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Full text of "The Empire At Home James Trafford
"
See other formats
JAMES TRAFFORD
THE EMPIRE
AT HOME
Internal Colonies and the End of Britain
The Empire at Home
The Empire at Home
Internal Colonies and
the End of Britain
James Trafford
PLUTO Ard PRESS
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © James Trafford 2021
‘A Virtue of Disobedience’ by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, © 2019, Verve Press;
‘British Values’ by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, © 2019, Verve Press; ‘Calais,
onward by Asiya Wadud, © 2018, Nightboat Books; ‘Displaced Development’ by
Shareefa Energy, © 2019, Burning Eye Books; ‘Home’ by W. Shire, © 2015, Warsan
Shire; ‘Migrant Among Us’ by Marie Ponsot, © 2011, Knopf Doubleday; ‘River’ by
Kalulé, Kalimba, © 2019, Guillemot Press; ‘River’ by Petero Kalulé, © 2019,
Guillemot Press. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to
obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The
publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be
grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future
reprints or editions.
The right of James Trafford to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him 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 97807453 40999 Hardback
ISBN 97807453 41002 Paperback
ISBN 97817868 06741 PDF eBook
ISBN 97817868 06765 Kindle eBook
ISBN 9781 7868 0675 8 EPUB eBook
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
For those who struggle under cover of darkness
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 The Mouth of a Shark
2 Extractive Entanglements Across Alien Territories
Policing Empire after Empire
Homeland Warfare and Differential Racism
Extinction Politics
The End of Britain
nr BR WwW
Notes
Indicative Bibliography
Index
114
142
162
193
198
Preface
This book argues that as a combination of neo-imperialism and internal
colonialism, the continuation of empire has been a fundamental con-
dition of British life, politics, and economics. As formal empire was
transformed into commonwealth and neo-imperial domination, Britain
attempted to establish itself as a post-colonial nation. To do so required
a spatio-temporal ‘cut’ from empire, which disavowed the violence in the
world that it had terraformed. But through this post-colonial cut, the
exceptionalism of a pristine island nation would be rebuilt through the
redeployment of structures that had facilitated and legitimised slavery,
exploitation and extermination across empire. Shaped in this context,
contemporary Britain is existentially, politically, and economically
grounded in a geopolitics of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession.
In part, this book attempts to think contemporary political shifts
towards regained sovereignty and securitising border regimes. It is an
attempt to centre the political and social machinery that is capable of
holding together the proposition that Britain can't be racist since it is the
most tolerant and lovely country in Europe, with the Windrush scandal,
where thousands of Caribbean migrants who had lived in Britain since
they were children were illegally detained, threatened with deportation,
and prevented from accessing necessary healthcare.
These tensions are explicable against a backdrop of empire and its
continuing modes of capitalist accumulation and subjugation. The 2016
referendum vote to leave the European Union and the election of Con-
servative prime minister Boris Johnson in 2019 have sedimented explicit
shifts towards nativist nationalism. Johnson was a figurehead for the Vote
Leave campaign prior to the referendum, during which he consistently
denounced migrants as benefit scroungers, and claimed they have been
responsible for a strained NHS and high levels of unemployment. The
campaign was fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric, perceived weaknesses
at the edges of the EU, and the demonisation of freedom of movement
within the Schengen zone. A critical moment in the campaign focused
on the idea that Britain would soon by flooded by Muslim people and
Middle Eastern refugees with the possibility of Turkey joining the EU.
PREFACE « ix
They argued that ‘murderers, terrorists and kidnappers from countries
like Turkey could flock to Britain if it remains in the European Union,
and their posters proclaimed that “Turkey (population 76 million) is
joining the EU: Vote leave, take back control.
As many writers have suggested, Brexit is best understood in the
longer context of empire. Concerns over Brexit have been chalked up
not only to anxieties over immigration controls but also to patriotism
and nostalgia for an empire whose history is grounded both in amnesia
and fantasy.’ Mainstream media painted the vote as ‘England's last gasp
of empire’ carried out by a nation ‘sickened by nostalgia and ‘post-co-
lonial melancholia’ for its lost colonies. Before the referendum in 2016,
a survey carried out by YouGov found most people think that British
empire is something to be proud of (59 per cent) rather than ashamed
of (19 per cent).? This nostalgic pride is founded on the pathological
romanticisation of an empire of railway building and the magnanimous
dissemination of civility.
However, whilst such denialist nostalgia has certainly been used to
characterise and chastise those who voted to leave the European Union,
eulogising empire whilst erasing its historical and contemporary realities
has been a persistent condition of its perpetuation since its supposed
collapse. Framed on these terms, the vote might be seen to sediment
the desire for a renewed sovereignty against an ‘other’ whose claims
upon Britain are seen as inherently rapacious and uncivil - with migrant
people figured as inherently criminal, security threats, and antagonistic
to so-called British values. As such ‘Britain’ shouldn't be understood as
a given - or even as pragmatic political, social, or economic category.
Rather, Britain and Britishness are explicable only through the colonial
machinery that gives them integrity and ground.
The Conservative party has made explicit its position of nationalist
protection, an increasingly cruel and revanchist approach towards immi-
gration policy, and patriotic exceptionalism. However, current leftist
arguments are also reliant on the nation as a basic political unit. The left
have borrowed from right-wing discourse to support the claim that a
strengthened nation-state is required to protect the interests of a fantasy
xenophobic white working class. This is given succour by a widely-made
argument that anti-immigrant sentiment has resulted from an inability
to explain how neoliberalism and globalism are the workers’ true enemy.
Focusing on the latter, the central target of messaging under the Labour
party since the referendum has been the crisis in global finance leading
x + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
to austerity measures. These are seen as the culmination of a longer neo-
liberal erosion of public services and welfare, with the mobilisation of
right-wing ethnonationalism just a protective sheen masking strategies
to maintain class power and capital.
But this forgets that neoliberalism and globalism are neo-imperial
formations. Both have been directed towards the extraction and expro-
priation of value from people who have been figured as not the rightful
inheritors of this earth. They have relied on extractive modes of capital
that hyper-exploit, dispossess, and make expendable. As I show in this
book, this violence has been justified and implemented through the rede-
ployment of colonial strategies: of segregation; the retributive protection
of property regimes; migrant-subsidised economies; the racialised strati-
fication of labour force; the criminalisation and pathologisation of groups
of people; hyper-exploitation; social control; containment; expulsion.
The state’s admixture of authoritarianism and privatised responsibility
in response to the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 clarified that death
is discriminatory. Since the distributions of death are far from unknown
and arbitrary, official policies of ‘herd immunity’ encapsulated eugenic
calculations. Britain prepared for lockdown amidst a discourse under-
pinned by militarised nationalism, nostalgic exceptionalism, and calls
for hugely expanded police powers. This desire for increased policing
was backed-up with police hotlines and ‘snooper’ forms overwhelmed by
over 200,000 reports in the first few weeks they were open. Police powers
under the Coronavirus Bill quickly led to increasing roadblocks, fines,
checkpoints, random stops, and a seemingly arbitrary use of powers and
disruption of movement that ramped-up and made-explicit the differ-
ential policing of Black and Asian people in Britain. It is indisputable
that policing shaped the lockdown as crisis - fining the already poor;
spurious arrests that forced people into contact; restricting access to
parks, exercise, necessary services; enforcing incarceration in already
overcrowded and virus-ridden prisons.
The intensification of separation across urban landscapes similarly
became more focused - with wealthy Londoners leaving the city or insu-
lated by luxury flats that became permanent panic rooms - a precarious
workforce literally servicing their needs. As lockdown under COVID-19
has confirmed, the wealthy are reliant on service workers, cleaners, child-
minders, and Deliveroo riders, whilst those people are required to live
elsewhere. As much as those in healthcare, people in insecure jobs were
suddenly figured as essential workers. Forced to continue commutes and
PREFACE © xi
contact, this rapidly led to the highest death rates from COVID-19 in
the most deprived boroughs on the outskirts of London. The differential
contiguity with death discussed throughout this book has been made as
unequivocally evident as the government’s response has been vicious.
In August 2020, Black people had been nearly four times more likely
to die from the virus as white people. Britain’s internal colonialism has
been quite blatantly translated into vulnerability to health conditions.
And, this precarity and vulnerability-to-poverty reverberated across
broken contracts and unpaid labour across the world. The juridical order
required to manage this viscous proximity and separation relies on the
naturalisation of contingent classifications of people as other, foreigner,
migrant.
Amidst this pandemic, whilst asylum seekers were on hunger strike
against threat of deportation, the Home Office distributed a video
showing cartoon aircraft flying from Britain in a homage to the TV
comedy series Dad’s Army. The planes representing the deportation
flights that were being rushed through against legal due process. The
video was released in the same week that Ugandan migrant Mercy
Baguma was starved to death after the Home Office removed her right to
remain. When legal appeals mercifully blocked the deportation flights,
the spectre of Brexit was raised as harbinger of sovereignty as the right
to expel at will - as the Home Office put it, ‘soon we will no longer be
bound by EU laws and can negotiate our own return arrangements.
Whilst disparate and divided, what holds together our contempo-
rary political moment is an emphasis on the securitisation of the British
economy and its borders - internal and external. The response to
COVID-19 was processed through the lens of threat, insurgency, and the
invisible enemy - foregrounding the protection of citizens and national
economy. But for years, the answer to our alleged crises on both sides of
parliament has been the enlargement and strengthening of the nation-
state. The left argues that controls over migrant workers and capital
outflows would supposedly allow us to determine which relations are
held in common and which are not, so making way for the restitution of
nation-state sovereignty against global capital. Here, the political left and
right collapse - not in a post-political centre, but labouring under the
horizon of an increasingly strengthened nation-state.
Britain has long-been dependent upon the management and legit-
imation of violence, submerged through the ideological alibis and
institutional super-structure - of law, rationality, culture, values. This
xii + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
book argues that accounting for this dependence requires us to look not
only at historical confluence and spatiotemporal entanglements, but also
at how Britain’s existential and political integrity is reliant on the pro-
duction, management, and negation of those people crafted as ‘perpetual
others. This is particularly important as corrective against arguments
that we have recently entered political crises, or that we've entered a
more coercive stage of history. To produce property, capital, and law has
required a violent excess as the aporetic matter upon which a juridical
calculus adjudicates.
The fundamental conditions of its deadly regimes, citizenry, politics
and criminal justice systems are the imperial frameworks and material
infrastructures that, stretched across the empire, bring their techniques
and strategies into the heart of Britain itself. This is set to continue,
aggravated under the pressures of crisis: of financial collapse, austerity,
public health disaster, planetary climate emergency. The intensifica-
tion of this violent colonialism will be justified by the need to preserve
national resources against those who would lay claim to them. What has
resulted from the continuation of colonialism under the image of the
post-colonial cut is a nation-state whose form increasingly tends towards
extinction. I mean this literally - through the expropriation of homes
and wealth; the ramping-up of criminalisation and incarceration; the
massification of a pre-crime space across British dominated zones; the
hyper-exploitation and extraction of and from people and places across
the world, which does not just leave people to die but acts to make those
worlds unliveable in the first place.
Far from being the only available unit for political thought, the nation
requires active dismantling - Britain is an imperial structure that must
be ended.
But let us be clear from the start. The account in this book is far from
unknown for many - its stories told with unnerving recurrence, and
forged through entanglements of force, resistance, and care. For this
reason, its critical focus lies with Britain’s whiteness, which is reproduced
by and productive of, mass-scale coloniality. Necessarily then, these
arguments, narratives, threads are not an attempt to unveil or to render
objective. Rather, in conversation with a vocabulary that has been woven
into being primarily by Black thinkers, they trace and track the vectors
of power and counter-power; the circuitry of reactive and manufactured
crises; the intimacies of proximities and separations.
PREFACE :: xiii
So writing and thinking Britain's internal colonialism is to describe a
set of practices and hegemonic logics that attempt to wholly manage and
fix but that could not possibly do so. This to clarify that which might
make power shudder: that at the kernel of empire lies its own impossi-
bility - ‘a splinter to the heart of the world’ as Fanon wrote — because the
totalising structures of colonialism are both necessary and impossible. If
the hegemonizing account of imperial expansion is upset by resistance
and force that is unequally distributed across the spatio-temporalities
of non-European worlds, internal colonial operations proliferate traces,
tensions, kinships. Tracing these vectors leads us away from the domain
of political possibility, and towards an openness to the often quiet insur-
gencies in which the end of Britain is already being practiced. As Saidiya
Hartman writes:
To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the
world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground
that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived
experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling
together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice
of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of
the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offers in the open-air prison.
Acknowledgements
Many conversations have influenced and shaped these thoughts, count-
less through reading, writing and thinking-with; others through
encouragement, often fragmentary thoughts, movements, nudges, reori-
entations. In particular, I would like to thank Lisa Tilley, Anupama
Ranawana, Alex Williams, Hannah Boast, Tom O’Shea, Suhaiymah
Manzoor-Khan, Robbie Shilliam, Will Stronge, Jas Nijjar, Suhail Malik,
Diann Bauer, Guilaine Kinouani, Shareefa Energy, Petero Kalulé, Smin
Smith, Rajkumar Uthayakumar, Nick Srnicek, Francesca Peck- Williams,
Ryan Huff, James Etherington, my editor Jakob Horstmann, all of my
students, but particularly Casey Highfield-Smith and Saffron Naylor, my
family, and especially Lynda Fitzwater, Zola Trafford and Magnus
Trafford.
1
The Mouth of a Shark
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
[...]
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side
with go home blacks, refugees
dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
(Warsan Shire, ‘Home)?
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire.
(Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza)*
IN THE SHADOWS OF FLIGHT PATHS
In the visitors’ room at the largest immigrant detention centre in Britain
there is a mural of a shark. From the vantage point of stained board-
backed chairs and tables adorned with a sharpie-scrawled numbering
system, the shark - with bared teeth - stares panopticon-like over the
head of the guard who checks you into the room and assigns tables.
Somewhat indecorously, a large clock sits within this mural.
When you have insecure immigration status, you don't have life. Your
life is not considered important. It should not be like this. Human life is
more important than immigration status.
The clock haunts this space that is so fraught by time, a space of detain-
ment without sentence or conviction. The ‘tuck-shop’ is closed again,
staff disorganised as if caught off-guard. Today the room is opened an
hour and a half late. A small crowd tensely waiting is now shuffling
2 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
together into the tiny anteroom whilst one door locks before another
can open. ‘It’s like we're going into prison, someone quietly remarks.
Just imagine, just walk in my shoes once. You have a normal life and
then they detain you. Take you away from your family and your kids.
It’s not normal. If youre going to detain you like an animal - how can
you expect them to live a normal life. It’s going to be ruining their lives
for ever.
This cold, dank-smelling, exhausted space of visitation is at once secured,
apprehensive, anxious, but also brimming with love, desire and ache.
Enfolding in the tenderness of emotion and presence, lovers, mothers,
fathers, children, friends - sucking in air in the vicinity of one another,
capturing fragrances of scalp, neck, spirit.
The treatment we are getting here is not right. On our anniversary
my husband travelled to see me. While we were kissing they came to me
saying that we are not allowed to kiss. My husband just started crying
because we being treated as criminal and making life hell for us.
Just beyond a grey business hotel, sitting at the other side of a dual car-
riageway to a drive-through McDonald's, are the Heathrow Immigration
Removal centres. Like many others, the running of Harmondsworth
is outsourced to Mitie, a company now infamous for its subsumption
business practices and the paucity of conditions of its immigration
centres.? Ostensibly a holding ground for asylum hearings, Harmond-
sworth is a prison that witnesses sickness, mental health crises and
suicide. The people detained there are often refused access to medical
care, and sent away with paracetamol regardless of ailment.
We are locked up like dogs. Even animals in this country have their
rights. Detention is not supposed to be like a prison. But we are treated
worse than prisoners. Where is the humanity in this country, where is the
human right in this country.
Harmondsworth lies in the elongated shadows of flight paths, positioned
for proximity to planes that extend its carceral reach. Rebuilt and
expanded in 2001 under New Labour, it was the first purpose-built
detention centre in the UK. It was brought into being by the 1968
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK ° 3
Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which had removed the right of entry
for British Commonwealth citizens and made precarious the rights of
many already residing in the country.
The people that they deport, and put on the charter flights. Those
people lose their lives. Everything gets worse for them.4
The centre symbolises violent attempts to refound the authority and
integrity of Britain in a post-colonial world that would ultimately
resurrect colonialism inside, and neo-imperialism without. Their cor-
porate facia of hostility is intertwined with strategies of containment
and punitive bordering that extends far beyond national territories -
outwards across Europe and Africa, and inwards across health services,
education and housing.
Britain — as nation-state — is colonialism
Put bluntly, this is the proposition and argument of this book.
Whilst this is a book that is largely about Britain, this is a Britain that
is not limited to its island shores. This is because Britain has never been
independent - there is no ‘island nation, as Gurminder Bhambra puts
it. Britain was established in 1707 with the formalisation of England’s
annexation of Scotland forming a ‘united’ kingdom. By the early twen-
tieth century, its empire dominated around one quarter of the Earth’s
lands, one fifth of its people, and half of all Muslims. Britain ruled over
100 colonies, protectorates and dominions, with 52 forming the later
Commonwealth. Britain-as-empire involved the annexation of lands,
settler colonialism, chattel slavery, extraction, genocide and expansion-
ist commerce.
Imperial empire had been built in opposition with its ‘others, making
stolen land into property and commodity, and Indigenous people into a
commodified reserve. This was the condition of Britain’s wealth and sov-
ereign political power. The British state was built upon inestimable wealth
that was extracted across empire through forced taxation, dispossession,
enslavement and forced labour. But Britain’s dependence on its colonies
was not limited to economy and political might. There is a paradox at
the core of Britain’s insistence on liberal freedoms, which empire brings
to light. Defining the universality of liberal freedoms had relied on the
creation of an ‘other’ against whom they could be measured. Not the
4 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
product of an internal European character, liberal values of liberty and
equality in the British metropole (the ‘parent’ state of its colonies) were
produced through violent divisions of the world in its colonies.° The very
image of liberal Britain rested on freedoms that were won by expropria-
tion and enclosure, exploitation and extermination.
The ‘end’ of empire was a long, slow and violent process, which stut-
tered through counter-insurgency, uprising, installed governments,
enforced trade deals and post-colonial migration. What emerged was a
system of neo-colonial imperialism built through the hard-fought dom-
ination over the territories, politics and economies of newly sovereign
states. The formal independence of post-colonial states was intertwined
with ongoing subordination that would later become embedded in mul-
tilateral organisations and international law.
The end of Britain’s formal colonies was seen by politicians like Enoch
Powell as the possibility for its rebirth as a singular nation. However, at
the same time that Britain fought to retain its imperial directives amidst
global decolonising forces and world-making struggles, its borders
were necessarily opened to inflows of capital, people and commodi-
ties. Prompted by domestic labour shortages and the desire to maintain
commonwealth power, the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave some of
Britain’s colonial subjects the right to travel to and work in the metropole
through incentivised guest-worker style schemes. These were supposed
to promote the temporary movement of labour from colony to metro-
pole, forming precarious communities whose citizenship status was in
question from the start. Also under Heathrow’s flight path, after the
violent partitioning of Punjab by the British in 1947, Southall became
Chota Punjab - Little Punjab. Not completely jokingly, one reason for
settling there was that ‘if the gooras [whites] ever kicked us out, it would
be easy to get on a plane and return home’
This brought tensions and tactics of colonial control into the heart
of the metropole. Much of this book is concerned to show that these
tensions and tactics underpin both the idea and the reality of Britain as
island territory and neo-imperial state since the end of formal empire.
From the embers of empire, Britain was rebuilt as the continuation
of colonialism. I will argue that the history of post-war Britain is also
the history of colonial strategies and techniques deployed ‘at home’.
In tracing this deployment of internal colonialism, I aim to show that
this was not just driven by the desire to rebuild Britain’s labour force,
economy and global position. Britain has been politically, economically
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK =: 5
and existentially dependent upon its colonies and their re-formation
inside the metropole. To put this somewhat glibly, as existential horizon
and nation-state machinery, Britain is colonialism.
