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