<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/10/immigration-debate-country-remigration-right>
"Do they come for you at dawn or dusk? In the dead of night, or at family
dinnertime? Will they come with masks and shields, or will they be kindly and
sheepishly apologetic? Will they accept a cup of tea and a biscuit if offered?
Will there be bags already packed by the door, protocols prepped and drilled, a
list of numbers to call? Will you go quietly and with dignity, or in a mess of
curse words and screaming limbs?
Perhaps right now this all feels a little fantastical and far-fetched. Perhaps
it feels hard to imagine the great wave of remigration lapping up on the
pristine middle-class doorsteps of Stroud or Stoke Newington. We can still have
a chuckle about it. Maybe there’ll be a nice fat relocation cheque. A free
one-way holiday on the British government. Always wanted to visit China at this
time of year, and so on.
But of course if the recent history of British politics has taught us anything,
it is that nightmarish visions do not stay nightmarish visions for long. There
is a heft and momentum behind them, a spirited and concerted effort to make the
nightmare flesh. And so in our darkest daydreams, many of the non-white
citizens of this country occasionally entertain an idle thought exercise: who
wants to get rid of us? Is it you, grumbling old lady on the bus? Is it you,
the smartly dressed businessman tutting quietly as two beaming mixed-race
children whiz by on mini-scooters? Was that an innocent jostle in the pub
queue, or the unmistakable microaggression of a seething racist who wants me
gone for good?
Two decades after the Conservative party asked “Are you thinking what we’re
thinking?”, it turns out that quite a lot of people were. Through the long
years of Windrush scandals and asylum panic, Brexit and beyond, from the
British National party in local government to white nationalists proudly
parading through our streets, from the Rwanda scheme to “great replacement”
theory, a menacing anti-migrant movement has been growling into gear. And we
should probably be clear at this point that hotels and small boats were never
the endgame.
Of course we knew right from the start that “legitimate concerns over
immigration” always had a kernel of racial purification at their core. The
tropes and elisions of rightwing discourse – “traditional British values”,
“Londonistan”, “multiculturalism” – were always mere euphemisms for simpler and
more sinister desires. What has been left unsaid, until relatively recently,
has been the other half of the equation: how these desires were going to be
sated. The roundups and deportations, families being handcuffed and strapped
into planes, the wartime-style powers that would create a permanently hostile
environment for anyone deemed insufficiently native. This is the omertà that is
gradually dissolving."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