Of aliens and universals
In the summer of 1948, Britain saw both the Empire Windrush bringing
around 800 Jamaican people to the port of Tilbury and the inauguration
of the National Health Service (NHS). Both were symbolic of compacts
between citizen and state, with the nascent welfare state rooted in liberal
citizenship as universal entitlement. The edges of this universal compact
were transparent - it was never meant for the others, which British
empire held within. Further still, its universalism was written through
this exclusion and as a means of its protection. Whilst trajectories in the
metropole had progressively shifted towards welfarism, leniency and
equality, their colonial counterparts were subject to genocidal violence
and torture against anticolonial resistance; the scrambling efforts of the
colonial office to hold onto power; claims over resources preserving
unequal flows of trade.*
The emergence of a universal compact through social reforms had
been underpinned by eugenicist arguments against the likely social
degradation and perishing of the British nation.’ The National Insur-
ance Act in 1911 sought to prevent the degeneration of Anglo-Saxon
stock through social hygiene - intervening in living standards through
health and unemployment provision for certain workers. Whilst advo-
cating universalism, Beveridge’s infamous 1942 report relied on a similar
logic to argue that at the present rate of reproduction, the ‘British race’
could not continue. With eugenicist credentials and a firm belief in the
pride in Britain, Beveridge understood that its continued imperial quest
required intervention to install a national minimum living standard:
‘good stock should be allowed to breed while bad stock would be amelio-
rated through state intervention’? As Robbie Shilliam writes, Beveridge
saw the possibility for ‘the preservation of empire in the universal provi-
sion of social insurance and welfare in Britain.** This welfare capitalism
was financed by continuing colonial exploitation such as the reduction
of plantation workers’ wages in Malaya by 80 per cent, with resistance
to the cuts leading to the British setting up resettlement camps.” In this
sense, universal provision was not just a weapon of exclusion, it was a
6 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
weapon for the maintenance and protection of freedoms that had been
built upon exclusion.
For Britain the decolonising world was a fragile state of affairs, with
the commonwealth held together largely by a trusteeship system of
colonial administration that would guide nations towards their own
self-determination."? Though the 1948 act meant that commonwealth
immigrants had rights to British nationality, in reality migration was
neither unrestricted nor spontaneous. With concerns over declin-
ing British stock, a waning post-war economy and labour shortages,
the government formed a working party to manage the movement of
labour from its prior and extant colonies. In order to incentivise limited
movement, the Colonial Office organised a scheme that would select the
best colonial subjects for migration under direct control of the office.
For example, the Indian administration required proof of financial status
and literacy through a series of checks before emigration was possible."
Relying on colonial governments and extra-territorial immigration and
border controls at ports of departure allowed Britain to circumvent
nationality laws, so they would not have to implement border controls
at port of entry.
As ‘children of the empire’ increasingly found their way to the mother
nation and as the temporary arrangement began to give way to settle-
ment, this did not herald a universal post-colonial welfare system, but
rather a series of immigration restrictions, buttressed by increasing
anti-immigrant resentment. If social and economic welfare movements
in Britain were grounded in racialised nationalism, then as Satnam
Verdee writes, ‘the golden age of welfare capitalism and the social demo-
cratic settlement was also the golden age of white supremacy.’ Migrant
people from the old colonies found themselves in a Britain that was
differentiated, living and working in zones of dis-location that operated
out of sync with the universal compact surrounding them. Then, as now,
they were forced to carry the colonies on their backs. Uneasily travers-
ing the spatio-temporal connections that supposedly made Britain
post-colonial, these zones were spaces of precarity and permanent tem-
porariness — shaped for those ‘never sure whether or not he has crossed
the frontier’**
Britain’s universal compact, which had been built against and in pro-
tection from its others, now required new strategies that could maintain
the ‘British race’ against colonial subjects inside territorial shores. This
required a seismic shift away from a fixed relation of political belonging
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK ° 7
between state, citizen and geography and towards flexible strategies and
technologies of citizenship. New battle lines were drawn, with migrant
people and those with migrant heritage configured as aliens who could
lead to the destruction of the nation. The close management of their
economic, social and political inclusion and exclusion provided the
state with legitimacy. Drawing this picture of a Britain under siege was
central to Britain’s new self-image as a unified nation whose ends were
its maritime borders.
COLONIALISM DIRECTED INWARDS
There has been much written about the role of imperial states and
corporations in the global periphery, postcolonialism and the role of
development, aid and security.’? However, these approaches have some-
times omitted the role that the global periphery played in the constitution
of nation-states in the imperial core. They highlight how colonialism
continues to shape the current configuration of interests manifested and
often violently enforced in the context of global governance. Nonethe-
less, whilst centring its after-effects, colonialism is often understood as
something that was done by Europe to the rest of the world. It is the
remnants and legacies of empire that continue to influence the treatment
of those people who were once colonised. This rests on both methodolog-
ical nationalism and Eurocentrism. Contemporary forms of governance
are understood to have been endogenously produced in the imperial
core rather than through historical and ongoing colonial processes of
accumulation, exploitation and control.'* In tracing the movements of
colonialism inwards we can rectify this lacuna to foreground the trans-
national relationships that have given shape to the political, economic
and cultural forms of power through which nation-states and global gov-
ernance have manifested.
Colonial entanglements
Rebuilding Britain in the wake of a decolonising world was dependent
on a combination of military support for insurgencies and wars that dev-
astated infrastructure and peoples together with regimes of indebtedness
put in place through post-Bretton Woods institutions. The latter would
recognise the political authority only of those nation-states that met
certain criteria allowing external access to resources. Multilateral aid
8 - THE EMPIRE AT HOME
packages became a necessary response to aggressive integration into the
global economy via World Trade Organization (WTO) and International
Monetary Fund (IMF) rules, sanctions and loans, and the ensuing petro-
dollar-caused debt crisis. Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)
were put in place as conditions on aid and lending from the early 1980s.
These benefitted the political and economic institutions that spon-
sored loans awarded by the IMF, and whose control is heavily weighted
in favour of the United States, Japan, Germany, France and the United
Kingdom.
The expansion of Europe and the ‘development’ of the colonies had
bound the two together. As Walter Rodney wrote, after formal decolo-
nisation ‘many of the territories incorporated into the overseas empire
were locked into providing primary products for the UK’’ Britain is still
reliant on the extraction of labour, rents, raw materials and resources for
industrial processes, and industrialised farming. Free trade agreements
continue to shape export prices and wages, whilst militarised commerce
and the offshoring of industry effectively subsidise our living standards
and our purchasing power. This echoes across the neo-imperial relations
that are now even more firmly etched than when Mississippi plantations
and Manchester factories were forged into an unequal world economy.”
We can see this from the vantage point of Harmondsworth. Charter
flights, which were introduced under New Labour in 2001, typically take
place in the dead of night at the edges of airports like Heathrow, Gatwick
and Stansted. The aeroplanes that are used for these violent deportations
have been made using materials extracted through imperial intervention
in parts of the world that Britain may never have formally colonised.
Take Mozambique as example. Formally colonised by the Portuguese,
British control of the wider region had been present during that period,
felt acutely through the Mozambique Company, with the country joining
the commonwealth in 1995. In Mozambique’ capital, Maputo, lies
Mozal, an aluminium smelter partially funded by UK investment and the
World Bank. The smelter has been exempt from tax on profit and VAT
because the investment is counted as development. Yet for every dollar
the Mozambique government made from the venture, $21 is extracted
from the country. In total, the UK has received $88 million from the
development project in addition to the original loan repayment. In 2014,
Mozambique was the largest recipient of foreign direct investment in
the continent. But this uneven and extractive development has created
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK ° 9
massive liabilities for Mozambique, leaving it the poorest country in the
world in 1993 and second poorest in 2017 by GDP.
These material, economic and social practices operate transnationally
to differentiate access to housing, food, land, resources and healthcare.
As Tania Li puts it, they are practices that ‘let die’ in order to ‘make
live.’ It is in part for these reasons that Mozambique is so vulnerable
to changes in climate that precipitate extreme weather. In early 2019,
the tropical cyclone Idai led to massive-scale devastation in Zimbabwe,
Malawi and Mozambique. Almost the entirety of Beira, the fourth largest
city in Mozambique was destroyed, flooding demolishing entire villages,
winds and floods affecting more than 2.6 million people, and taking
over 1,000 lives. As Idai makes stark, climate crises are increasingly
making life in the region unsustainable, whilst the destruction caused
by climate change is inseparable from ongoing capitalist plunder in the
name of development. However, it is likely that the Shark at Harmond-
sworth will never see any of those whose homes are made in the mouth
of a shark. Not only do our draconian asylum regimes make no allow-
ances for so-called climate refugees but they are increasingly securitised,
enhanced and expanded globally.
These inequities and interconnections reverberate across Britain,
where shifts from colonial to neo-colonial nation brought about new
relations of geographical enclosure through differential citizenship
and plastic strategies of exclusion. Underfunded and overpoliced, this
made entire communities subject to supposedly colour-blind technolo-
gies of finance and debt, credit scores, surveillance and algorithmic and
pre-emptive policing - providing the facade of anti-racist science that
has led to hierarchical outcomes.
Domestic colonies
I use the phrase internal colonialism to centre the production and repro-
duction of colonial relations through the intensification and reproduction
of societal structures and hierarchies, differential access to resources
and normative limitations. Its strategies have redeployed structures that
facilitated and legitimised slavery, exploitation and extermination and
frameworks that suppressed dissent and resistance to them. Consider-
ing colonial entanglements in this way both draws on and differs from
theories of domestic colonialism that were primarily focused on the US.
Their visibility relies on a long tradition of activist and academic analysis
10 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
of segregated areas (ghettos) as an internal colony in the US including
activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Kenneth Clark, Malcolm X, Kwame
Toure, Harold Cruse; and sociologists such as Robert Blauner, Robert L.
Allen, Charles Pinderhughes.
In A Negro Nation Within the Nation, WE.B. Du Bois argued that
African Americans in the depression era required the creation of
institutions whose economic and political self-determination might
circumvent Jim Crow segregation. Central to his analysis was the artic-
ulation of twelve distinct features that drew together the experience of
colonial subjects and African Americans as ‘semi-colonial’ people:
1. Physical and psychological violence
2. Economic exploitation
3. Poverty
4. Illiteracy
5. Lawlessness and crime
6. Starvation
7. Death
8. Disaster
9. Disease
10. Disenfranchisement
11. Cultural inequality
12. Exclusion from political participation.”
Tying together the transnational experiences of colonial subjects was core
to the development of this account of semi-colonial people in the US.
This was also instrumental in the making of a pan-African movement
that would be directed towards the mass emancipation of Black people
across the world. As Amy Ashwood Garvey stated at the 1945 Pan-Afri-
can Congress in Manchester, the movement would be ‘supported by the
semi-colonial people in America.**
What is specific about domestic, or internal, colonialism was that the
biopolitical and geopolitical management of people and land occurs
within the borders of an imperial nation.” Initially, the understanding
of internal colonialism had originated from Latin American analysis of
unequal terms of trade between dominant and subordinate nations as
analogous with those between dominant and subordinate groups within
nations. Taken up by writers in the US, the concept of a nation within
a nation was mobilised to develop theories of domestic colonialism as a
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK = 11
geographically contiguous state whose symbolic form was the ghetto.?°
In 1962, Harold Cruse used the phrase domestic colonialism to describe
the problem of the underdevelopment of African American commu-
nities. The ghetto was understood as the major device for persisting
anti-Black colonisation. Its underdevelopment had produced the condi-
tions of colonialism in the US that centred on geographical segregation
and the subordination of a differentiated population.
The framework offered a way of thinking about life conditions for
African Americans beyond simple economics and the idea of race as dis-
crimination or prejudice. As Blauner argued, the persistence of race in
America couldn't adequately be explained by class analysis, but required
tracing its conditions to those produced under colonialism:
Western Colonialism brought into existence the present-day pattern of
racial stratification; in the United States, as elsewhere, it was a colonial
experience that generated the lineup of ethnic and racial divisions.””
This provided an explanation for the continuation of spatial segregations,
economic dependence, political exclusions and excessive policing.** The
forms of control that had been used to maintain the colonies were now
being used to ensure the enduring domination of the US nation and its
white elite. Systems of exploitation and control were found to form a
dynamics of domination and resistance that was structured by coexist-
ent racial antagonism. Building on this tradition, the most prominent
use of the framework of internal colonialism was in Stokely Carmichael
and Charles V. Hamilton’s 1967 Black Power. Critiquing white power
and locating foundational racism in the ‘economic dependency of the
colonised; they showed how racism constrained and shaped the lives of
those contained by the internal colony. Not only descriptive, but a call to
resistance on behalf of the nation within a nation, internal colonialism
was developed as both theory and praxis.
Coloniality as process
Despite drawing on this lineage, the approach taken throughout this
book will necessarily break with it - not least because of the substantive
differences between the British metropole and the US settler colony. It
should be said that the theory has not been limited to the US. Internal
colonialism has been fruitfully employed to consider many contexts
12 ' THE EMPIRE AT HOME
including Palestine, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.*? However, the contexts
in which it finds a natural home are those which allow for the relatively
clear demarcation of colony and host nation. Whilst I shall return to this
throughout this book, these delineations have not been so clear cut in
the case of Britain. The terms of segregation produced in Britain, I shall
argue, have often been far more diffuse and distributive — though just as
deep.
Rather than use the framework of internal colonialism to describe
the territories of a colony inside the state, I want to think of it primar-
ily as a framework for clarifying histories, understanding processes
and connections, and bringing to light the interwoven movements of
colonial techniques and practices within Britain’s shores. By necessity of
method, this both expands our remit and forces us to consider internal
colonisation as an enduring set of processes. This also builds on work
that has challenged assumptions - both that we exist in a post-colonial
world, and that geographical, cultural, and political distinctions separate
colony and metropole.*° By considering the transnational circulations
of colonial forms of governance and practices of accumulation, we can
foreground how they have been constitutive of British nationhood, and
are an enduring process across the Earth.
This is to think of the violences of colonialism not as Britain’s spatial
and temporal other or originary past but as its ‘ongoing conditions of
possibility.3: As such, the analysis throughout weaves together strat-
egies developed across empire with their later deployment both inside
British shores and across external borders and neo-imperial territories.
Telling this story unveils both the mass-scale and complex circuits of
colonial capitalist power, and the often-silenced counter-discourses of
its subjects. Far from passively subject to colonial relations, ongoing
coloniality can only be understood through the lens of anti-colonial
resistance and active political agency. Internal colonialism has largely
been implemented as a reactive mechanism to a series of manufactured
crises centring on the presence of the other now within.
The method offers significant explanatory reward. Through it, we are
granted understanding of the persistently laminar contours of labour and
property markets; why criminal justice reformism gave way to punitive
militarism in the 1980s; the manifestation of differential racisms and
their weaponisation against communities judged to be uncivil and
criminal; how counter-insurgency projects have become normalised
with all citizens conscripted as border guards; how the horizon of the
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK ° 13
nation continues to be staged as the only permissible ground for progres-
sive politics; how, under pressure of dwindling resources and ecological
crisis, we're headed towards a politics of green nationalism underpinned
by a border regime that produces temporary and highly controlled forms
of citizenship for Britain’s others. This throws sharply into focus the
mechanisms through which the persistence of this unequally differenti-
ated world has been made to seem like a neutral standard, and how it is
protected with increasing vehemence.
Faithful to its original intent, the framework of internal colonialism
provides a way of thinking about Britain that is obscured by narratives
that frame the last half a century through the lens of neoliberalism. I will
return to these issues a few times, so here I shall just briefly consider
approaches to this historical period through the lens of neoliberalism as
market rationality writ large. David Harvey, for example, considers our
history since the 1970s as a project that was taken up by the capitalist
classes to ‘protect themselves from political and economic annihila-
tion. This project to repair class power supposedly became embedded
in policy by Pinochet, Volker, Thatcher and Reagan by retrenching the
welfare state and demolishing labour movements. This was marked by a
fundamental transformation of the role of the state, withdrawing from
social provision, and supposedly intervening only when neoliberal order
broke down - to repair markets, prevent challenges to capital accumula-
tion, and resolve social crises. In this light, neoliberalism has very often
been made into a universal logic whose material processes transform us
all into human capital.
This narrative doesn't just obfuscate and collapse trajectories and
distinctions within British history, it forces an understanding of the
development of socio-political formations through the narrowing
conduits of class analysis. As I'll show throughout, there is an incredible
wealth lying beyond this deformation which could help us to more ade-
quately understand our contemporary predicament. But taking up the
framework offered by internal coloniality does not require simply jetti-
soning the explanatory traction of the mechanisms that Marxist analysis
foregrounds. Rather, it refuses the delegation of race to social abstrac-
tion or ideology, and actively pursues the claim made by Lisa Tilley and
Robbie Shilliam that ‘race has the same kind of materiality as class does
in constituting the hierarchies and eviscerations of the “social”.
Internal colonialism emphasises processes of underdevelopment, dif-
ferential exploitation, violence, containment and criminalisation - all
14 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
of which have been central to the reproduction and reconfiguring of
racialisation around ‘migrants’ and the spaces in which migrant commu-
nities inhabit. In this, I take heed of Patrick Wolfe's suggestion that ‘race
is colonialism speaking. The specific articulations of race and racisms
that have emerged in recent British histories are produced through the
underlying machinery of colonialism as it is wielded within the British
metropole. In many ways this coheres with the Latin American focus on
the coloniality of power, in which practices of European colonialism are
intertwined with the ongoing stratification of social systems and groups.
Anibal Quijano defines coloniality not as colonialism per se but as the
systemic structuring of culture, labour, markets, intersubjective rela-
tions and normative life experience within subordinating and racially
shaped relations, behaviours and practices.3+ This includes the enduring
intersubjective constructions of race that were produced through sup-
posedly objective European knowledge, and that constitute not only a
subordinating relation between coloniser and the dominated, but also
colonisation of knowledge and imagination. As Nelson Maldano-Torres
writes, coloniality survives colonialism - ‘as modern subjects we breath
coloniality all the time and everyday.**
This is at odds with the dominant racial formation theory of Michael
Omi and Howard Winant, which rejects colonialist explanations of
race. Instead, they foreground social processes through which the racial
organisation of societies are produced as a complex of meanings that are
under constant transformation in conditions of political struggle.*° The
result is a colour-blind approach that relies primarily on analysis of racist
ideologies.” Their emphasis on meaning systems and ideologies fails to
do justice to their material basis. In part this is motivated by a drive away
from biological or essentialised accounts of race. Nevertheless, whilst
denying not just that race has any biological basis but also any material
basis, they also fail to demonstrate why racial difference constitutes a
central dimension of social organisation and discourse.** So rather than
gaining traction on the causal significance of the conditions that give
rise to the reproduction of race, race becomes a floating signifier that is
dislocated from its origins in colonial regimes. Against this, I hold that
race is a technology that forms part of the machinery of colonialism.
The reproduction and manifestations of race in the metropole have used
frameworks and practices that had developed across empire, and led to
‘[s]kewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature
death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK = 15
This line of thought follows articulations of racial capitalism in which
the machinery of capital accumulation is considered inseparable from its
fundamentally racialised arrangement.*° Drawing on Cedric Robinson,
in Gargi Bhattacharyya’ recent work racial capitalism is similarly not
posed as a metatheory nor master narrative, but as a means to charac-
terise the tendency of capitalism not to homogenise but to differentiate.
This provides a frame through which the tendency to homogenise and
universalise the machinery of capitalism can be resisted. For Bhattacha-
ryya, this offers the guiding thought that ‘in the realm of the economic,
racism is an attempt to safeguard the interests of those deemed dominant
or “unraced”.*"
This also indicates a shift in attention. Considerations of racial capi-
talism pose racialised hierarchy as the outcome of processes of capitalist
accumulation. But in following Wolfe’s suggestion that race is coloni-
alism speaking, we are perhaps led away from questioning whether or
not capitalism is inherently racist, or whether it relies on racist inten-
tionality. For instance, against a doctrine of empire as a great civilising
mission and industrialising force, it is often supposed that colonialism
can be accounted for on the terms of the machinery of accumulation
alone. Perhaps this is a matter of focus, but insofar as Britain is con-
cerned, it seems necessary to understand empire as not only producing
conditions of economic dependency and ongoing subsidy, but also of a
sub-structural logic through which Britain’s liberal self-image could be
won. Capital accumulation and the ascendancy of Britishness as a model
of humanity forged in violence and protected with vehemence are neces-
sarily thought together.
BORDERLANDS TRAVERSING TIME AND SPACE
With Gloria Anzaldua, I want to think of Britain’s borders as not
only physically instantiated nor just a product of fantasies of national
omnipotence. Instead, I consider the dis-located zones of coloniality as
borderlands that traverse transnational spaces and temporal orders. As
Anzaldua puts it:
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emo-
tional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
16 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
These borderlands stretch across occult passageways for ‘those who
cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal”? They
are zones that intersect lives and bodies. As Sarah Keenan puts it, they
involve ‘taking space with you - along the thin edge of barbwire of cal-
culative credit scores, access to shelter and food, armed social work and
threatened deportation. Borderlands are strange geographies that are
imposed but also transported across air, sea and land. They are carried
by certain people, and not by others, ‘attaching to individual subjects
wherever they go rather than bounding off a defined physical area.** As
Keenan suggests, this is to think of places not as enclosed spaces but as
‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings’
as Doreen Massey writes.
