent of the people
who voted for brexit were from the
southern were from southern England not
from the north 59 percent of people who
voted for brexit were from the middle
class not the working-class and from the
lowest to social classes the proportion
of people who voted for brexit was only
24% so the typical lis voter was not
someone from the northern white
working-class the typical lis voter was
propertied pensioned well-off and likely
to be from the white middle class living
in the southern of living in southern
England
Lorenza antonucci who’s a researcher
here in the city she’s done subsequent
follow-up research
and she’s found that there is no
association between a self identifying
yourself as working class and voting
leave however there is an association
between self identifying as middle class
and voting leave if we look at the
figures for the BM II population that is
the black and ethnic minority citizens
we see that 67% of Asians voted to
remain 70% of Muslims
voted to remain and 73% of
afro-caribbean and black British
citizens voted to remain if this had
been a vote of people who were
disenfranchised and upset at the
consequences of economic globalization
then we would have expected the vote for
brexit to be much higher amongst these
populations not least because as the
recent race audit has demonstrated these
are the populations who have suffered
disproportionately as a consequence of
such processes so if brexit is not about
the white working-class then what is it
about
I would suggest here that we need to go
back to one of the key refrains that was
part of the discourse during the lead-up
to the vote and the key refrain at that
point was that we want our country back
we want national sovereignty and the
idea that was play at play during this
time was the idea that Britain is a
nation and it has a history as a nation
and yet Britain isn’t the nation it’s
never been a nation Britain came into
being in 1707 through the union of the
kingdoms of England and Scotland both
England and Scotland had colonies prior
to Union and after Union they went on to
establish the British Empire the largest
empire that the world had ever seen it
covered one quarter of the world’s Earth
Territory and it governed over one-fifth
of its population this political
formation stayed in place until 1948
when as a consequence of forms of
decolonization and the various parts of
empire the empire transfer
formed into being the Commonwealth and
then in 1973 we entered the European
Economic Community the precursor to the
EU by entering the economic the European
Economic Community in 1973 one of the
things that got displaced in our sense
of ourselves at that time was the impact
of decolonization decolonization over
the late 20th century was turning
Britain from an empire with global
status into a small island but we never
had to experience what it felt like to
be a small island because we entered the
EEC and by entering the EEC we went on
to continue to have status on the world
stage and so in a sense I would suggest
that the vote for brexit is a vote that
represents the delayed resentment at the
loss of Empire and at the loss of
privileges associated with Empire it’s a
vote against the multicultural community
that Britain had become and this is
nowhere better evidence than the fact
that walking down the street it hasn’t
been uncommon in the months after breaks
it for me as a darker British citizen to
hear we voted to leave why haven’t you
left yet and so in this way the vote for
brexit was not just about the status of
non UK EU citizens in Britain it wasn’t
just about our relationship to the
European Union it was also about the
question of the legitimacy of belonging
of those who look different to
understand this we need to understand
the history of British citizenship just
as many people think of Britain being a
nation and not an empire people often
think that British citizenship is
something that has existed for a very
long time in fact British citizenship
only came into being in 1948 with the
British Nationality Act what this act
dated four was two main forms of
citizenship one was that you could be a
citizen of the UK and its colonies note
here that there’s no separate
citizenship for being in the UK and a
separate citizenship for being in the
colonies it’s one common shared
citizenship the other form of
citizenship is Commonwealth citizenship
and this is a form of citizenship that
was given to anybody who lived in a
country that had previously been
colonized by Britain and was now in the
Commonwealth
so in 1948 Britain gave citizenship to
in excess of 800 million people you
might wonder why on earth would any
government do that well remember that at
the time the direction of movement was
not from the rest of the Commonwealth to
Britain Empire was established by the
migration of Britons to the rest of the
world and so migration had never seen
been seen to be a problem up until the
point that those citizens from the
darker parts of Commonwealth that is
India the Caribbean Pakistan and other
places started to come to Britain then
suddenly there was a moral panic about
coloured immigration about the effects
on jobs on education on housing the most