This prompts a mode of thinking that could engender ways of ren-
dering visible these ‘rhythms of endurance, the surges of life that carry
bodies forward and back.** Here, I follow Anzaldta’s considerations
of these zones that are out of sync with the supposed universalisms of
liberal freedoms. Slipping between and without a deadened dialectical
movement between the false universality of science and logic and the
reification of local experience, Anzaldua urges us not to ontologise the
other — as if an alien subject exists prior to, or under, the veil of colonial
time and space. As Denise Ferreira Da Silva reminds us, whatever we
suppose to lie behind this veil will ultimately be reproduced as other
to be permanently excluded by, and dislocated from, freedom again.
Furthermore, as Glen Coulthard points out, the parallel politics of this
way of thinking - benevolently including those who were previously
excluded - promises to replicate the very configurations of colonialist,
racist, patriarchal state power they seek to transcend.”
Instead, I will attend to the ‘point of entanglement’ as Edouard
Glissant put it, of abstract global structures and local and embedded
forms of life, where these ‘overspill clear boundaries in time and space
[and] are marked above all by displacements - temporal, geographical,
rhetorical, and technological displacements.** This requires us to embed
ourselves in forms of knowledge that are abrasive and undermining of a
critical form that involves the manufacture of a unified subject who sup-
posedly sits apart from worlds, and speaks without consequence. This,
for Glissant, leads us to consider inhabited ways of knowing and under-
standing that are necessarily open-ended, mobile, consequent:
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK °: 17
An ‘intellectual’ effort, with its repetitive thrusts (repetition has a
rhythm), its contradictory movements, its necessary imperfections,
its demands for formulation (even a schematic one), very often
obscured by its very purpose. For the attempt to approach a reality
so often hidden from view cannot be organised in terms of a series of
clarifications.
This resistance to clarifications arises from an attention to nested knowl-
edges that traverse temporalities. Violence is done to these knowledges
through attempts to wrench them into modes of knowing and critical-
ity that typify the rational public sphere. By drawing attention to these
forms of living knowledge we might also undo the supposedly transpar-
ent universality that gives structure to this sphere.*°
This is vital when accounting for these narratives from the vantage
point of an academic benefitting from the privileges of whiteness, and
trained in knowledges that reify social difference and uphold social
transparency - even when (and perhaps especially when) that social
transparency is supposedly disabused. Noel Ignatiev argues that treason
to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. But whiteness as structure of social
significance and power is not easily sloughed off. Working to draw atten-
tion to the machinery through which whiteness is maintained requires
us to keep a weather eye on its reproduction through material practices
and social relations.*' Whiteness is so often both too attached and too
detached from its material fundament - supposedly now describing a
race that requires cultural protection like any other. This is where Omi
and Winant’s approach leads us. For them, whiteness is not a structure
produced through colonial practices that extends beyond phenotype.”
Rather, whiteness operates as a racial group ‘among many other relatively
co-equal groups contending today in a horizontally arranged plurality
that exists on an increasingly level playing field.°? Cut adrift from its
colonial form and basis, whiteness becomes rewritten as part of the play
of identity.
As Achille Mbembe puts it whiteness that was forged through coloni-
alism was:
the mark of a certain mode of Western presence in the world, a certain
figure of brutality and cruelty, a singular form of predation with an
unequaled capacity for the subjection and exploitation of foreign
peoples.*
18 - THE EMPIRE AT HOME
In considering the mass-scale and complex circuits of colonial capitalist
power, and the often-silenced counter-discourses of its subjects, I hope to
show how the production and reproduction of whiteness was entrenched
as core to the organisational schema of Britain. In this lie two overriding
thoughts to which I shall return. The first, drawing on the work of David
Roediger is that whiteness is apophatic - it is both empty and defined
only by ‘what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.*> The second
is that ‘whiteness belongs, as Guilaine Kinouani puts it - ‘no amount of
being born “here” will grant you access to the fortress of belonging, if you
have black or brown skin.** Whilst Roediger’s assertion forms part of the
propulsive logic underlying much of this book, Kinouani’s suggestion
situates its attempt to refuse clarifications, to trace entanglements, and
to foreground the points of resistance through which whiteness has been
made as core to Britishness at the end of empire.
So against the temptation of positing internal colonialism as theory
or rational frame, I endeavour instead to situate knowledges that are
emergent from the borderlands. These are more likely to arise from inter-
stices, misattunements and dis-coherences than through the production
of a unified history and meta-theory. For Anzaldua, this is encapsulated
by La Facultad as:
anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, that
causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, anything that takes one
from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depth to open up, causes a
shift in perception.*”
Drawing on Rachel Carson’s notion of death by indirection, Rob Nixon
defines slow violence as:
a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed
destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional
violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.°*
The primary aim of this book is to render this gradual and corro-
sive violence visible, conceivable and accountable through the lens of
ongoing coloniality. This is to follow Anzaldua, in this subterranean
understanding, attempting to cause ‘the depths to open up’ and to see
the ‘deep structure below the surface. The hope is that this refusal of
clarifications becomes part of a refusal of ‘methodological whiteness:*
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK °: 19
In refusing this politics of unification, I trace attempts to generate from
these depths a unified nation-as-subject: Britain - as symbol, material
infrastructure and productive machine - not merely to be resisted but to
be refused and abolished.
POLITICS ON A WAR FOOTING
The book is roughly split into two halves. The first traces how internal
colonialism was progressively deployed on home territory. Of course,
these movements did not reproduce colonial techniques exactly. They
were continued and transformed in three major areas: spatial and
economic segregation and differentiation (Chapter 2); policing, crim-
inalisation and pathologisation (Chapter 3); racial differentiation and
management as threat to Britain (Chapter 4). Through analysis of both
the mechanisms and outcomes of these forms of internal colonialism, I
show how the shape they took was determined by attempts to reforge
Britain after the collapse of empire through a post-colonial cut.
In Chapter 2, ‘Extractive Entanglements Across Alien Territories, I
trace how the colonial categorisation of people for exploitation, dispos-
session and disposal has worked its way into differentiations of housing,
labour and finance in the metropole. Strategies ensuring spatial segre-
gation had been used across empire to territorialise potential threats
against property regimes and colonial order. A barrage of active policies
and practices, informal actions and public discourse reproduced these
in England for commonwealth migrant people. I show how property
regimes were not only segregated and protected, but also subsidised by
this migrant labour force. Their racial cheapening forced apart a poten-
tially homogenised working class, and made way for a growing middle
class whose stability would not be dependent on social welfare but the
accrual of wealth through home ownership. Where the marketisation of
housing and shifts towards financialisation promoted some inclusion
into systems property ownership, this was both limited and involved
exorbitant charges and punitive measures. Together with existing racial
stratifications of housing stock and redlining, this led to dispossessions
that formed the ground for mass displacement through urban regen-
eration projects. Austerity measures have had the effect of accelerating
these configurations, revealing a core drive of internal colonialism to be
a flexibility to shift between producing relations of hyper-exploitation
and those of expendability.
20 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Whilst segregations have been core to the technologies of colonial-
ism in Britain, this analysis centres their diffuse and non-linear form
to consider the idea that a specifically distributive apartheid took root
across this period. Chapter 3, ‘Policing Empire after Empire, considers
how this has been produced and enforced by forms of control, surveil-
lance, and detainment through state and privatised violence. To begin,
I show how Britain’s others had always been necessary to produce the
boundaries of reason and lawfulness characterising the liberal subject.
A criminal justice system that tended towards reformism in the metro-
pole relied on definitions of lawfulness that required the manufacture of
an inherent lawlessness in the colonised other. This worked its way into
policing migrant bodies at home through the pathologisation of entire
groups of people through logics of hereditary criminalisation. Black
migrant bodies were remade as essentially criminal through strategies
of policing whose roots lie with colonial force. Directed toward popu-
lation controls rather than addressing crime, punitive and militarised
systems of criminal justice that had been developed across empire were
increasingly used to govern the ‘perpetual other’ now inside English
shores. I argue that this explains why, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a
decisive end to reformist criminal justice in England, leading to what has
been termed a new punitiveness. Criminalisation and colonial forms of
policing have been employed not just to exclude racialised communities
but to actively produce them as pathologised and alien — protection from
whom was core to stability of national belonging.
Chapter 4, ‘Homeland Warfare and Differential Racism, considers
strategies of multiculturalism, counter-insurgency and the expansion of
bordering regimes in the context of a political logic drawn from Enoch
Powell. The forcefulness of policing and containment has often been
seen as antagonistic to state multiculturalism. But the privatisation of
race afforded by an analytic of racial demography allowed for strategies
of co-option and differential racism that consolidated the pathologisa-
tion of the racialised poor. By the turn of the century, these trajectories
had worked their way into hegemonic discourses that certain migrant’s
values were both homogenous and threatening to the social fabric. In
the context of counterterrorism, this became the basis for the implemen-
tation of counter-insurgency measures under the CONTEST scheme. I
argue that this domestic strategy was both premised on Britain’s internal
colonialism, and that it consolidated its synthesis of criminalisation, par-
amilitarisation and cultural stigmatisation. I end by arguing that attempts
THE MOUTH OF A SHARK ° 21
to refound Britain through the post-colonial cut find their culmination
in the expansion of bordering practices that enlist all citizens as police.
The shorter second half of the book thinks about how the account
might intervene in approaches to contemporary politics. Recent political
movements circulating around a socially democratic project within the
Labour party have formed around the idea that we are currently wit-
nessing the end of a specific form of globalist capitalism associated with
neoliberalism, and a corresponding crisis of liberal democracy. Both
are put down to a crisis in capitalist accumulation coming to a head in
2008 and its subsequent management by austerity measures. By way of
response, a kind of socialism was formed that presents a politics which
actively reproduces the nation as the only horizon for political change.
In showing how politics under this horizon is possible only on condition
of ongoing coloniality, I argue that it would be no position to imagine or
practise its undoing. Staging political struggles like this misses the point
of how the specific forms of capitalism at work over the last few decades
have been inherently shaped by a reliance on the justification of layers
of differential exploitation by a supposedly natural order. This has been
enforced through quarantine, criminalisation, precarity and pre-emp-
tive forms of power, which together produced hierarchical regimes of
control. Getting this wrong affects the contours through which any hope
for their resistance and transformation could be born.
Chapter 5, ‘Extinction Politics, problematises the staging of political
struggles on the terms of the collapse of neoliberalism. I begin by out-
lining a counter-narrative of shifts in Britain’s geopolitical formation
under what is commonly called neoliberalism by highlighting the role
of the commons and its limits as inheritor of Lockean logics of devel-
opment. This reproduced an order whose globalised form has relied on
the system of nation-states to ensure the continuation and naturalisa-
tion of Britain’s political and economic power in its neo-imperial form.
Understood through the lens of the post-colonial cut, this brings to light
how economic and political nationalism within the political left has
been produced within this framework. I show how that project relies on
a re-established natural order that is translated into a romanticised nos-
talgia for the welfare state bounded by national territories, and against
which migration is pictured as exacerbating our current crises by driving
down wages or using our dwindling resources. I finish the chapter by
arguing that under pressure of ecological crisis, committing politics to
this supposed restoration of the nation risks becoming a cipher for a
22 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
geopolitical reconfiguration whose end is the reproduction of Britain as
lifeboat state. The enemy that left politics should seek to ward off is not
so much globalised neoliberalism as it is green nationalism.
The concluding Chapter 6, “The End of Britain, considers possible
strategies for the end of internal colonialism, looking first at anti-colonial
nationalism, reformism and recent calls for decolonisation. I draw atten-
tion to the ways these often funnel colonialism through the framework
of exclusion and inclusion, so highlighting how they fail to under-
mine arguments that multiculturalism coupled with overpopulation is
destroying the natural order of the nation. I go on to consider the idea
that a politics of global anti-subordination might be pursued through
the ending of border regimes. These hold much promise, though they
tend neither to account for the machinery of internal colonialism, nor
to adequately estimate how they might also undermine the legitimacy
of nation-states across the board. To close, I explore how instabilities at
the core of the project of post-colonial Britain might be exploited to this
end. Politicking tells us that nationalist horizons are merely pragmatic
- that public ‘common sense’ is too wedded to the form of the nation.
But the insistent and ongoing forces required to maintain the shape of
that world are exhausting. Through rupture from within, we can identify
where insurgent universality is forged from the solidarities and kinships
at the end of Britain.
2
Extractive Entanglements
Across Alien Territories
take notice: the otherworld
is lustrous, like sealight
or twilight, ambiguous because
it’s more than one thing at a time:
(Marie Ponsot, ‘Migrant Among Us’)’
The colonial world is a world divided into compartments.
(Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth)
EMPIRE, WASTE AND PROPERTY
This chapter examines ongoing patterns of segregation, exploitation and
dispossession in Britain since the 1960s. As children of the empire found
their way to the metropole by incentive, coercion and cunning, they didn't
meet inclusion but housing segregation and spatial marginalisation.
A dark room, often requiring electric light at all times of day welcomed
them - if lucky. A bed, a chair, a table, possibly a cupboard. Washing in
a shared bathroom that often lacked a bath.? For Windrush souls, British
empire passports promised opportunity and advancement, against
the backdrop of a home left emaciated and chaotic under supposedly
post-slavery British rule. But homelessness and half-way housing sepa-
rated families in the ‘mother country.
When we came off the boats at Southampton, we didn't walk into
council houses. My room was so small I couldn’t even change my mind in
it, and the rent I was paying was so large I couldn't change my mind in
the post office.
If work was relatively easy to find at first, it was underpaid and exploita-
tive. The restoration of wealth required by Britain’s stagnating economy
24 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
was in part created through its revenue and taxation. Whilst this
propped-up welfare for white Britons, a near total colour bar segregated
access to housing, aid and labour.
...there was the enormous creation of wealth in Britain on the back of
blacks. That is the system of exploitation that I am talking about.
I trace how operations of colonialism made their way across the metro-
pole, with logics and practices that echo across these spatio-temporal
entanglements to remake the colony at home.
They once colonised us in Azad Kashmir, and in some village in Africa,
but they are colonising us now 15 miles from Downing Street.
These movements did not leave colonial techniques intact but repro-
duced their underlying frameworks. In particular, colonial logics
categorised people for exploitation, dispossession and disposal. It is their
reproduction in the metropole that I trace through this chapter.
Waste as matter out of place
To understand these logics, let us first consider how imperialist Britain
forcibly ‘remade’ places as property. According to John Locke, property
is defined by the transformation of land through labour.‘ In this sense,
Locke’s theory is antecedent to the labour theory of value associated with
Adam Smith and David Ricardo. For land to be made a commodifiable
asset it had to be cleared and enclosed, on which basis a system of wage
labour could be formed. In England, enclosures had made way for the
production of an agricultural and subsequently industrial wage labour
force. At the same time, the conquest of Ireland, and to a lesser extent
Scotland, had dispossessed land for English landlords. The English
crown confiscated Irish lands, redistributing them to the English elite
who made them into tenancies for a primarily English labour force. In
part this relied on the dismissal of Irish customary law together with
a legal regime that voided ownership where land was empty of ‘civi-
lised’ people. As Patrick McAuslan writes, this relied on the underlying
idea that:
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 25
[...] the natives have no law and no capacity to develop a modern state
and society, and it is for their own good that their land is taken from
them.
In this sense, colonial dispossession of the Irish was the condition of
capital accumulation for the English from the start. This forged a deep
and long-standing division between English tenants whose labour was
exploited, and the colonised Irish who were evicted and displaced to
highly exploitative tenancies on the worst lands and transported to work
on plantations in the Caribbean.
Locke's work provides the logical basis for this proto-capitalism,
which was founded by the appropriation and reorganisation of nature
and peoples into regimes of property. Expanding the colonial dispos-
session of Ireland, empire built the networks of trade and markets that
would form the infrastructural basis for liberal capitalism, as well as
instilling property regimes by restructuring material and social relations.
According to these regimes, legitimate possession was formed as a rela-
tionship that could only be produced by the coloniser. Locke's definition
was underpinned by a distinction between cultivated and wasted land,
and vindicated by God’s will:
God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for
their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to
draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain
common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and
rational, (and labour was to be his title to it).°
All the lands of northern America were available for appropriation by
the coloniser because there existed no commerce there, and so no cul-
tivation or improvement of that land. Under the moral injunction of
natural law, the land should be made productive and profitable. Whilst
remaking places through labour instituted a regime of property that des-
ignated rights over enclosed land or other sources of surplus-value, this
determination was in constitutive relation with ‘waste. The foundations
of private property lie in these ideologies of labour as improvement and
action, providing the means for transforming nature as waste into nature
as property.
This required a subject deemed capable of shepherding the meta-
morphosis from nature to property — a subject who was industrious and
26 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
rational. By contrast, the Indigenous other was marked by an incapacity
to develop and improve nature, and so also an inability to make nature
into property. According to this framework, they were rationally dispos-
sessed by their own state of nature — a ‘people arrested in their evolution,
impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs.” Indig-
enous people were figured as regressive against a steady current of
improvement and progress, themselves requiring improvement through
the force of colonial regimes. Their relationships with land were inval-
idated, and their clearance and enclosure was legitimated as improving
the ‘waste-lands: Land not cultivated by empire was understood as mere
waste, with Indigenous people supposedly incapable of transforming
land into property, so themselves becoming eradicable and exploitable.
As such, by enclosure and armed removals, land was made property, the
rights to which were ratified by law grounded in the fundamental right
to exclude.®
Conjoined with Locke’s moral justification was an economic argument
that colonialism would increase land value and provide revenue for
Britain. The distinction between waste and property formed the basis
for dispossession and subsequent extraction of surplus-value. Not just
means to acquire surplus-value through property rights, this process
also marked distinctions with those who were justifiably (according to
this regime) dispossessed — so articulating white Britishness as a system
of power that would take the form of a property relation.® Those falling
outside of this category were deemed waste as much as the land that
was their home. The establishment of this white colonial subject in dis-
tinction with the racialised other was built through this dispossession,
exploitation and erasure.
This chapter considers how these imperial logics and tactics provided
the grounds for their later use in the metropole. They relied on figuring
waste as matter that was ‘out of place.'° Through this lens of waste matter
as disordered and disordering, both uncolonised land and Indigenous
peoples had posed a threat to the newfound social order of property
and economy. I first turn to the ways that segregating and differenti-
ating spatial geographies were produced as an attempt to territorialise
these threats. I show how these logics were reproduced in England, but-
tressed by a tranche of policies and practices and public discourse that
forged newly migrated populations as foreign threat. The racial purity of
the nation was inextricable from anxieties regarding this contiguity of
white Britons with their prior colonial subjects. A central drive toward
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES +: 27
this new segregation was the protection of property rights — maintaining
the nation and its wealth as a white possession even in the presence of
its racialised other. I go on to show these were not just protected, but
also subsidised by a racial cheapening that produced forms of labour
hyper-exploitation.
This leads me to consider neoliberal techniques of marketisation and
financialisation as enduring forms of extraction and dispossession. The
frontiers of the wastelands became despatialised and dispersed through
the movement of people into the metropole. It thus became imperative
to contain the wastelands in the same moment that it became necessary
to rely on commonwealth labour for the restoration of the imperialist
production of capital. What has resulted does not always look like the
ghettoisation familiar to internal colonies of the US. Instead, the repro-
duction of colonialism as a property relation has resolved itself into
flexible systems of distributive apartheid, which contain and disperse,
exclude and include, hyper-exploit and discard.
FROM MAGIC MOUNTAINS TO THE SWAMPLANDS
Let us first consider strategies of segregation and their underlying logic
as weapons against the threat of contamination. Across empire British
invasion and settlement had been enforced by violence and sustained by
spatial restriction." The British created zoning systems for settlers, with
housing for Europeans separated from colonial subjects. Since the seven-
teenth century, the British East India Company designated distinct areas
of (then) Madras as ‘white’ and ‘black’ town. Later, more complex tech-
niques were used to separate European and ‘native’ districts in hundreds
of cities, perhaps the most famous examples of which are Edwin
Lutyens-designed New Delhi, and the townships of South Africa.’
These processes of segregation are well documented across empire,
forming zones that demarcate exclusion and belonging. As Fanon writes:
The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel.
It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the
garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly
thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in
the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are
protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean
and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town,
28 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’
town is a town of white people, of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native
town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill
fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters
little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is
a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and
their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry
town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native
town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in
the mire.”
Their legitimation was the racialised state of nature - of waste - as
enemy to be guarded against. Waste and the racialised other were bound
up with one another as objects of anxiety and peril, making the enclosure
of land and people imperative. This was fuelled by fears caused by the
newfound spatial intimacies of colonial settlements that became woven
into geographies of segregation against threats of disorder and impurity.
From colonies to the twilight zone
We often think of migrant people from Britain’s colonies as forming the
archetype of bodies deemed out of place. But this out-of-place-ness was
not just a product of the movement of those bodies into the metropole.
Migration saw the continuation of logics of waste as disordered matter
out of place. These were enforced by systems of segregation, with ‘slum
administration replacing colonial administration."
Initially the British government attempted to draw labour from its
former and contemporary colonies in a guest-worker style system to
rebuild post-war economic growth. The sustained immigration that took
place in the middle of the twentieth century saw increasing numbers of
people living in squalid inner-city conditions in overcrowded reception
areas. Determined to some extent by geographical demands for labour
and post-war housing shortages, this was also caused by a near total
colour bar meaning that migrant people were forced to occupy housing
stock that was vastly overpriced and neglected. From the late 1950s, slum
clearance orders in England and Wales led to around 170,000 people per
year moved from inner-city slums to estates and flats around cities’ outer
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 29
rim. Predominantly white occupants of inner-city slums and council
housing were moved to peripheral estates, or otherwise used the oppor-
tunity to escape from areas that had become established in the public
imagination as ghettos.'* Large numbers of white people in receipt of
public housing support or in private rentals moved away from urban
centres.
The state had mostly devolved responsibility for housing to local
authorities who had consolidated segregation principally by barring
rights to access public housing. Residence requirements and informal
racism in the allocation of public housing had largely disqualified recent
immigrants from council housing until the late 1960s. Migrants of colour
had been forced to move into privately rented housing of below-average
quality and above-average density, whilst facing huge discrimination in
the marketplace.’* Prevented from accessing housing ownership or public
housing, this left them filtered into overcrowded bedsits in decaying
areas, at the mercy of exploitation by landlords like the infamous Peter
Rachman. Even those relatively few Black people who did live in clear-
ance areas tended to be excluded from rehousing and were corralled into
private rentals instead.
The buildings housing Black migrant people and their families would
have been next to go should clearance policies have remained, but by
the mid-1960s policy began to shift towards in situ improvement. These
shifts came about as a result of increasing pressure on public authori-
ties by legal requirements such as the Race Relations Act 1965, together
with social resistance to the rehousing of Black people in new council
estates. At the time, Labour politician Reginald Freeson charged local
governments in areas of high immigration with behaving as though
Black people didn’t exist. In 1966, he argued in parliament that local
authorities were failing to execute redevelopment plans because they
did not want to rehouse immigrants ‘living in twilight zones of major
city areas.*”7 Even so in situ improvement policies were consolidated
under General Improvement Areas (GIAs) in the 1969 Housing Act, and
Housing Action Areas (HAAs) introduced in 1974 — both of which coin-
cided with primary Black residence areas.
Asa result, Black communities were largely retained in the highly seg-
regated areas of cities to which labour settlement had drawn them. Sam
Selvon captured this in his novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), which
reframed London through creolised English and traced the contours of
informal cities within the city - ‘little worlds, and you stay in the world
30 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
you belong to and you don't know anything about what is happening in
the other ones. These worlds are the derelict spaces that others couldn't
really know, with people existing ‘in a twilight subterranean enclave
of cramped rooms situated somewhere between Notting Hill and the
Harrow Road."
The handkerchief turns black
The colonial fear of contamination had spread to the metropole -
not only of racial degradation but of threat to economy and property
regimes. After the Race Relations Act, an informal colour bar limited
housing options to areas that were racially tainted. This fear was written
into Selvon’s prose - ‘[w]hen Moses sit down and pay his fare he take out
a handkerchief and blow his nose. The handkerchief turn black? This
was symbolic of the resurgence of the colonial logic of waste as matter-
out-of-place, which supported controls on the spatial distribution of
commonwealth immigrants.
This resonates with the ways that colonised populations had
been pathologised, both physically and mentally, as justification for
segregation:
Uncivilized Africans, it was claimed, suffered urbanisation as a pathol-
ogy of disorder and degeneration of their tribal life. To prevent their
pollution contaminating European city dwellers and services, the idea
of sanitation and public health was invoked.’
Bolstered by European theories of health, hygiene and disease, this desire
for sanitation symbolised anxieties on behalf of the British against the
degeneration of racial stock. Isolation was required to prevent the spread
of diseases, whose source was supposedly the non-European. The hill
station in Freetown, Sierra Leone became an experiment for the building
of white towns away from the clammy air of urban areas. British settlers
built widely spaced bungalows that were designed with ventilation to
dispel the air and germs that were imagined to be radiating from the
Black people in the valley below. In turn, urban slums were regulated
or cleared and inner-city inhabitants removed to townships elsewhere.
The same underlying idea ‘that African bodies, customs, and
neighbourhoods were particularly likely to generate both germs and
mosquitos”° of Sierra Leone, also underwrote the white flight of private
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 31
housing as well as shaping the provision for higher standard suburban
public housing for working-class white people. For example, urban
planners in English development had long been influenced by the
development of suburbs in colonial cities such as Madras.” The East
India Company’s monopolistic control over suburban real estate had
formed the basis for defensive strategies against the supposed physical
harms of the ‘black plague’ and cultural and economic harms caused by
proximity. Familiar across cities divided by race across Africa, colonial
settlers in Sierra Leone built an elevated British residence overlook-
ing Freetown. This echoed the way that hill stations had been built
in colonial India. These ‘magic mountains’ were chosen at higher alti-
tudes to prevent British colonisers from becoming too intimate with
‘natives’ whilst also warding of the supposed mental chaos that could
be produced by Britons spending too much time in tropical climates.
Segregation was understood as a necessary safeguard against racial
degeneration, shoring up whiteness by the architectural simulacra of
the English country town.
Similar techniques had been used across empire in building cities
at transport and military hubs.” Their physical construction and
maintenance required proximity between coloniser and Indigenous
population. The management of these spatial intimacies relied on buffer
zones of parkland and industrial buildings. British city planners thought
that these would maintain order and the demonstration of civilisation
against the disorder of Indigenous ways of life. Entrenching differential
spaces helped to resolve anxieties and contradictions regarding the com-
mingling and proximity of colonisers with Indigenous people. These
were fraught with fears at the intersections of racial purity, health and
property.
In the metropole, parallel spatial arrangements were reproduced by
so-called ‘white flight. White residents abandoned inner-city areas,
leading to neighbourhoods populated by majority migrants of colour
whilst the white middle class self-segregated to monocultural suburbs.
Averting the disaster of contagion required their ongoing protection,
with fears rising by the mid-1960s that migrant people previously con-
signed to crowded slum houses would try to move into white residential
areas. Such fears were exacerbated by collective practices of communal
housing and financing known as ‘sou sow and ‘pardner hand, as well
as mortgage clubs and the shared buying of properties by extended
families.*? In response, self-segregating white areas were heavily guarded
32 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
from possible incursion. Tenants and residents’ associations organised
to keep migrant people away, and public health laws were used to dispel
multiple occupancy and break up collective housing.
The threat of contamination was writ large in public discourse.
Famously, Enoch Powell named this ‘separate and strange population’
as a threat to be guarded against by a white nation becoming under-
mined by alien values. He advocated for the repatriation of immigrants
in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and employed an image of race as
danger - ‘their colour marks them out} as he put it. In parliamentary
discussion and public discourse, these immigrants were compared to
pestilence and threat, with the horizon of racial extinction implicit in
these debates. Thatcher had studied Powell’s speeches, echoing closely
his archetypal approach to the racialised other as risk to the nation in her
now infamous 1978 interview:
If we went on as we are then, by the end of the century, there would be
four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now,
that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather
afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a dif-
ferent culture and, you know, the British character has done so much
for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that
if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react
and be rather hostile to those coming in.
Grading respectability
As was the case in the colonies, English segregation shouldn't be put down
to state design alone. It was produced at the confluence of state control,
coalitions between state and corporations, and informal practices sup-
ported by a burgeoning white middle class. As the threat of the other
was felt to be present within the metropole, so too were the segregat-
ing practices of racial steering and a racialised offer of public housing.”
Public sector housing remained difficult to access under Thatcher, with
migrant communities receiving the worst properties - when they did
so at all. Whilst a legal colour bar was officially prohibited, in effect
this was translated into cultural measures hidden inside bureaucratic
systems. Central to these was a respectability grading, which differen-
tiated tenants according to culture and existing environment. This was
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 33
given credence by the pathologisation of migrant populations in studies
of child development and poverty in the 1970s and 1980s.”
In 1972, London GP Margaret Pollak carried out research on three-
year-old children in her south London practice, following up with the
same children at age nine. According to her investigation, allegedly poor
verbal and cognitive skills in a “West Indian’ sample of children were
caused by parental absences, unsatisfactory childminding, and lack of
interaction and stimulation.*° As a way of ensuring the reproduction of
the nuclear family for immigrants, in 1968 restrictions had been put in
place so that only children with both parents residing in Britain would
be allowed entry. Even so, the familial arrangements of immigrants were
subject to the scrutiny of sociological and psychological study. Analyses
of behavioural disorders and emotional disturbance were undertaken,
with particular concern over the ways they might contribute to the
reproduction of social disadvantage in the education system.” In 1977
the Labour government launched an inquiry into the underachieve-
ment of Caribbean children, its partial results released under the interim
Rampton Report in 1981. Whilst this pointed toward stereotyping and
racism at work in the classroom, the controversy that resulted led the
new Conservative government to force the replacement of its chairman
with Michael Swann. The result, known as the Swann report (1985), had
taken eight years to produce. It too noted a climate of racism in school-
ing, and it advocated cultural diversity in education whilst denying
genetic causes for differential attainment. However, it also attributed
reduced educational outcomes to environmental and cultural differ-
ences, singling out the higher proportion of single-parent households in
Caribbean communities.
The poverty and life experience of Black families was supposedly
accounted for by differences in family structure, parenting style and
household organisation. Sociologists were not just complicit in these
explanations, they actively produced them. Most significantly, Ralph
Dahrendorf in 1987 helped popularise the notion of an underclass which
was marked by race. This underclass was to be found in urban areas and
suffered under a culmination of social pathologies.** The idea strength-
ened divisions between a deserving and undeserving poor along racial
lines, distinguishing between those especially impoverished, and those
just ordinarily poor. The divisions were well-established by the burden-
ing of migrant communities with their own welfare. Whilst not actively
proscribed from welfare services at this time, they were ignored and
34 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
excluded by ignorance from agencies that treated Blackness primarily
as a threat to the existing social fabric. The need for care of an ageing
population in the 1980s relied on expectations that “Third World values’
and the extended family would deal with them. Somewhat ironically,
immigration laws in the 1980s had actively worked against the existence
of extended families residing in Britain.
The withdrawal from public building together with a loss of council
housing stock through the Thatcherist 1980 Housing Act right-to-buy
policy further entrenched this division. The subsequent commodifica-
tion of housing replaced subsidies with tax relief on mortgage interest.
This supported massive shifts in housing provision. In the early 1950s
half of all households were in the private rented sector, but this had
fallen to 10 per cent by 1980, with a majority of households owning
their homes.”? The properties most suitable for purchase were on the
suburban estates almost exclusively occupied by white families who took
the opportunity to enter home ownership. For instance, in Nottingham
between 1976 and 1979 over 10 per cent of this ‘good’ council stock was
transferred to owner-occupied stock.?? The remaining public housing
offer was stratified by race, with allocations limited to poor quality prop-
erties in inner-city areas so continuing the segregation of communities
already installed there.
In the private sector, house prices were depressed in multicultural
communities. Strategies of segregation had led to spatially differentiated
patterns of racial inequality across value, mobility and risk assignment
determining access to credit. Local building societies were well-known
for redlining, refusing mortgages and steering migrant people to
certain areas.* To a degree this was ameliorated by loans made by local
authorities. Council loans were offered as mortgages on properties in
improvement areas, so attracting Black people to buy homes there and
in 1976, around one third of Black owner-occupiers were reliant on
this finance. However, these were available only in these cheaper inner-
city areas, and were awarded with far higher interest rates, shorter loan
periods and punitive safeguards than typical mortgages. As such, Black
and Asian borrowers paid more for their loans, and due to the structures
of tax relief on mortgage interest received far fewer subsidies than white
higher-income owners. This widened the gap between home owners
and renters as well as between owners whose homes provide a source
of capital accumulation and those whose homes failed to store wealth
because they were tarnished by geographies of waste.
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES * 35
Alien territories
Communities from prior colonies were often powerless to take advantage
of the commodification of housing as a direct result of the uneven devel-
opment of Britain. They were unable to accumulate or even retain wealth
because they were situated in segregated areas facing ‘the locational
inertia associated with a downward spiral of house conditions and relative
house prices.3? Exacerbated by mortgage redlining and property inher-
itance, these practices, policies and discourses had led to the systematic
confinement of migrant people to marginal and underdeveloped areas.
These had been justified by figuring migrant people as illegitimate com-
petitors for scarce resources - as foreign invaders who occupied “alien
territories within the metropole. The systems that produced segregation
in England were predicated on irrevocable difference of those people
configured as regressive and less civilised, whilst replicating the material
basis for that configuration. They continued attempts to territorialise
waste against the threat to social order, which supposedly issued from
claims to state provision, property ownership and the accrual of wealth.
As a result, there was no significant dispersal of Black people into
predominantly white wards,} whilst residential location was critical in
determining ‘their subordinate position in society.4 For example, inner-
city areas had huge levels of unemployment, with a 1982 study showing
that Black people born in the UK to West Indian parents were four to five
times as likely as their white counterparts to be unemployed.*° This had
not only been produced by migration and its resistance. Rather, these
communities were already figured as threat and contagion by colonial
logics that had marked them out as waste. Claims to the welfare and
wealth of the metropole were prohibited and guarded against just as
Indigenous claims to land had been understood as threat to the estab-
lished power of empire. Migrant bodies were not rendered out-of-place
through their mass movement across colonial lands, they had been so
across empire.
EXTRACTIONS FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE
In this section I suggest that strategies of segregation were intertwined
with strategies to continue colonial accumulation and exploitation. As
such, it becomes important to understand segregation not just as a con-
tainment strategy (of people and wealth), but also as a technique for the
differentiated extraction of value.
36 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
People who had previously lived under colonial rule forged a trans-
national web of connections across neo-colonial territories. The twilight
zones — systemically produced in post-war Britain — provide a conduit
for the continuation of processes of accumulation by dispossession and
specific forms of exploitation. For example, the City of London, finan-
cier of neo-colonial extraction and land-grabs in the global South, is also
reliant on the exploitation of cheap migrant labour to clean its offices,
nurse its workers, and to care for its children in what Parrenas terms the
‘international transfer of caretaking’** This is tied to practices of con-
sumption of goods and services that produce higher incomes, such as
for home owners to purchase labour to improve their homes to better
store wealth. Collapsing spatio-temporal relations that had previously
been carried over land and sea by white colonisers, these new forms of
spatial intimacy have also led to new ways to produce surplus humanity
and economic dependency.”
Labour and political capture
The differential access to wealth accrual enforced by segregated housing
was conjoined with market logics that translated racialised hierarchies
into labour hierarchies, pay discrepancies and barring of access to more
secure forms of work. Thinking through these transmutations requires
us to dismantle the idea that capital accumulation has been the basic
motor for neoliberal societal transformation.** The picture we are
offered by such a view is one in which the logic of capital accumulation
is supposed to have formed a set of social conditions in which race and
imperial relations become irrelevant, replaced by abstract relations of the
market. Let us briefly articulate and dismantle this narrative.
The racialisation of immigrants has been central to the process through
which national identities were formed in opposition to the imaginary
threat of a surplus labour force to be drawn upon at will. This coheres in
part with Marx’s theory of surplus labour. The idea is that shifts toward
industrialisation required the formation of surplus populations, whose
size and character is governed in accordance with capital accumula-
tion to be drawn into production or expelled into unemployment. For
instance, the reduction of prices often leads to wage decreases, unem-
ployment, and welfare retrenchment which maintain the production
of surplus-value. In that case, surplus labour is used to put pressure on
the workforce to accept these lower wages, shoddier working conditions
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 37
and intensified production processes. This explanation foregrounds the
composition of a surplus labour force through post-colonial migration
that responded to temporary labour supplies in the expanding industrial
economy until the mid-1970s. The thought is that deindustrialisation
and the decimation of labour power in the 1980s then led to the increas-
ing precarity and flexibility of the entire labour force.
It is certainly the case that the weakening of labour power under
Thatcher relied on the myriad ways that the labour of racialised migrant
communities was exploited differentially against those of the white
working classes. These depended upon active and accumulated discrim-
ination, colour bars preventing Black and Asian workers from
promotions, and exclusion from union membership. Indeed, not just
excluded from them, unions actively resisted the employment of Black
workers, taking industrial action to defend a white labour force. In 1955,
the West Bromwich Transport Corporation held a series of Saturday
strikes against the employment of a single Indian trainee conductor. Sup-
posedly more progressive unions and organisations like the TUC refused
to intervene in discriminatory practices, instead blaming migrants’
refusal to integrate.*
The resulting irregular employment and poverty fed into the pathol-
ogisation of a racialised underclass. For example, a Working Party on
Coloured People Seeking Employment in the United Kingdom was set
up by the Conservative cabinet in 1953. Their report suggested that
work was not easy to come by for colonial migrants because of their
‘irresponsibility, quarrelsomeness and lack of discipline’*° Sedimenting
into common sense beliefs that migrants were criminal, lazy and pred-
atory helped to justify public discourses that welfare reinforced rather
than reduced poverty. This relied on an entrenched idea that the white
working classes were victims of a racialised lazy underclass whose claims
to state resources and instrumental use as strike-breakers had led to their
own relative precarity.** As such, explanations of racism can be ‘added to
other symbolic mechanisms of class exploitation as an excessive ideolog-
ical device the dominant class imposed upon the exploited’, as Da Silva
writes.”
Racial cheapening
However, neither the scapegoating of migrants nor their use as a flexible
source of surplus labour can fully account for the ways that colonial
38 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
relations have engendered labour stratification in the metropole.
Often missing from these accounts is how the consolidation of power
for working- and middle-class white Britons had been derived from
revenues gained through empire, which acted like a racial subsidy to the
metropole:
The super exploitation of the Third World has brought material
comforts to the white working class such as consumer goods, welfare
state and a standard of living beyond the country’s resources. The
white workers have been incorporated in the system because they, too,
get their share of the cake.
The subsidy continued. The colour bar did not, strictly speaking, bar
people from work, it segregated colonial migrants into badly paid and
deskilled jobs with lowered wages through ‘acceptable’ forms of exploita-
tion familiar to the colonies.“* There, standard economic theories of
the value of labour would falter due to the lack of a substantial refer-
ence point that could form the basis for measuring surplus-value. For
instance, plantation economies could not rely on measurable forms
of capital to regulate work and rationalise production since value was
produced as a result of the capture and subjection of labour.*’ Enforcing
different rates of surplus-value has been central to the unequal transfer
of value in colonial and post-colonial economies.
Not confined to the colony, analogous problems manifest in the
metropole regarding setting labour value in the context of migrant com-
munities. Roughly, the rate of exploitation can be measured as the ratio
of surplus-value to wages. Ordinary exploitation arises from the unequal
conditions under which the exchange of labour occurs. Standard nar-
ratives emphasising surplus labour and scapegoating seemingly assume
that the rate of exploitation is relatively uniform across the population,
with competition in the labour force motivated by labour valued at
the same rate. But labour time and economic value have not operated
in a linear relationship with each other. Rather, the value of labour for
racialised communities was set in conditions of unequal exchange that
gave rise to forms of hyper-exploitation. For the hyper-exploited, wages
are set below the value of labour power.*® With a differential ability to
enforce the rule of exchange produced under conditions of barred access
to labour and unions, racialised communities were systematically paid
less than their white counterparts for the same labour.
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 39
As the Race Today collective wrote in 1974, the employment of Black
and Asian people reproduced colonial relations through:
...low pay, the fiddling of bonuses, the constant harassment of the
workforce for more productivity, the imbalance in the production
targets given to blacks and whites, the non-existence of Asian shop
stewards, the restrictions that made up their daily working lives as
compared to those of the white workers - washing time, tea breaks,
lunch breaks, toilet breaks, dignity.”