iconic representation of this period of
migration was the empire wind rush this
was a ship that came from the Caribbean
and docked in the Thames and 500 West
Indians disembarked carrying British
passports whilst this is presented as
iconic of both coloured immigration and
also of British multiculturalism I would
suggest that this is incorrect for two
reasons first the British Empire was
constituted by a plethora of languages
peoples and cultures the British Empire
was already a multicultural entity so
how could multiculturalism have come to
Britain in 90
forty-eight when the very imperial forum
was itself multicultural secondly the
point about this being the beginnings of
colored immigration well the five
hundred West Indians who came came as
British citizens they came carrying
British passports with the rights to
live work and settle in Britain at the
same time as Empire Windrush and the
forms of colored immigration that were
going on and that were discussed there
were other patterns of immigration this
involved paler migrants and these
migrations are very rarely discussed so
in the five years after the end of the
Second World War the British government
established the European voluntary
workers scheme in order to help rebuild
Britain after the devastation wrought by
that war this brought a hundred thousand
Eastern Europeans to come and live and
work in Britain people came from Eastern
Europe and from the labor camps in Italy
in Germany at the same time a hundred
and twenty eight thousand polish
migrants were given the right to live
and settle in Britain as a consequence
of their involvement in the Polish free
army a hundred thousand i renamed to
britain annually in this period to live
and work and settle in britain around
the same sort of time just to put things
into perspective what we’re talking
about in terms of caribbean migration is
seventeen thousand people by the time of
the 1961 census five percent of the
total population of britain was foreign
born yet only one-tenth of it was
constituted by darker citizens the other
nine-tenths was made up of paler
migrants and yet there is not one line
of debate in Parliament about the paler
migrants the only discussion is on the
arrival of the darker citizens who came
with the rights
live and work in Britain the moral panic
became so intense during the period of
the 60s that the government ended up
passing the Commonwealth immigration
Acts of 60 to 68 and 71 each one of
these acts progressively took rights
away from darker citizens to the extent
that by the end it was near impossible
for them to come and exercise their
rights to come and live and work in
Britain and yet there was no comment on
the rights of paler migrants and
citizens to come they continued to be
able to come so it’s this racialization
of citizenship that I suggest is so
significant and that requires unpacking
the children and grandchildren of many
of the paler migrants who came
eventually came to be understood as
British in a way that most of the
descendants of Empire Windrush and those
who came from the darker Commonwealth
countries never were indeed not far from
here in 1968 Enoch Powell in his
infamous rivers of blood speech talked
about the dangers of the immigrant
descended and it’s clear that he wasn’t
talking about the children of the paler
migrants rather he was talking about the
children of the darker citizens and yet
it’s precisely their migrant history
that enables many of my white seemingly
English friends to now apply for EU
passports from Ireland Poland Germany
Sweden France and maintain their access
to the European Union whereas I with my
British passport and my British parents
and my British grandparents continue to
be called the second generation
immigrant even by people who work on
these issues and should know better so
where do we go from here the theme of
today is perspectives and I’d like us to
think about what constitutes an adequate
perspective a perspective on the basis
of which we could develop a healthy
politics
and policies that work for the greatest
number one question that we might ask is
does the perspective that’s being put
forward does it properly account for our
history particularly our shared
histories Britain has never been a
nation it’s always been an empire
policies are established on the basis of
your historical belonging to nation not
your historical belonging to Empire this
results in the arbitrary exclusion of
peoples and the present but as we’ve
seen Britain has constructed its sense
of itself on the basis of a series of
exclusions by turning some citizens into
migrants it did this in the 1960s with
the Commonwealth Immigration Act and
it’s doing it in the present with non UK
EU citizens we’re at a critical juncture
where our political community is being
redefined it’s up to us to endeavour
that it gets redefined in an open
inclusive and generous manner then it
gets redefined in a way that puts the
connections both historical and
contemporary and uses them as the
bedrock for how we go on to develop our
political community in the future thank
you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
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