The market value of labour was set by a moral economy of racial cheap-
ening, allowing for differential rates of exploitation from the active work
force.** This racial cheapening of labour was both produced by and pro-
ductive of logics of people as waste products. They formed an underclass
whose ultra-cheap labour power produced value that was captured,
rather than created, by British workers, companies and the state.
Importantly, the hyper-exploitation of this racially cheapened labour
allowed a white majority labour force to operate at class levels, and
accumulate wealth, higher than they would have otherwise been able.*?
White British workers were able to leave lower-paid jobs, or to take
supervisory roles for higher wages. Labour stratification thus made
possible unequal exchange transferring surplus to subsidise labour and
capital for largely white middle classes. It is through the dynamics of this
combination of subsidy and the production of a racialised underclass
that the reserve price for white labour was set. This process was central
to producing the conditions under which welfare retrenchment would
later be able to get off the ground. The erosion of the welfare state was
made feasible not just by undermining labour power, but by forming a
safety net that had made it possible for white Britons to receive higher
wages and status, better-skilled positions and property.
Ongoing deindustrialisation and deregularisation of employment
law led to large-scale shifts that began to replace long-term and stable
work with flexible forms of employment. Companies employed fewer
core staff with a broader flexible staff, and subcontracted labour to prior
colonies. These differential production costs and local workers’ rights
have been core to the accumulation of capital in the imperial core, with
borders not just excluding workers, but producing uneven geographies
that are manipulated to facilitate labour arbitrage. That is, to move
industry to create jobs in areas where wages and business costs are less
40 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
expensive. Conjoined with increasingly restrictive visa and immigration
policies and the stigmatising and racialisation of cheapened labour, this
has allowed for migrants in Britain and wage-workers in the periphery
to be hyper-exploited, propelling an already segregated populous toward
informal and marginal economies. In other words, the mechanisms
through which surplus-value was produced require us to recognise how
the reproduction of colonial logics have forced a potentially unitary
labour force apart.
The accumulation of capital has relied on a structured labour force
that is not indifferent to race, but works through the ‘social production
of “difference”, as Lisa Lowe writes.5° Neither operating only at the level
of ideological superstructure, nor only an effect of economic structure,
the formations of race work sub-structurally to organise the material and
structural basis for capital accumulation. In other words, the remaking
of racialised populations in the metropole was inextricable from the pro-
duction ofa de-homogenised working class. This was a social articulation
that relied on distinctions between the working class and a racialised
underclass, whilst reproducing divisions that had been instrumental to
the formation of proto-capitalist systems of property and labour. Borrow-
ing from Patrick Wolfe, these can be articulated in terms of a difference
between an exploited labour force whose reproduction is required, and
a hyper-exploited racialised underclass who is ultimately consigned to
expulsion and exclusion.*' The logics of waste had become attached to
migrant bodies, pitting a subsidised working and middle class who could
sell their labour and compete within markets, against an underclass whose
fate lies in the balance between hyper-exploitation and disposability.
MODULATIONS OF EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION
In this section, I show how these distinctions between people exploited
and expelled continued to be manifest by the complex dynamics of racial
exclusion and inclusion in property acquisition and financial systems
since the 1980s. These involved continuing the carving up of lands into
heterogeneous geographies and discrete spaces, with the attachment of
‘different versions of the human to different places’?
Extortionary inclusion
Previously excluded by mortgage redlining and neighbourhood devalu-
ation, the refusal to lend to migrant populations was gradually replaced
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES ° 41
by extortionary inclusion. This had the effect of bringing money and
savings that had been circulated within communities through collective
purchasing of properties and lending into banking and financial systems.
Shifts in the financialisation of lending markets and the privatisation of
development made this possible, with people drawn into the financial
system as it became easier to obtain credit.
By financialisation I do not mean to create a distinction between the
operations of abstract economics and ‘real’ capital accumulation. Rather,
I am interested in how wider financial industries and banks operated on
broader economic systems and social practices to form a set of specific
and systemic tendencies through relations of interaction and exchange.
First, this allowed corporations not primarily concerned with finance
to reduce their reliance on bank loans and acquire financial capacities.
Second, banks expanded activities into financial markets and house-
hold lending, and, in particular, to act as an intermediary between the
two. Third, ordinary people and households were increasingly involved
in finance, both as debtors and asset holders. So financialisation was
intertwined with individuals and households, not only via mortgages,
but by student debts, payday loans, hire purchase, credit cards.
This followed techniques that had enabled the transfer of lands into
capital investment through privatisation and the strictures forcing the
liberalisation of resource markets in peripheral economies. Since the
1960s, a frequent tactic was to use debt to restructure states through
punitive intervention and conditions on lending. Lending between US
and Latin American countries during the oil crisis was a means to make
relations of indebtedness into a disciplinary device to restrict taxation
and nationalisation and to ensure US dominance. In the metropole, debt
was also used to restructure communities and economies. Where the
debtor has seemingly entered into an agreement of their own volition,
power asymmetries exist between debtor and lender - the relationship
itself forming a new set of affordances and capacities for intervention.
One aspect of these is what Costas Lapavitas describes as financial
expropriation. This is the ability for the direct extraction of profits from
workers’ revenues and accumulated wealth - through mortgages, credit
cards, hire purchases and loans. This has since become systemic practice.
Regimes of permanent indebtedness are grounded in asymmetrical
social relationships that exacerbate precarity and expropriate future
incomes.**
42 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Deregulating markets
As mentioned above, Thatcher introduced the transferal of housing
association properties to Registered Social Landlords in the late 1980s.
Together with the 1988 Housing Act, which defined housing associa-
tions as non-public bodies, this gave private companies overarching
control over properties, depleted housing stock and opened up housing
to finance.>> This allowed for the expansion of finance to areas of the
housing market that had previously been off-limits. For example, mort-
gages were offered in rundown inner-city areas, and for houses in
decaying public sector housing estates under right-to-buy legislation.*°
These shifts also made way for a move from mortgage lending at the level
of local savings and decision-making to national, market-wide criteria.
Relational lending that had entrenched segregation through informal
redlining gave way to supposedly colour-blind criteria, thresholds and
risk assessments. One way this was established was through a reduction
of bank branches in low-income communities. Around 17 per cent of
bank branches closed in Britain between 1982 and 1992, mostly concen-
trated in major urban areas.
The translation of lending decisions into objective and centralised
criteria failed to abstract from the differentiations that had led to racial
redlining. Instead this process obscured and expanded differential
economic inclusion. Modelling the value at risk for lending decisions
relied on the statistical manipulation of risk that was mediated between
banks and customers. The ground level of these financial technologies
was predatory lending practices and risk assessment that reproduced
racialised difference within socio-spatial risk pricing. In effect, the
assessment of loan applications quantified prior racial discriminations
and historical structures that had segregated and devalued racialised
communities.
Contextualised within 1980s Britain, financialisation linked workers’
revenue to slow wage growth and welfare cutbacks, but also to forms of
wealth accumulation that were primarily realised through home own-
ership and rising house prices. This served to consolidate markets that
had been unevenly distributed by rising house prices by largely white
property owners in more affluent areas, against stagnant lower-priced
areas marked by race. This translated differentially configured spaces
into seemingly commensurate systems of value, reproducing them on
the terms of a market hierarchy that forced higher interest rates and
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 43
more punitive measures on mortgages granted in those areas. Asa result,
capital from segregated communities was exported at accelerated rates.
For decades this had been made possible by charging far higher rents
for poorer properties, but now it was administered by greater interest
charges and large numbers of mortgage defaults.
As this liberalised lending market began to swing back in the
1990s, finance was increasingly restructured toward the more stable
middle-class heartlands. Levels of debt in the UK in the early 1990s sur-
passed net income, so demand for debt-related products like loans and
credit lines fell, and insurance firms began to raise premiums or refuse
policies. At the same time, New Labour set in motion mass-scale devel-
opment projects in urban areas. Under civil pressure, the essentially
untouched twilight zones finally received recognition from politicians
to deploy plans for urban renewal. But in this context, these were written
as strategies designed for expropriation and dispersal. Tony Blair’s urban
renaissance strategy (1999) translated discourses of ghettos into ‘sink
estates, and pushed through redevelopment projects that would open
up inner-city housing to wealthier renters. These so-called regenera-
tion projects were underpinned by public-private partnerships such as
private finance initiatives (PFIs).°”
Operating on prior stratifications, divisions were created between
preferential banking and investment services that privileged those with
wealth, and the end of free banking, increasing levies and charges, for
those without. This served to further police the boundaries of the finan-
cial system, with those who had been allowed inside financial markets
in the 1980s now forced outside by punitive charges. Many people were
forced into highly unequal dependency relations with financial institu-
tions. Left reliant on banks yet abandoned by them, people often needed
to look beyond market regulated financial systems and so poorer com-
munities became rife with exploitative and predatory services — offering
annual interest rates of over 1,000 per cent. These sub-prime credit
markets employed risk pricing strategies that specifically employ call
centres to target non-standard borrowers.** The barring of access to
standard financial systems supported existing economic power - larger
financial institutions were again incentivised to lend only in higher
income areas, and to people deemed financially proficient. Predatory
lending continued to operate at the other end of the market to larger
financial institutions and banks, whilst both nonetheless safeguarded
44 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
financialisation as a disciplinary mechanism and highly asymmetric
social relation.
Privatised segregation
The segregation and underdevelopment of inner-city communities was
compounded by their privatisation, with ever dwindling public funding
backed up by an inability of communities to access funds to maintain
the built environment. Where there still exists public housing, residential
qualifications have returned through the Localism Act (2011), and are
exacerbated by choice-based letting schemes run by private companies.
The cumulative nature of selective credit provision in which decisions
to lend money involve determining their long-term value have led to
downward spirals of decline.
Today, as a result, whilst 32.5 per cent of white households own their
property outright only 8.3 per cent of Black households do.°° Not just
ownership, the situation and condition of housing are racially differen-
tiated, with a quarter of Black and Minority ethnic households living
in pre-1919 homes, often in poor repair, harder to heat and situated in
deprived neighbourhoods.® Nearly 27 per cent of Black and Minority
ethnic population live in the 25 per cent worst neighbourhoods in
England, while the corresponding proportion for white population is 8.6
per cent, and children who live above the fourth floor of high-rise blocks
in England are most likely to be Black or Asian.”
Housing stock is an equally important indicator of racial discrepancies,
with Black and Minority ethnic groups more likely to live in flats,
maisonettes and apartments (29.8%) and terraced housing (29.1%),
whilst white households more frequently live in detached and semi-
detached housing (26.1 and 34.7%, respectively).® In 2001, the charity
Shelter reported that nearly half existing bedsits were inhabited by
asylum seekers, many of which were cockroach-infested, damp and
overcrowded. Racialised housing deprivation remains unaccounted for
by geography, socio-economic status, age, household structure or date of
arrival in the UK.
BLACK HOLES OF EXPULSION AND ERASURE
This section ends this chapter by showing how the configuration of
differentiated populations as controllable, hyper-exploitable and expend-
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES * 45
able has been rapidly accelerated since the late 2000s. The segregated
conditions of housing and wealth accrual since Windrush have formed
the basis for the rapid reorganisation of society not just to hyper-exploit,
but increasingly to expel racialised communities.
Unhoming
At the confluence of segregation, home ownership projects and racial
subsidy, a white middle class was consolidated. It was in their material
interests to uphold policies and reinforce systems leading to higher home
prices in a context of diminished state support and financial discipline.
As detailed above, this was inextricable from the mass-scale redistribu-
tion of wealth away from racialised communities. This has since been
embedded by the package of redistribution and restructuring forming
the austerity programme since the late 2000s. Wealth that migrant com-
munities had fought to accumulate has been systematically extracted and
eradicated by austerity measures leading to massive-scale cuts to public
service funding, and reshaped discourses and practices of exclusionary
social citizenship.® Jobs have become more precarious, with real wages
reduced, people who had worked more than one low-waged job losing
one or more of them, high levels of anxiety, and lack of access to the same
benefits as British citizens.
Changes to the system of universal credit that we have witnessed in
the UK sit atop a series of cuts to benefits and alterations to tax systems,
all of which have disproportionately affected Black and Minority Ethnic
women. Asa result, Black women (employed or not) stand to lose £5,030
a year - around 28 per cent of net individual income of those not in
employment and 20 per cent of those in employment.® A study carried
out by the Women’s Budget Group shows that Black families in the
poorest fifth of households will see their living standards fall by over
£8,400 a year on average between 2010 and 2020 due to cuts to benefits
and services. The results of these cuts are already stark - in 2017, 59 per
cent of Bangladeshi children, 54 per cent of Pakistani children, and 47
per cent of Black children in Britain live in poverty.”
Across the board, housing, planning and immigration legislations
brought in since the 2008 crisis have involved an accelerated program
of social reorganization that codifies social entitlement and exclusion.
Secure tenancies in social housing are being phased out, with higher
earning tenants having to ‘pay to stay’; local authorities forced to sell
46 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
low-rent higher-value properties to subsidise voluntary right-to-buy
programmes; eviction powers are to be extended; residential qualifica-
tions are to be expanded, which are directly discriminatory to asylum
seekers and indirectly to recent migrants.
These work in tandem with major development projects in urban
spaces. Partnership schemes between rapacious developers such as
Landlease and councils like Southwark have seen the mass-scale process
of housing demolition and rebuilding. The estates regeneration project
that was put in place under the 2010s Conservative government sold local
authority properties, and particularly housing estates, to private com-
panies. Redevelopment and commodification have resulted in people
forced from communities, made to leave places like the Aylesbury estate,
which had been carefully managed through a steady process of decline.”
Huge numbers of people have been displaced, as far as from Elephant
and Castle to Hastings. Still others are expropriated from their housing
and businesses by massive rises in rents. Echoing practices of mass
eviction occurring across the global South, this displacement is a violent
material and emotional rupture.”? Between 2012 and 2015, this great
unhoming saw more than 50,000 families (over 150,000 people) evicted
from London boroughs.” In the process, multicultural communities
have been broken up and dispersed whilst their remnants see exacer-
bated levels of poverty and are increasingly vulnerable to destitution.
Of matter out of place
Inner-city areas that were produced as waste through downward decline
have been renewed through the return of the wealthy. Privatisation,
enforced decline and redevelopment are well-worn colonial efforts,
appropriating land and subsistence to force people into dependency,
precarity and hyper-exploitation. So-called urban improvement renews
civilising discourses and colonial exploits. The urban wastelands are
transformed from corralled spaces for hyper-exploitation and predatory
exclusion to sites of improvement and development through expropria-
tive displacement.
Emerging in the work of 1950s Latin American economists like André
Gunder Frank, theories of domestic colonialism have long centred
economic underdevelopment.” Social stratifications were understood
as the consequence of designed underdevelopment, leading to the iso-
lation of Indigenous communities and their unequal incorporation into
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES + 47
the machinery of racial capitalism. Similar mechanisms were found to
be at work in 1960s US. Most famously, Stokely Carmichael and Charles
V. Hamilton foregrounded an underdeveloped people whose colo-
nised status was maintained by relations of economic dependency. For
example, John Lindsay, then mayor of New York City, wrote that:
The basic similarity between Harlem and an underdeveloped nation
is that the local population does not control the area's economy, and
therefore most of the internally generated income is rapidly drained
out. That money is not returned or applied to any local community
improvement.”?
Spaces of uneven development continue to be a matter of white (re)-
settlement, enclosure and exclusions. As charted above, the ongoing
inflections of development and underdevelopment form the racialised
geographies of contemporary British landscape. I have drawn attention
to the regeneration of colonial ordering through alliances between
state and finance, anti-migrant policies, white resentment and the
pathologisation of the alien within.
The evolution and ultimate demolition of so-called sink estates was
made possible through the slow violence of disinvestment and state
attrition — of destruction at a pace that evades that of the spectacle. The
underlying logic supporting this violence has been the economic and
social differentiation of spaces into places for neglect, exploitation and
disposal. Drawing on Mary Douglas's idea of ‘dirt as matter out of place,
Ben Campkin argues that dirt and the classification of order continue to
inform these architectural practices and spatialised demarcations. They
are manifested by the purification of the sink estate and the reclassifi-
cation of housing and land as waste. For example, the 2015 Institute of
Public Policy Research report City Villages: More Homes, Better Com-
munities argued for the rezoning of council estates as brownfield land,
allowing their value to be better maximised. Brownfield land refers to
land that may have become contaminated, so requiring clearance before
redevelopment - it is by definition land that requires cleansing from
contamination.
These processes have been given popular justification by claims that
increasingly isolated racial communities are ‘literal black holes; as broad-
caster and former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor
Phillips put it, ‘into which no one goes without fear and trepidation and
48 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
nobody escapes undamaged.” The psychosis of whiteness, as Kehinde
Andrews writes, consistently avoids the realities of the production of
white monocultural suburbs as well as the revanchist expansion of the
wealthy into spaces occupied by the racially condemned.’
Distributive apartheid
According to writers and activists based in the US, the geographical
segregation and subordination of a differentiated population was neces-
sary for internal colonialism.”* The ghetto was understood as the major
device for persisting anti-Black colonisation. However, in the account
of post-war Britain given above, whilst such separation was present, it
has not been so clear cut. Given the pervasive redeployment of colonial
strategies of segregation, hyper-exploitation, expropriation and expul-
sion, this suggests that linear segregations aren't necessarily features of
internal colonisation. In Britain, at least, their underlying logic is one
of exclusion, extraction and erasure that operates across molecular and
molar worlds.
I have shown how relations of contiguity and dispersal were forged
through colonial exclusions and intimacies. Coloniality continued
through the reconstruction of whiteness as a property relation that oper-
ated through exclusion, exploitative inclusion, geographic containment
and diffusion — Selvon’s little worlds are nested and labyrinthine. As we
have seen, exclusions exist in cases of regional co-existence: through the
management and modulation of segregations across wealth, housing and
access to resources. What starts to emerge in this account is a picture of
distributive apartheid.”
On 14 June 2017 Grenfell tower in affluent North Kensington became
a site of death and despair. Fire spread rapidly upwards because of the
flammable cladding that had been installed to make the building more
attractive to nearby developments. This was cheap and substandard. It was
installed without requisite safety measures, leaving an air-gap between
the cladding insulation and building that prevented firefighters access to
the fire. Protestations about the cladding and fire safety of the tower had
been ignored by local council and government, deaf to the voices of the
racialised poor. Colloquially called the Moroccan tower, those living in
Grenfell were caught in conditions of coloniality - confined to ‘lives of
poverty in a dilapidated and dangerous building in one of the wealthiest
places in the world.”* Grenfell had already been rendered waste at the
EXTRACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS ACROSS ALIEN TERRITORIES * 49
fulcrum of the reverberations of colonialism, forming an open wound
‘where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”
As argued above, at the heart of colonialism’s annihilative drive has
always been a flexibility to shift between relations of hyper-exploitation
and those of expendability.*° The dispersal of colonial spaces and bodies
across the metropole carries with them this logic of potential erasure — as
Fanon recognised:
The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone
inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the
service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian
logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No con-
ciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous.™
The corollary of this is the enforcement of control, surveillance and
detainment through state and privatised violence — it is this to which we
now turn.
3
Policing Empire after Empire
We are the disobedient
we overspill and overspeak
we are unboxed, unharnessed, unfathomable
(Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, ‘A Virtue of Disobedience’)
The struggle of our new millennium will be between the ongoing
imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e.,
Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrep-
resents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the
well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy
of the human species itself/ourselves.
(Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the coloniality
of being/power/truth/freedom)
CONTIGUITIES OF VIOLENCE AND REFORMISM
This chapter traces how strategies and logics underpinning violence and
policing across empire were fundamental to the reproduction of coloni-
alism in the metropole. In the previous chapter, I sketched how the logic
of colonialism led to the segregation, hyper-exploitation and disposal of
racialised communities in Britain. This chapter shows how the pathol-
ogisation of entire groups of people was reproduced and consolidated
through logics of hereditary criminalisation, together with practices of
social control, surveillance, militarisation and containment.
The great insohreckshan
In January 1981 in New Cross, south London, a house fire at a teenager's
birthday party was likely caused by a racially motivated arson attack by
one of the right-wing groups active in the area. Following a number of
fire-bomb attacks on the homes of Black people, the fire killed 13 Black
children and injured 26 others. Subsequent police investigations were
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 51
wholly inadequate, denying that a crime of racial violence had even taken
place.? The Metropolitan Police suggested that the party had been gate-
crashed by drug users in a cover up that preserved a long-held complicity
between police and the far right. This led Black activists and community
groups to organise as the New Cross Massacre Action Group.
Come what may, we are here to stay.*
Recalling the Southall march that had culminated in the police murder of
Blair Peach two years earlier, a “Black People’s Day of Actiom was organ-
ised for 2 March that year. Around 20,000 mostly Black people marched
from New Cross to Hyde Park - a spectacle that clearly unsettled the
police. Headlines the next day led with the Daily Mail’s “When the Black
Tide met the thin Blue Line, and the Daily Express describing the march
as ‘the rampage of a mob.
it woz in April nineteen eighty-wan
doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan
dat di babylan dem cause such a frickshan...
Just a few weeks later, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation
Swamp 81. Deliberately evoking Thatcher’s infamous phrase, this
involved mass police presence in Brixton, which was a centre for Black
social and political life in England and an archetypal example of the dis-
tributive segregation discussed in the previous chapter. Plain-clothes
police officers patrolled the area making indiscriminate stop and
searches of nearly 1,000 people — mostly Black young men. On Friday 10
April, the onslaught on the community led Black young people to fight
back against the police. The next day, later known as bloody Saturday,
saw even greater police presence. A routine search on the Saturday after-
noon led to a large-scale uprising, leading to 65 civilian and 299 police
injuries, and over 1,000 police officers eventually flooding the area.
...an it bring about a great insohreckshan
an it spread all ovah di naeshan
it woz a truly an histarical okayjan.*
Below, I show that this act of anti-colonial resistance - this great
‘insohrecksha’ - was not just the culmination of colonial policing
52 ' THE EMPIRE AT HOME
brought into the metropole. Rather, it resolutely set in place trajectories
of policing whose regimes had reverberated across the Imperial state-
at-large. Directed toward population controls rather than addressing
crime, more punitive systems of criminal justice that had been devel-
oped across empire were used to govern the perpetual other now inside
English shores.°
Metropolitan liberalism, colonial punishment
There has been an overriding myth about the civilising force of British
empire that persists in some quarters today. This relies on the idea of
a liberal metropolitan culture existing prior to empire that was subse-
quently being exported across the world. At first glance, narratives of
British policing seem to support this imaginary. As J.M. Moore discusses,
nineteenth-century shifts toward liberal reforms, education and welfare
in the metropole led to the emergence of alternatives to imprisonment,
declining prison receptions and declarations of its possible abolition
altogether.° As result, the early twentieth century saw substantive moves
toward penal reform, decarceration and welfarism in the metropole. In
the 1910s, then home secretary Winston Churchill argued for decreas-
ing the number of convictions leading to imprisonment by one third;
to reduce the existing prison population; to abolish imprisonment for
shorter sentence terms.” Churchill was part of a much broader movement
towards penal reform, which between 1908 and 1939 saw the prison
population of England and Wales halved from 22,029 to just over 11,000.
Borstals, understood as progressive methods for the reformation of
young offenders, were looked to as preparing the ground for prison
reformation. The Probation of Offenders Act 1907 allowed the impo-
sition of probation, rather than imprisonment, for many offences and
London probation service became a social service for finding homes,
family reuniting and finding employment. The conceptual ground for
these shifts was a combination of moral scepticism regarding impris-
onment together with an impetus to return workers to society against
the proclivity of imprisonment to produce recidivism. The humanitarian
movement emphasised decarceration for prisoners’ welfare, self-respect
and social progress, against the prison method and deprivation of liberty
as extremely cruel. With support from wealthy benefactors such as Alex-
ander Paterson and the Howard League for Penal Reform, alternatives
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 53
were promoted in place of imprisonment, and by the 1920s an emphasis
on rehabilitating prisoners was entrenched across the prison system.
However, the ‘civilised’ and socially liberal tendencies of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century England occurred at the same historical
moment as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of peaceful protestors on 13
April 1919. That act of vindictive ruthlessness recalled events of the
1857-58 Indian rebellion, where participants were ‘tied to the muzzle of
a cannon before its discharge spectacularly terminated their lives:* Brutal
violence, punitiveness and imprisonment were endemic to colonial rule
across empire.
Othering lawlessness
Moore argues that this colonial excess was justified by the supposedly
universal principles of liberalism and their exclusionary exceptions. J.S.
Mill famously argued that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government
in dealing with Barbarians, providing the end be their improvement, and
the means justified by actually effecting that end. This is borne out by
practice. For example, in the nineteenth century self-claimed guardian of
political and religious liberty Lord Acton proffered the justification that
the British were working with ‘nations in which the elements of organ-
isation and the capacity for government have been lost. Instilling this
capacity required that they were ‘educated anew under the discipline of a
stronger and less corrupted race’?
However, this sort of critique coheres with the idea of colonialism
as ‘civilising mission’ - whether understood as misguided and racist,
or as beholden to (Eurocentric) justificatory structures ‘of its time. The
exceptionalities of liberal political philosophy and their outworking in
colonial practice could be understood as lacunae in an otherwise uni-
versal humanism. Explaining the viciousness of empire by means of
exceptionality hence offers a get-out clause that liberalism could ret-
roactively suture. The wounds of colonialism could be figured as an
unwelcome breach in an otherwise universal doctrine whose aims were
reformism for all.
In distinction, I want to foreground how liberalism was functionally
dependent upon the maintenance of coloniality. The creation of Britain
as a liberal society required the existence of its others. As discussed in
the previous chapter, the consolidation of property regimes relied on
colonial exclusion and enforcement, so the conditions of liberal freedom
54.‘ THE EMPIRE AT HOME
were also born through this elimination and exploitation of Indigenous
lands and peoples. This required the absolutisation of a specific form
of the human subject who would be defined in opposition to its others.
The distinction does not itself result from the logics and dispossessions
driving colonial property regimes. As Sylvia Wynter argues, it results
from the ‘answer to the question of what is human and the present
techno-industrial, capitalist mode of production is an indispensable and
irreplaceable, but only proximate function of it.*°
Answering the question of what is human relied on ideals that emerged
during the Enlightenment period. In Perpetual Peace (1795) and Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Kant had
laid out a theory of universal social development with Europeans at the
highest and most developed stage thus far, together with a judicial theory
of a single system of laws whose protection against less-developed states
should be financially and violently enforced. At its core lies an image of
the European in the image of liberal humanism, common to which was
a ‘commitment to man, whose essence is freedom’:
Liberal humanism proposes that the subject is the free, unconstrained
author of meaning and action, the origin of history. Unified, knowing,
and autonomous, the human being seeks a political system which
guarantees freedom of choice.”
Knowledge, rationality and autonomy are bound together according to
this picture of freedom as both determined and constrained by objective
laws. According to Kant, rational morality is universal, so our actions are
subject to critique under objective laws that demand our conformity with
them. Whilst lawfulness and freedom are inextricable from one another,
they are resolutely cast as distinct from causal events or processes.
This is because reason, according to Kant, must be autonomous and
subject only to its own standards in order that it can give laws to us. The
‘only uncompromised use of reason is the one in which the principles of
its use are not forced upon it from the outside’? Lawfulness demarcates
the separation of the realm of reason from the realm of causation by
means of freedom, which is to say, through reasons self-determination.
However, this articulation is famously circular - the legislative approach
to reason yields to a vicious regress which requires the causal exercise of
power to stop.*4 The pre-emptive solution to this problem relies on the
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 55
coupling of objective laws to a developmental theory of natural order
through which objective laws might emerge.
Kant argues that development from ‘the lawless state of savagery;”°
and towards this European ideal, would be guaranteed by the natural
order of war and conquests that would spread Europeans across the
world and impose European law. As such, he argues that even in case
the foundations of a European state are unjust, there is an absolute duty
to obey the law. This duty is a practical principle of reason according
to Kant, ‘requiring men to obey the legislative authority now in power,
irrespective of its origin.’® As James Tully writes, justifying this principle
is the idea that unsociable beings must ‘have the law coercively imposed
upon them by a master in order to establish the basis for the develop-
ment of a lawful and rightful order in the first place.”
So to define an objective realm of lawfulness also required the
institution of lawlessness by force. This relied on the creation of two
mythic worlds - civilised societies which had the capacity for rational
and lawful government, and societies that existed outside of history
which were lawless and despotic. It was only by writing the social
systems of non-European countries out of the lawfulness required by
reason that the exercise of colonial freedom could be produced - the
structure of the laws of reason requiring the vigilant demarcation from
that which is unreasonable: the domain of nature, affect and uncivilised
forms of thought. Configured as inherently exterior to civil society,
non-European people signified this outsideness to the ‘territory of
the universal principles.'* The colonised other occupied this sphere of
mere causality — that which is intrinsically affectable and outside of the
realm of lawfulness. Not only were the capacities of the ‘lawless savage’
considered to be less developed and thus subject to imperial rule, their
resistance to the imposition of that rule was taken as evidence of their
supposed lawless freedom. In other words, the Indigenous other was
constructed as an object of the law who could not be protected under it.
Resistance to the law was understood as a regressive resistance to reason
that confirmed a state of nature and lack of socialisation that could see
them progress towards rule-governed beings, which is to say, human.
Let me sum up. The self-image of the liberal subject was reliant on the
symbolic and material configuration of groups of people as essentially
lawless. In this sense, liberalism wasn’t so much developed endogenously
by the metropole and exported outwards, as it was fashioned through
distinction, and protection from, the lawless, illiberal and despotic other.
56 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
The broader systems of political liberalism thus provided the foundation
for a civil polity whose authority lies with democratic reasoning. But as
David Theo Goldberg argues, the supposedly progressive liberal princi-
ples of liberty, equality and fraternity, correspond to a ‘multiplication of
racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize,
enable and sustain. This explains why liberal freedoms and reforms
in the metropole were coupled with the violent erection of boundaries
against an uncivilised world in the colonies - they were actively sus-
tained by them. The liberal metropole was dependent on the colonies
not just for imperial theft and subsidy, but for its logical integrity.
The liberal order required preservation against the constant threat of
an irrational and lawless exterior - where both orders were produced
through the construction of those boundaries. In what follows, [ll
trace how this was used to police migrant bodies in the metropole, first
considering strategies that remade Black migrant bodies as essentially
criminal. The violent production of the racialised body as criminal other
has been produced by strategies of policing whose roots lie with colonial
force. Rationalities of lawfulness and lawlessness have been fundamental
to the construction of liberal Britain. Through these practices, they have
manifested a specifically post-colonial form of British belonging that has
relied on the reproduction of the colony at home.
This pathologisation of Black criminality and the need to quell internal
colonial uprisings underpinned shifts towards an increasingly milita-
rised police force. I'll argue that this also explains why, in the 1970s and
1980s, there was a decisive end to reformist criminal justice in England,
leading to what has been termed a ‘new punitiveness.”° In a supposedly
post-colonial and post-war metropole, the apparatuses and technologies
of colonial violence were translated and modified, attempting to repro-
duce the uncivilised and lawless other within the metropole.
Shifting from reformism to the remaking of populations as surplus
has been central to this ‘new punitiveness’ - indicated by shifts from
decreasing prison populations even whilst crime rates remained high
under a lenient criminal justice system oriented toward reform, towards
penal expansion and the reappearance of the central social role of
prisons. This has sometimes been explained by domestic shifts from
welfarism to disciplinary neoliberalism. However, explaining these shifts
requires us to expand away from considering only the internal machi-
nations of the metropole, and to also take into account the non-linear
spatio-temporalities of empire. To this end, I show how the formation
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 57
of surplus populations continues colonial practices and logics. These
are manifest by the manufacture of urban ‘gangs’ and the flexibility with
which networks of suspicion and data are used to create lawlessness.
Criminalisation and colonial forms of policing have been employed not
just to exclude racialised communities, but to actively produce them as
pathologised and alien - protection from whom was core to stability of
national belonging.
(RE)PRODUCING HEREDITARY CRIMINALITY
Whilst historians have often regarded colonial India as a ‘laboratory
of mankind, this is particularly pertinent when considering what Jas-
binder Nijjar describes as ‘Britain’s punitive and exploitative history of
constructing, controlling, and punishing colonial subjects as criminal
collectives.** Through this, we can trace strategies that have produced
populations as criminal and consider their redeployment by metropoli-
tan systems of policing.
Criminalising tribes
Under the state-capital coalition forming the East India Company, large
areas of India were controlled by its massive private armies. In 1835 the
Thuggee and Dacoity Department was set up under civil servant William
Sleeman as an intelligence collecting department targeting suspect
criminal groups. This responded to the figure of the thugee - the idea
of a native criminal intent on robbing and murdering their victims.”
Later, under the British Crown, the Criminal Tribes Acts (CTA) of 1871
awarded powers allowing for entire tribes to be subject to exclusion and
control by their classification as criminal when there was some reason to
think there were ‘thugs’ amongst them. The act allowed for the registra-
tion, surveillance and control of tribes, with 13 million people classified
under it by the early twentieth century, and no recourse to remove the
designation.
Building on earlier campaigns against Thugs, the CTA provided a way
of dealing with threats to the colonial state, not just by individual crimi-
nals, but entire tribes.” This relied on a deeply held belief that the tribes
had a hereditary and biological propensity to crime. Further credence
was provided to this belief by the development of the pseudo-science of
eugenics in England. Conjoined with the CTA, this allowed for entire
58 - THE EMPIRE AT HOME
sections of society seen as a threat to colonial order to be indissolubly
branded as criminal - using systems for the supposed pre-emptive iden-
tification of criminals using measurements of the skull and arm-span.
As a result of these logics, policies and execution, tribes like the
Mappilas of Malabar in south-western India were considered irredeem-
ably lawless and criminal. J.H. Stephens, a member of the viceroy’s
Executive Council in 1871, described the CTA as follows:
It means a tribe whose ancestors were criminals from time imme-
morial, who are themselves destined by the usage of caste to commit
crimes and whose descendants will be offenders against law, until the
whole tribe is exterminated or accounted for in the manner of Thugs.
When a man tells you that he is an offender against law he has been
so from the beginning and will be so to the end. Reform is impossible,
for it is his trade, his caste, I may almost say his religion is to commit
crime.
The causes of criminal activity were thought to inhere in the very nature
of colonial subjects. This was an embodied and essentialised crimi-
nality, which could overcome all evidence to the contrary - ‘reform is
impossible. Whilst supposedly scientific, the criminalisation of tribes
was thereby constructed to lie in the realm of nature so they could not
possibly be reformed.
Liberal failures and sus laws
I want to think about how similar techniques have marked people as
inherently criminal and beyond reform as part of the reconstruction of
colonial strategies in the metropole. This can be brought to light in con-
sidering the context of the 1981 Brixton uprising. Discussed less than the
later miners’ strikes, the uprisings in Brixton and subsequently across
England became a central symbol in Margaret Thatcher’s law and order
strategy, which used state violence to repress and control their ‘alien
violence.*> As Tara Brabazon describes it:
For many historians researching Thatcher’s first term, Brixton appears
an aberrant implosion in the economic rationalist narrative. It was
a moment of unravelled consensus, when violent clashes between
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 59
police and protestors were the only means possible to protect the
Thatcherite state.*°
Tapping into Powellian language, the uprising was presented in public
discourses as riots ending law and order and British ways of life.
Lord Scarman’s report on the 1981 Brixton uprising was more liberal,
speaking to the ‘understandable’ failures of Black communities to deal
with oppression and poverty, having ‘no doubt that unemployment was
a major factor [...] which lies at the root of the disorders in Brixton and
elsewhere. Scarman saw that Black communities faced similar disparities
regarding education and unemployment as broader working classes, but
far more severely, so ‘young black people may feel a particular sense of
frustration and deprivation.
Scarman also found evidence of individual malpractice and the dispro-
portionate use of stop-and-search powers against Black people. As might
be expected, Scarman failed to criticise police practices at anything more
than a superficial level, arguing only that ‘racial prejudice does manifest
itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers in the streets. He
drew attention, for example, to the use of a colonial tactic with a police
battle cry of chanting, shouting and rhythmic beating.” This was most
blatant in his pronouncement that ‘[i]nstitutional racism does not exist
in Britain; leading to critique of the document as ‘a liberal report, but one
within entirely racist parameters.*®
The implementation of specific strategies of saturation and deterrence
policing were foregrounded as the incendiary leading to the uprising.
Nonetheless, whilst these are important, to adequately explain the
increasingly punitive nature of policing in this era requires us to consider
the barrage of practices used to maintain the segregation and control
of Black and Asian people. Policing techniques familiar to the colony
were reproduced through the criminalisation of Black young people as
central to increasingly confrontational policing. The use of sus laws has
rightly been highlighted in this regard. Directed toward individuals with
an intent to commit any felonious act, whilst drawn from the Vagrancy
Act 1824, the deployment of sus laws was descended from strategies
employed under the CTA. Its use was reinforced by the revival of other
laws like affray, conspiracy and blasphemy. Together these were used to
flexibly accommodate much Black behaviour as criminal.” As a result, in
1979 in London, of 1,894 sus arrests, 767 were of Black people - at that
point making up just 4.2 per cent of London’s population. As a practice,
60 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
their use operated as a form of social control and exclusion - to instil
fear, control and deter. Their disproportionate use against Black people
reinforced societal marginalisation and helped to recast them as an
‘internal colony within the nation.°
Born criminal
Whilst inflected with liberal condescension, Scarman’s report effectively
reproduced the predestined criminality of Black British communities -
citing the ‘rising tide of black crime: This was compounded by Kenneth
Newman, who was commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in the early
1980s, talking of Jamaicans in the UK as ‘a people who are constitution-
ally disorderly:?* As Cecil Gutzmore argued at the time, the jollity of
Black cultural forms were themselves seen as enough to warrant police
targeting and intervention.”
In colonial India, the framework of hereditary criminality had given
rise to an irresolvable tension that formed the basis of colonial policing.
Groups of people were subject to the increasingly stringent and violent
force of law whilst at the same time understood as not possibly subject to
it. In this context the function of policing was not reform. Nor was it the
prevention of criminal activity, since these were groups of people under-
stood to be ‘destined by the usage of caste to commit crime’? Rather the
function of colonial policing was the controlled separation and hierar-
chisation of colonial subjects and the identification of groups of people
as born criminals.
Echoing the CTA, the same logics were reproduced in England.
Black people were configured as axiomatically lawless, uncontrollable
and outside the law, yet subject to its harshest implementation. Recall-
ing the manufactured figure of the thugee, mugging had been staged
as a widespread crime across urban Britain in the 1970s. As described
in the landmark book Policing the Crisis, street robbery was remade
in popular discourse as a crime perpetrated by Black young people.*4
As Cecil Gutzmore argued, the press and courts orchestrated the link
between mugging and Black youth by dramatising deterrent sentences
that were passed on specific cases. Subsequently, the Metropolitan Police
reconstructed their statistics backwards several years, conflated crimes
that didn’t belong together, and recorded data on victims’ perceptions
of race of their assailant. In the mid-1970s, these statistics were released
to evidence an exponential rise in mugging, principally carried out by
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 61
Black young people. In 1976, the Metropolitan Police claimed that early
reports stating that the “West Indian crime rate is much the same as that
of the indigenous population’ were incorrect.*> Black crime was reported
to be rife, particularly in multicultural areas. These were used to confirm
the criminalisation of Black young people, with media narratives using
the barely coded colonial language of their ‘hunting’ of victims. This
drew on logics of hereditary criminality to foreclose racialised subjects
under what Paul Gilroy describes as an ‘inbred inability to cope with
that highest achievement of civilisation - the rule of law.3* They were
exacerbated by the consolidation of an increasingly static surplus popu-
lation, whose irregular employment and poverty were read as inherently
predatory and criminal.
Criminalisation ensures that people are maintained and controlled as
a separate population whose claims on the state are carefully corralled.3”
Where hereditary criminality was linked to religion and caste in colonial
India, in Britain it was engulfed by discussions of nation and belonging.
The racialised migrant (or descendant of) from previously colonised
countries was marked as the permanent outsider. The ‘outsider’ was
rewritten as a folk devil subject to an increasingly punitive form of state
regulation via the criminal justice system in what Gilroy called the myth
of Black criminality. In this era, ideas of Black criminality emerged as
central to racist ‘common sense; so providing justification for pervasive,
illegitimate, discriminatory and illegal police practices.
As such, policing was part of a set of practices that defined and pro-
tected the nation’s boundaries from the enemy within, as Powell’s 1970
election speech named them. The distinction was central to the crimi-
nalisation of migrant communities as fundamentally lawless. As Gilroy
puts it:
[t]he subject of law is also the subject of the nation. Law is primarily a
national institution, and adherence to its rule symbolises the imagined
community of the nation and expresses the fundamental unity and
equality of its citizens.**
The convergence of policing with logics of criminality and lawlessness
produced populations that could not possibly be integrated into British
society because they were configured as ‘no-bodies.#? These commu-
nities were forged as a transcendental signifier for social problems and
disorder, so requiring excessive quarantine and control.
62 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Policing the nation
That the protection of the British nation looms in the background of
these events is perhaps clearer against the backdrop of successive Race
Relations Acts 1965, 1968 and 1976. These were core to a tranche of
practices intended to deal with migrant populations. The Race Relations
Acts conjoined increasingly stringent immigration controls targeted
at quelling the amount of people migrating from former colonies with
integration measures designed to appease the existing population. As
Labour MP Roy Hattersley put it in 1965, ‘integration without control
is impossible, but control without integration is indefensible. In other
words, integration was a means of managing race relations that required,
and was supported by, the increasingly violent policing of England’s
migrant communities.
Echoing these unstable relationships between law and lawlessness
characterised by the imposition and flexibility of imperial law-making,
the closing down of citizenship made migrant people increasingly
susceptible to state violence. Under powers awarded by the Immigration
Act 1971, a category of migrants with the right to work but not settle had
been carved out. This made way for grounds of suspicion to be applied
to practically anybody who looked like they might be a migrant. Stricter
controls on immigration were enforced by passport raids in workplaces
and homes in the 1970s and 1980s. People suspected of breaking
immigration laws could be detained and questioned, and so the powers
were used to disproportionately detain, stop, search and question non-
British-appearing people, with entire communities rendered inherently
suspect. Later immigration reforms in 1981 included imposing charges
for the use of any NHS service on anybody who had resided within the
UK for less than three years. As a result, racialised people were often
required to provide proof of their eligibility prior to being given access
to the health service.
Notably, police powers were exempt from the Race Relations Acts
until 2000. This is unsurprising given that punitive policing was required
to maintain the social order created by harsher immigration controls.
Yet, their absence makes explicit policing’s functional aim as guarantors
of the state against the dangers of the immigrant other. Scarman’s report
was generally thought to indicate the ways that Thatcher’s neoliberal
cuts to welfare and increased unemployment had simply hit Black young
people the hardest, so forcing them toward criminality. Not only does
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE °- 63
this misunderstand the functions of policing and the material construc-
tion of criminality, it also fails to account for the violent and paranoiac
ways that policing had become the policing of nationhood itself. As
Salman Rushdie noted in the early 1980s, ‘[f]or the citizens of the new,
imported empire, for the colonised Asians and blacks of Britain, the
police force represents that colonising army, those regiments of occupa-
tion and control.
In this context, Brixton highlights attempts to resist and to maintain
imperial supremacy. Not only had this not abated under the Race
Relations Acts, but it had been made difficult to redress since racial dis-
crimination was deemed officially non-existent. Moreover, non-white
citizens had been progressively stripped of the formal equality that had
been awarded by the British Nationality Act 1948 conferring the status
as Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. In the wake of Powell
calling for the UK to ‘curb the influx of immigrants, the Callaghan
Labour government went on to restrict non-white immigration through
the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968. Officially, Callaghan
repudiated ‘emphatically the suggestion that it is racialist in origin or
in conception or in the manner in which it is being carried out, but
cabinet papers recently released show that the legislation was specifically
targeted at ‘coloured immigrants. The Commonwealth Immigrants Acts
1962 and 1968 meant entry into Britain could be denied for anybody
who did not hold an employment voucher, or who could not prove they
had the means to support themselves whilst in the country.
With the mass migration of Asians from Kenya and Uganda during
the late 1960s and early 1970s, Conservative prime minister Edward
Heath declared Britain to be in a state of emergency because of the
immigration of people of colour. In response, Heath passed the 1971
Immigration Act, which entrenched the racialised differentiation of
migrants across the Commonwealth and former British colonies. Where
the 1968 Act had brought Black migration under control, it had not yet
created the conditions for temporary workers. The 1971 Act achieved
this by granting foreign workers a permit for a specific job for an initial
period of twelve months. This shift from settlement migration to tempo-
rary citizen produced an explicitly hierarchised labour force along with
far greater controls on migrants."
Moving through parliament at the time of the uprising, the 1981
British Nationality Act removed automatic jus soli (birthright citizen-
ship) and consolidated the category of the right of abode, building on the
64 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
1971 Immigration Act restriction to ‘patrials.** This had restricted right
of abode through male descent to the United Kingdom. In effect this
meant that white commonwealth subjects would be granted freedom
of movement (from Australia, Canada and New Zealand, for example)
whilst excluding those made British subjects under colonialism from
Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Legally defining British citizenship for
the first time, this was written through hereditary bloodlines and the
severing of imperial and neo-imperial interconnection. This was com-
pounded at the time by calls in parliament to repatriate commonwealth
citizens, supposedly to deal with the ‘immigration problem’ and forge
Britain as a white nation disconnected from its form as part of a larger
empire. The 1981 Act rewrote British identity as whiteness, whilst the
criminal justice system materially produced Black people as alien and
lawless outsiders: “Black Britons were cast as the perpetual other within
the nation — a colony within the metropole’*
TRAJECTORIES OF POLICING AND MILITARISATION
According to Moore, it was around the time of the uprising that the reha-
bilitative ideal collapsed. In the 1980s, a focus on inclusion and welfare
gave way to exclusion and containment enforced by increasingly mili-
taristic policing.** Whilst things weren't really so clear cut, these shifts
require us to understand their novelty in the metropole but also their
continuity across a broader perspective on British policing. In this
section, I show how these movements are best understood as the out-
working of coloniality - not as a continuity that simply returns to the
metropole, nor as rupture and developmental progress from it, but as
condition and aim of policing.
Militarised temporalities
The concrete networks of migration across the new textures of the
colonial world consolidated the use of techniques from elsewhere, now
applied at home. Both personnel and strategies developed in the colonies
were imported back from empire, with home policing ultimately con-
verging with colonial practices.** The Police Overseas Service Act (1945)
intended to maintain British policing in territories outside of the UK.
This involved the secondment of British police officers to Britain's
remaining colonies where forces were often facing crises of control. The
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE © 65
movement of personnel also saw repatriated colonial officers slotted into
senior positions in the homeland police force, with successive appoint-
ments to commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of ex-military men
who had been central to counter-resistance operations across empire.
In the mid-1980s, ex-Ugandan police commissioner Michael Macoun
reflected that:
So many UK officers over the last decade and a half have served
overseas that some of them must have learned something about public
order tactics which presumably they brought back with them.“
In Michel Foucault’s somewhat fleeting analysis of colonialism, he
borrows from Aimé Césaire the idea of the ‘boomerang effect’ to describe
how colonialism returns techniques and strategies to their European
home. For both, this is understood as a kind of inexorable return of
colonial depravity, which could not be quarantined to the colonies ‘over
there. As such, the tools of colonialism would be applied in European
contexts, particularly in the context of authoritarian rule. As Foucault
puts it:
[...] while colonization, with its techniques and its political and
juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other
continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mech-
anisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and
techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought
back to the West.*”
Whilst seemingly consistent with the narrative presented above, the met-
aphorical ‘boomerang is antagonistic with it for two interrelated reasons.
First, it suggests an inevitability to the return of colonial techniques,
rather than explaining them. Second, it attaches colonial techniques to a
rise in political authoritarianism across the board, rather than analysing
their interaction with other forms of policing and control. It is clearly the
case that the colonies formed spaces in which experiments of surveil-
lance, extermination and concentration camps were honed, as Césaire
incisively clarifies. However, on its own, the ‘boomerang’ fails to explain
how belonging in Britain was reforged through techniques of power, dis-
possession and control, as well as how specific and concrete strategies
have been utilised in the reconstruction of coloniality at home.
66 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
It is well established that Britain’s colonial policing of the Irish was
used as a kind of test-bed for the later establishment of British police
forces.** In the 1830s, Whitehall had established two police forces, one as
law-keepers in mainland Britain, and the other, the Royal Irish Constab-
ulary, to repress and control the Irish republican rebellions. The force
was armed and had a military form that involved drills and marching.
The Irish force offered the British government a ready-made model
for policing in the colonies, which it drew on more formally from the
middle of the nineteenth century. Ireland became a base for colonial
police training, with officers of the constabulary travelling globally to
provide training, and some senior officers from Indigenous populations
journeying to Dublin for instruction.
A coalition between police and military was commonplace across the
colonies, with military tactics used to control and repress, and policing
integral to the maintenance of colonial power once in place. The use
of excessive methods against Indigenous populations, and particularly
those deemed a threat to the socio-political order of dependent terri-
tories, meant that ‘colonial policing culture [was] distinctly political in
nature.*’ The force of policing lay not in the protective shape of liberal
welfare, reform and the emergent socio-democratic consensus familiar
to the metropole, but in active strategies of state control and violence that
had been developed across empire in a range of locations and contexts.
In recent history, this was perhaps most blatant in 1950s Kenya. There,
the British state carried out thousands of judicial executions - often in
absence of concrete proof, and through the dubious categorisation of
activities as terrorism.°° The battle against the 1950s Land and Freedom
Army (known by the British as the Mau Mau) rebellion in Kenya involved
mass containment, torture and genocide. Presided over by Conservative
prime minister Harold Macmillan, this employed techniques familiar
to responses to colonial resistance in India, the Caribbean and South
Africa. As Elkins describes, this was part of a ‘murderous campaign to
eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands, dead’? This was backed up by a politics of forced
containment of around 1.5 million Kenyans to a network of detention
camps and enclosed villages. British settlers forced Kenyan people into
specific areas such as tribal reserves, from which the Kikuyu tribe, who
were thought to provide a network of support for the rebellion, were
removed by burning down villages, and resettled into camps that were
surrounded by barbed wire fences and spiked trenches.
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE °: 67
The British did not only deploy tactics like these in the context of
so-called ‘emergencies. Rather, policing cultures in the colonies were
primarily of a paramilitary character. The colonial police acted as a kind
of state military - in contrast with the image of the British policeman
as essentially civilian bobby on the beat - which required policing by
consent in order to retain legitimacy for the political regime. The milita-
rised policing of Kenya expanded on structures that had been developed
across empire where excessive policing was common - involving spec-
tacular executions, illegal raids, extortion, corruption and ‘mindless
brutality, as Cole puts it.”
Tracing colonial inflows
In the 1980s, the two traditions of policing became increasingly con-
joined. In the period that followed the 1981 uprising, policing models
were developed that targeted populations supposedly at risk of partic-
ipating in future violence drawing on public order tactics tested in the
remaining colony of Hong Kong. In September 1981, the Association of
Chief Police Officers (ACPO) met for their private annual conference
in Preston. The director of operations of the Royal Hong Kong Police,
Richard Quine had been asked to present strategies used in their para-
military approach to public disorder. Their approach distilled decades of
British colonial policing into command and control networks, riot sup-
pression units who were armed and flexibly deployed, and street patrols
for curfew enforcement. As Northam writes,
Its public order tactics are a compendium of methods which have
been tried and tested for forty years in all the former colonies. They
have repressed dissent and put down uprisings in the Caribbean, up
and down Africa, in the Middle Est, the Indian sub-continent and in
the Far East.°4
Quine recommended forming an elite squad to be trained in tactical
exercises and transformed into a paramilitary unit. At the conference,
the ACPO formed the Community Disorder Tactical Options Inter-Force
Working Group who were tasked with the compilation of the ACPO
Public Order Manual, which was approved by then home secretary
William Whitelaw, as well as a range of training materials including the
system resulting in the ACPO Public Order Training Manual.
68 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Whilst thousands of officers were trained using the manual, this had
been conducted in secrecy, with the decision to shift policing towards
a paramilitary approach known only to the Home Office and higher-
ranking police officers. The manual advises tactical options in the face
of serious rioting that include use of smoke, baton rounds, tear gas, and
in the case of lethal rioting, firearms. The ACPO found justification
in Scarman’s report, where he had written that ‘[t]he police must be
equipped and trained to deal with this [disorder] effectively and firmly
whenever it may break out. This added to the legitimation of more
explicitly deploying colonial approaches to policing, and training the
police to fight as soldiers on the streets of England against possible future
colonial uprisings.
Newman, who had been appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police in the wake of Scarman’s report had previously worked for the
British Palestine Police, and most recently as Chief Constable of the
Royal Ulster Constabulary. Under his direction, the Metropolitan Police
was restructured, with criminalisation and militarisation essential to
transforming Black and Asian communities from enemy of the state
into enemy of ‘the people of Britain. The enemy within would therefore
become the enemy of all, since, as criminals, they embodied a struggle
against social order. As Newman stated, ‘it would be better if we stopped
talking about crime prevention and lifted the whole thing to a higher level
of generality represented by the words social control. New regulations
ensured similar changes across Britain, bringing social services under
the banner of community policing, expanding surveillance powers
across public bodies, and legitimating extensive stop and search.
Importantly, these shifts focused as much on community policing
as paramilitarisation. Crucial to generating legitimacy in an era of race
and class-based struggles was the development of seemingly innocuous
projects like Neighbourhood Watch. Emerging from strategies used in
Northern Ireland and the response of white communities to civil rights
movements in the US, Newman made Neighbourhood Watch integral to
his multi-agency reorganisation of policing. The seemingly antagonistic
drives toward individual acquisition and community action were made
interdependent in service of marshalling differential power over space,
property, and the means of accumulation. Suburbs shaped in part by
white-flight needed their middle-class self-defence league to embed
surveillance into everyday life and continue to draw distinctions and
limits within and between communities.
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 69
As such, the pervasiveness of policing across people's lives strengthened
the legitimacy of coercive force whilst delegitimising political action
against the state. For example, Douglas Hurd would go on to use the
scheme to exemplify ‘Active Citizens, and in 1984 Thatcher proclaimed
that “Every citizen has to help. No-one can opt out. If you want our
country to be safe, you cannot afford not to get involved. However, this
sort of community political-policing crossed political divides in the
period, becoming embedded in a shared common-sense. The uptake
of neighbourhood watch schemes was not divided by partisanship but
by wealth, property-ownership, and proximity to the urban wastelands.
Alongside Crimestoppers and Crimewatch, the movement implicated
many into routine and formalised low-level intelligence gathering.
Intelligence gathering through the scheme was used to justify passport
raids, raids on black clubs and meeting places, and arbitrary arrests.
Information collection was central to the paramilitary approach
imported from Hong Kong, with intelligence units operated in ‘peace-
time’ situations before public disorder broke out. Drawing on this, the
British would construct an intelligence gathering machine that was put
together from police information and public data. Whilst using telex and
data management techniques, the ACPO looked forward to an auto-
mated future. These special branches used classification systems that
calculated the risk of outbreaks of public disorder alongside the use of
focused policing and surveillance. Targeted policing was determined
by these criteria, which included ‘a high density of population of ethnic
minorities; frequent trouble between gangs; hostility towards police as
manifested by the incidence of complaints and difficulties in making
arrests.>>
The initial meeting between the ACPO and the Hong Kong Police led
to a formal relationship, with regular meetings leading to an exchange
programme of operational officers. The control structure developed
by the ACPO drew directly on theirs, with the chief constable able to
transform a police force into a paramilitary unit in the context of an
emergency. Models of paramilitarised policing that developed through
the ACPO training were used to deal with subsequent rebellions in
1985: in Handsworth in Birmingham, Brixton, and the Broadwater
estate in Tottenham. Police response was armed with guns loaded with
plastic bullets and CS gas. Though they were not given the order to fire,
this would be the first time that plastic bullets would be deployed on
mainland Britain, and a precursor to the arming of police forces across
7o * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
the country. In the Broadwater uprising, more than a thousand police
officers had been transformed into riot gear and suppression units
within a few hours. In 1987, the Metropolitan police developed its own
riot suppression units in the form of Territorial Support Groups. These
were (and still are) trained tactical groups that could be transformed
from ordinary police officers to a paramilitary group equipped for fast
and flexible deployment. As Northam puts it, this requires the police to
think of themselves ‘as members of an army rather than a constabulary.*°
On riots and reason
The use of force had again been legitimated by discourses of the enemy
inside - with Oliver Letwin famously arguing that the 1985 uprising
was caused by the ‘bad moral attitudes’ of Afro-Caribbean rioters. Since
Scarman, and into the 1990s and 2000s, sociologists and politicians
had considered feelings of powerlessness and frustration on behalf of
Black cultures in the face of being shut out of mainstream society and
at the bottom of the economic ladder.” This might appear to do justice
to the social and economic conditions under which racialised commu-
nities were living. But implicitly in this sort of evaluation is the idea
that criminal justice was not capable of functioning as it should do; that
policing and the courts couldn't operate as a reformatory and rehabil-
itating service for criminals because of the epidemic of violence and
criminality that was largely confined to Black young people in urban
environments. This understood criminalised behaviour as a kind of
pathology, a lawlessness that was reproduced by economic hardship and
social marginalisation. Steadily built on through the 2000s, this would
increasingly inform social control and regulatory responses towards
the perpetual outsider. In turn these legitimised and rendered sensible
policies that were designed to discipline and further marginalise sup-
posedly ‘maladjusted’ Black people and families. Politicians and popular
media have foregrounded ‘zero-tolerance’ law enforcement driven by
stories of youth violence that, whilst making no reference to race, are
implicitly racialised by the accompanying use of images of Black and
Brown faces.** But most blatant was Tony Blair’s 2007 declaration that
London's violence is caused by a ‘distinctive black culture’?
The English uprisings that occurred between 6 and 11 August 2011
are symbolic of the convergence of paramilitarisation and this pathol-
ogised criminality. During the uprising, thousands were involved in
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 71
looting, arson and anti-police violence across England, answered with
strengthening shifts toward military-style policing. The uprising was
rooted in a protest focused on the request that Metropolitan Police meet
the family of Mark Duggan. The police had shot Mark on 4 August 2011,
and protests were exacerbated by police refusing to meet with his family
and other protestors. By 11 August, more than 3,000 people had been
arrested, with 1,000 people subsequently issued with criminal charges;
there were five deaths and 16 others were injured as a result.
In the popular press the riots were derided for their feckless irration-
ality, sheer criminality and racial degeneracy.® But many rioters actively
claimed their role in a struggle against more punitive policing. For
instance, a 19-year-old Black student from Bromley stated:
Everything the police have done to us, did to us, was in our heads.
That’s what gave everyone their adrenaline to wanna fight the police
[...] because of the way they treated us, we was fearless [...] Same way
they forget to think about us is the same way we forgot to think about
them during the riots.
The militarisation of the police response served to enforce the crimi-
nality of the uprisings framed as riots, with their supposedly apolitical
nature confirmed as inhering in the psycho-pathological character of
those involved. In colonial Kenya, the severity with which the Land and
Freedom Army had been surveilled, expelled and exterminated had been
legitimated by framing support for them as pathological and potently
epidemic. In experiments on captured Kenyan rebels conducted by the
psychiatrist J.C. Carothers in the early 1950s, evidence was supposedly
found which demonstrated that the uprising was not of a political nature,
but due wholly to these pathologies of the mind. The pathologisation of
English rioters similarly undermined their potential power as uprisings
against police violence. Political pronouncements on them ranged from
criminal, ‘pure and simple’ by then prime minister David Cameron, to
members of a ‘feral underclass’ by then justice secretary Ken Clarke. This
pathologisation of rioters was ingrained into the inner workings of the
policing of public order units since the early 1980s. For example, the
training of the London Territorial Support Group relied on the idea that
rioters are fundamentally lawless and irrational. This unit had already
been accused and found guilty of assault on children and young people
on several occasions.* As a 29-year-old Black male rioter put it:
72 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Ive been beaten up in the back of one of them territorial support
group war buses as we call them. These big black buses where they
come and they kidnap us [...] And they beat us in there [...] They’re
monsters. Absolute monsters. And they don’t have no law and justice
in their heart. They look at us. They look at us as scum."
Across the board, the uprising was understood as inimical to politics
because, reframed as riots, it would be seen to lack reason, lawfulness
and political force.
The framing and policing of the uprisings as riots exemplifies their
sanctioning and control in order to enforce and demarcate lawfulness
and lawlessness. Typified by disruptive, partisan and often violent action,
riots are relegated to the result of irrational belief, the affect of crowds
and social pathology. However, there is scant evidence for thinking that
uprisings are not shaped by social norms, and mobilised through intran-
sigence against ‘consensus’ politics. As mentioned above, the supposed
rational sphere of liberal politics requires a line to be drawn between
actions taking place in accord with meaningful rules, and actions that do
not. This allows actions to be judged according to how lawful and rea-
sonable they are. But if actions are driven by emotion and compulsions
then they can't even be judged by these standards. This is apiece with the
ways in which political liberalism monitors the boundaries of politics
proper. Liberal reasonableness has been built upon spaces of democratic
reasoning that are immunised against the import and content of certain
statements, actions and people. In other words, the political content of
those actions judged as lawless is pre-emptively neutralised as apolitical.
As one of the authors of a major report on the riots pointed out, judg-
ments pronounced on the uprising served to annex it from the domain
of the political, and very quickly return to the status quo:
You don't need to look below the surface here because there’s nothing
to find. This is just people behaving criminally and immorally. As
soon as the cops have learnt to do their job, it will all be fine.®
Yet, the virulent force of the statements and subsequent sanctions on the
rioters belie a recognition of their potential power. For example, Novello
Noades, chairman of the bench at Camberwell magistrate’s court, argued
for a directive to make custodial sentencing on rioters harsh because ‘the
very fabric of society was at risk. On the one hand, this recognises the
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE °- 73
agency of rioters as disruptive to current social power, and on the other,
sanctions their activity as simply criminal and external to the domain of
the socio-political domain. Such ‘anti-normative’ behaviour is castigated
as both irrational excess and ‘too’ political.
The sanctioning, police violence and legal censure of that action in the
aftermath of the uprising does not result from the external misapprehen-
sion of its antinormative behaviour, but rather it awards it recognition as
counter-normative, so requiring explicit and impositional power to recu-
perate the domain of lawfulness and lawlessness. This has been central
to the redeployment of colonial strategies of policing in the metropole
that work as an attempt to reproduce the nation against the spectre of
the enemy within. For example, in the wake of the uprising came David
Starkey’s now infamous Newsnight diatribe that:
the whites have become black, a particular sort of violent, destructive,
nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion [...] which is this
Jamaica patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of
us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”
Here, the pathologisation of Black criminality becomes contagious -
recalling the justification for moving settlers to the magic mountains
of colonial India. Maintaining the integrity of the nation against this
epidemic legitimated a logic of social quarantine whose corollary was
the militarisation of policing.
SHIFTING NETWORKS OF RECYCLING TO DISPOSAL
In this section, I show how this sort of epidemiological approach to
Black criminality continues to underwrite the formation of surplus pop-
ulations through the manufacture of ‘gangs’ and the flexibility through
which data is produced to create conditions of lawlessness.
Remaking populations as surplus was familiar territory for British
colonialism.® This relied on intelligence-gathering techniques that had
been long central to dealing with political insurgency and particularly in
the context of later decolonising resistance. The powers brought about
under the CTA, for example, were made possible via techniques of sur-
veillance and information collection. That had included census data and
the development of fingerprinting technologies - first used in the context
of criminal justice by the fingerprint bureau established in Kolkata in
74 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
1897 as part of the identification of criminal records. More broadly,
ever-vigilant surveillance was central to the operation of colonial control
- working to identify those seen as potential risk to colonial ‘harmony:
Police intelligence units were created, with information collected on
all subjects who were thought possible to threaten the political order
coupled with stricter enforcement of what Mark Brown characterises as
colonial ‘penal excess:® For instance, the British in Kenya imposed mass
surveillance and stop and search practices against Black people, together
with intelligence-gathering practices employing both inducement and
torture. Analogous strategies work towards the containment of racial-
ised communities and their consolidation in the symbolic and material
fabrication of gangs as cause for violent crime.
The race-gang nexus
The ‘race-gang nexus, as Patrick Williams puts it, was entrenched
through the 2000s with specialist police (gun and) gang units employed
throughout England and Wales. These include Trident in London,
Ventura in Birmingham, Stealth in Nottingham, the Matrix in Liverpool
and the Xcalibre Task Force in Manchester.” The set-up of these units
was combined with the development of gang databases used to build up
intelligence to inform policing as well as to increase conviction rates for
members of gangs. Gang data is shared across agencies, having a gener-
alised impact on young Black people - particularly since, as Amnesty
put it, the addition to gang databases involved ‘ad hoc and inconsistent
standards and procedures.’' For example, grounds for inclusion in the
gang matrix include intelligence gathering of social media activity, often
involving the development of fake personas and befriending without
a warrant. According to research on Greater Manchester Police gang
‘intelligence, the majority of those named in connection with supposed
gang members were associated through social rather than criminal links,
such as family and friendship, whilst still receiving police attention due
simply to risk analysis defined by proximity.”
These forms of policing produce gangs through an information-
gathering machine that constitutes an archive for flexible and convenient
deployment. Disparate and largely innocuous information is combined to
make risk-profiles, which supposedly determine the potential to commit
crime. Membership in a gang is made synonymous with Black and Asian
young men, whilst violence and criminal activities carried out by white
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE © 75
young people are defined out.”3 So the collective lawlessness of entire
Black communities is translated into networks of criminality through
risk analysis that is grounded in spurious connections that are remade as
empirical data. This police-craft translates racialised criminalisation into
objective criteria for pathologised violence.
In part as response to the 2011 uprising, David Cameron announced
an ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture. However, whilst violence in
general is considered a gang issue, data suggests that less than 5 per
cent of youth violence can be attributed to have any connection with
a gang.’”* Even so, significant funding was again awarded to anti-gang
policing. This led to the development of problem profiles, whilst increas-
ing the use of the gang as a platform for legitimising the criminalisation
of young Black men. The gang database also includes topographic
mapping, which masks racial profiling by determining hotspot locations,
with gangs determined by mere proximity to high ethnic heterogenous
communities.”> As Stafford Scott of The Monitoring Group in Totten-
ham put it, if ‘you're black and born on an estate, nowadays the system
automatically sees you as being in a gang.”
As Nijjar describes, this has led to a situation in which ‘[b]lack people
are disproportionately subject to a frightening mix of militarised antigang
policing measures, including armed policing, stop-and-search practices,
gang injunctions, and multi-agency forms of surveillance.”7 An Amnesty
investigation in 2018 found that 87 per cent of people listed in the gang
matrix in London 2014 were Black or Asian, and 78 per cent Black only.”8
The long-held idea that economic marginalisation underpins punitive
policing also loses its explanatory traction when we consider that the
racial make-up of those on the gang database fails to reflect the ethnic
composition of deprived communities.”? Moreover, this is not just a
matter of bias in its compilation, as Lee Bridges argues:
As the police themselves turn increasingly to so-called ‘intelligence-led’
operations at a time of reduced manpower and resources, these data-
bases feed directly into the ways that policing policies and priorities
are being targeted on particular groups. In other words, the racial bias
in the databases becomes institutionalised in police practice.®°
This becomes particularly pernicious in conjunction with the joint
enterprise law. This allows many people to be prosecuted for the same
offence - so making way for the ability of the state to prosecute groups of
76 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
people according to ‘common purpose. In other words, groups of people
could be prosecuted together whenever there exists an association of
all suspects (in a gang, for example) who had ‘foresight’ of the offence,
together with intent (though the latter was added only in 2016). Given
the over-representation of Black and Asian people in the gang database,
it is unsurprising that, together with joint enterprise, there has resulted
a hugely disproportionate use of the latter on racialised groups, with 76
per cent of people convicted via joint enterprise being Black men.
Spatial control
One way that this has been institutionalised is through targeted policing.
For example, the 2017 Knife Crime Strategy worked with chicken shops
and other fast food restaurants to ‘control Wi-Fi and phone charging
facilities and ‘play classical music’ in an attempt to calm down risky
adolescent subjects.*: This was part of a wider plan to work with busi-
nesses, particularly in areas of London going through the kinds of urban
renewal and regeneration projects discussed in the previous chapter.
A scheme was introduced in these areas called Met Patrol Plus, which
would increase the police force within a local area by allowing businesses
and local authorities to match-fund policing in a two-for-one deal. Quite
clearly, the state enforcement of racial profiling operates in direct col-
lusion with capital and expropriative displacement. This was codified
most explicitly by the proposal made by Home Office minister Victoria
Atkins in June 2018 to remove council housing from families of listed
gang members.*”
A parallel logic is in operation with nascent concerns over ‘county lines:
These have become increasingly used to describe the selling of illegalised
drugs by primarily city-based operations expanding into suburbs and
small towns. The techniques to do so typically involve younger workers
transporting along ‘deal lines’ from city out of county. In public dis-
course, this has been presented as a new modality of gangs whose origin
was at least partially constructed under the auspices of a war on drugs.*
Importantly, however, this lies at the confluence between discourses of
gangs and their dis-location from criminalised urban environments.
Discourses around county lines embody the idea of Black invasion into
spaces formed through white flight and associated shifts described in the
previous chapter. Here, criminalisation meets the racialisation of white
suburbs and Black urban spaces, with the policing of bodies out of place
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE °: 77
- as alien invaders of white purity - imperative against their becoming
infected by racialised disorderliness.
With these logics forming a basis of legitimacy, Trident have used
pre-emptive incapacitation and disruption tactics to pursue supposed
gang members prior to any criminalised act or the existence of possible
evidence. They work through engagement with public sector partners to
seek ‘Anti Social Behaviour Orders - Hard Stops - Super Gang Injunc-
tions - Stop and Searches - Evictions and even having children removed
from the home.™ In the London borough of Haringey, this supposed
pre-emption has led to gang members not being allowed to travel out of
borough, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) being
used to remove driving licences under the pretext of suspected drug use.
With the detective chief superintendent of Newham in London stating
that ‘[g]angs are more dangerous than paedophiles’ in 2018, we have also
seen even greater militarisation of the policing of Black communities.
London Metropolitan Police now carry out routine armed foot patrols
in areas that are judged to be high in likelihood of gang activity. Accord-
ing to a 2018 investigation, the Metropolitan Police employed violent
force such as handcuffing, stun guns, CS spray, batons and guns 41,329
times in April to August, a rise of 79 per cent compared with the same
period in the previous year.*> Of these, 39 per cent were incidents involv-
ing Black people, many of which were part of stop and search practices.
From recycling to disposal
From the 1980s onwards, policies and strategies put in place under both
Conservative and Labour governments have seen a swelling prison pop-
ulation. Gang databases, joint enterprise and the flexibility with which
criminal profiles are put together from disparate datasets have been con-
joined with the creation of massive numbers of new offences. As a result,
UK prison populations have doubled over the last couple of decades.
There are currently 92,400 people incarcerated in UK prisons, with
thousands of others in detention centres, young offenders’ institutions
and psychiatric units.*° Weighted by proportion of population, Black
people in the UK in 2015/16 were proportionally more likely to be in
prison than Black people in the US. British Black people were four times
more likely to be in prison than would be expected given their propor-
tion of the total population.*” Of under 18s in custody in the UK in 2017,
45 per cent are from designated Black and Minority ethnic groups, up
78 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
from 24 per cent in 2007,** with rates of prosecution and sentencing for
Black people three times higher than for white people in the UK in 2016.
Perhaps most blatant is that Black men are 228 per cent more likely to be
arrested, plead not guilty, and be sent to prison by the Crown Court than
their white counterparts.
Despite still using discourses of employability skills, education and
rehabilitation, these are places of punishment and repression - ‘[p]rison
is about punishing people who have committed heinous crimes; as
justice secretary Liz Truss put it in her 2017 ‘biggest overhaul of prisons
in a generation.*° The same discourses have been used to generate a mass
prisoner workforce, more familiar to discussions of the prison-industrial
complex in the US, where corporations extract free or ultra-cheap labour
from convicts.”? Familiar to colonial rule, containment has long been
used to integrate people into the racial capitalism of empire through
enforced penal labour. Here, under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat
coalition government, what was euphemistically called the ‘rehabilita-
tion revolution’ was designed to increase the employment of prisoners.
Over 300 businesses make use of prison labour, brokered by the New
Futures Network (NEN). These businesses often draw attention to their
use of prison labour as a way of suggesting they are using more ethically
appearing practices. However, using a discourse of reintegration, this
mass workforce is hyper-exploited, with no unions or strikes possible,
and increasingly placed in the hands of private security firms like G4S,
which now runs 14 UK prisons. If a prisoner works a full working week,
consisting of ten morning, afternoon or evening shifts, or five night-
shifts, and is considered to demonstrate adequate performance and
effort in all activities then they are paid by the prison a minimum rate of
£4. In other words, they earn 80 pence a day for a full working week.”
Supposedly central to the functioning of (neo)liberal forms of democ-
racy, this production of a contained workforce is directed at exploitation
extraction rather than rehabilitation, and it is disproportionately Black.
Running counter to discourses of reintegration, prison-leavers are
released into systems that systematically produce poverty and homeless-
ness. Between 2015 and 2018, nearly half of the 220,411 people leaving
detention were either classified as unsettled or left for accommodation
that wasn’t tracked.°? There was a 25-fold increase of rough sleeping
amongst those who had served short sentences between October 2016
and June 2018, with a quarter of short-sentenced prisoners released
homeless - almost double the rate in October 2016. Abandoned by the
POLICING EMPIRE AFTER EMPIRE ° 79
state, one person under post-custody supervision takes their own life
every two days. This is a sixfold increase since 2010, with 153 self-inflicted
deaths in 2018-19 compared with 24 in 2010-11." The purpose of incar-
ceration is primarily to remove people from society, with incapacitation
rendering the convict ‘suitable for disposal rather than recycling.
THE FLEXIBILITY OF VIOLENCE
In the above, I’ve suggested that a common line can be traced across
movements of policing and lawfulness from colonies to metropole
through their use of hereditary and pathologised criminalisation of
entire groups of people. These continue to underpin mass roll-out of
surveillance cameras, DNA databases, communications monitoring and
electronic tagging, techniques such as stop and search as form of social
control, increased militarisation and excessive containment. Across the
criminal justice system, state policing achieves specific modes of quaran-
tine, control and disposal.
A central role of policing has been to remake colonial subjects and
develop strategies for their removal and distinction from citizens proper.
As such, the strategies and techniques discussed above were not simply
returned to the metropole, rather they were utilised and developed in
order to maintain the integrity of a constitutively imperialist nation-state
through a period of manifest change. The structures of policing form
points of convergence between colonial and liberal democratic experi-
ence, not as linear effects, but as encoded in forms of the political that
we should call colonial.” That is to say, the configuration of policing
concerns both order maintenance and the production and reproduc-
tion of colonial power in a context where the colonies are no longer at a
distance but dispersed and intimate.
In this sense, policing is interwoven with broader structures of power
and security, many of which are obscured as peaceful violence that is
justified and normatively acceptable. That is, a violence that became
rewritten as part of the natural order by logics of hereditary criminal-
ity and the pathologisation of Black communities. To a degree, this
coheres with Jacques Ranciére’s analysis of the police as established
social order.2” What is normatively acceptable as lawful is both produced
by broader structures of policing and is retained and continually forged
through policing - with the borders of belonging modulated and flexibly
managed - not simply as restrictions, but as productive of modes of life.
80 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
As such, strategies of coloniality have been transmuted and reconfig-
ured in the context of new forms of sociality in England. The legitimacy
and justification of liberalism required a significant change in order to
deal with the increasing intimacy of a violence that had before been
held at arm’s length. Where liberalism required the vigilance and violent
policing of liberal lawfulness and reason against the threat of the multi-
tude outside, a neoliberal era has required much more labyrinthine ways
into subjectivity that continue to render these distinctions possible at
home. Here, the Enlightenment struggle between reason and unreason
finds its figure in the shape of a law-abiding society set against the
threat of an ignorant and uncivil population judged incapable of such
behaviour. Cohering with the characterisation of distributive apartheid
found in the previous chapter, tracking this populace has involved the
metamorphosing production of lawlessness through its pathologisation
within epidemic networks of gangs. This police-craft produces subjects
not just as included and excluded, but as distributed threats, risks,
deviants and differentially pathologised.
Belonging and non-belonging in post-colonial Britain has relied on
the ongoing construction of distinctions between lawlessness and law-
fulness. In a historical moment characterised by spatial closeness, the
enemy within seemingly threatened the integrity of the nation. British
policing has required the movement of exterior colonial violence in
confrontation with this immanent other, whilst their basis for citizen-
ship rights has been made increasingly precarious. Whilst fragile, this
movement was a necessary part of the forging of supposedly ‘post’-colo-
nial Britishness. It is to this that I turn in the following chapter.
“.
Homeland Warfare and
Differential Racism
call it crystalline, call it
empire call it
salt honed call it
calais onward
london
(Asiya Wadud, ‘Calais, onward’)’
But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live,
or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?
(Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics)
POST-COLONIALISM AS COUNTER-INSURGENCY
In this chapter I consider strategies of multiculturalism, counter-
insurgency and the expansion of bordering regimes in the context of
a political logic drawn from Enoch Powell’s attempt to refound Britain
through the post-colonial cut. Whilst supposedly inimical to Powellian
nativism, Pll argue that state multiculturalism manifested differential
forms of racism through an analytic of racial demography. In the context
of counterterrorism, this became the basis for the adoption of counter-
insurgency as a domestic strategy that was premised on, and consolidated,
Britains internal colonies. Building on this, I argue that attempts to
refound Britain through the post-colonial cut find their culmination in
the expansion of bordering practices that enlist all citizens as police.
A Trojan Horse
In 2014, a hoax letter was leaked to the Sunday Times that purported
to be from a Muslim parent in Birmingham boasting of a plan for a
hard-line Muslim takeover of several high schools in the area. Whilst an
82 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
obvious false flag, a media frenzy whipped up panic around an Islamist
plot to take over schools, radicalise young children and undermine fun-
damental British values.”
“Taught to Hate’ - the Spectator cover story ran with a picture of a child
holding a sword in one hand and a copy of the Quran in the other.
The allegations triggered a series of investigations into the schools under
then Conservative education secretary Michael Gove. Gove'’s earlier
policies had expanded the formation of academies first introduced
under Blair. These were schools directly funded by the Department of
Education and independent of local authority control.
...the nuances that separate us are irrelevant. We are all brown P***s
basically, who wanted to take over schools that served majority Pakistani
Muslim children, and push Islam upon them when they were already
Muslim.
The school at the centre of the allegations - Park View Academy - was
located in east Birmingham in an area of extreme poverty where almost
80 per cent of residents are Muslim. Teachers and governors had worked
against all odds to see massively rising achievements, in part by integrat-
ing aspects of pupils’ home life and language into the school environment.
We observed posters written in Arabic in most of the classrooms
visited by the team and in corridors, advertising the virtues of prayer
and promoting the Friday prayers (Jammah). Staff we spoke to said that
the loudspeakers in the school were used to broadcast the call to prayer
(Adhan) across the school, but were turned off on our visit because of a
malfunction.*
The roll-out of academies had enabled this integration by allowing for a
much greater role of communities in the shape that education could take.
This gave rise to a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, meted out along
the political spectrum of liberal progressivism to social conservatism
- the epitome of liberal multiculturalism being gradated forms of inclu-
sion. At Park View, this stratified and precarious inclusion was wielded
as bludgeon against them.
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 83
Students are not taught citizenship well enough or prepared properly
for life in a multi-cultural and diverse society.
Reports fabricated narratives through the mishandling of evidence and
gross cultural and linguistic misunderstanding. Antagonism towards
supposed British values and a fantastical insurgent Islamic force were
weaponised against the flourishing of young Muslim people in Birming-
ham. But in the process, what became known as the Trojan Horse affair
points us towards fundamental instabilities at the core of Britishness as
defined by and against its others.
Michael Gove argued that then home secretary Theresa May should
drain the swamp and not wait for ‘the crocodiles to reach the boat’.
The argument in this chapter develops those made in the previous two,
suggesting that the shape of internal colonisation has been determined
by attempts to forge Britain as post-colonial nation.
The post-colonial cut
I have already shown that a fundamentally colonial order was projected,
submerged and transfigured across a post-war settlement within British
shores. In this context of reverberating imperialism - of guest-workers
and the narrowing confines of commonwealth - post-colonial nation-
alism became the pervasive horizon through which Britain would be
remade and its antagonisms managed. This is particularly stark given
that this moment perhaps held the potential both for acknowledge-
ment of the colonial shape of Britain and its dissolution as imperial
state-at-large. Yet the post-colonial cut was entrenched in practice and
hegemonic common sense, with mass non-white immigration and the
loss of empire filtered through a common drive to reformulate the purity
of Englishness. In this way, the articulation of this post-colonial cut set
in place political trajectories that attempted to remake Britain on the
basis of the end of empire, but which nonetheless fundamentally relied
on the continuation of colonialism inside British shores and imperialism
beyond them. For this reason, Powell is symbolic of an enduring political
philosophy that cannot be sloughed off as an ethnonationalist anomaly,
but rather underlines the fragile tension at the heart of this moment of
84 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Britain’s refounding. As Bill Schwartz eloquently puts it, “Enoch Powell
became, in Gramscian terms, a political party in his own right?’
For Powell, Englishness could be granted rebirth only by being
cleansed of its colonial extravagances. As such, the post-colonial cut
relied on the myth of a pristine island whose inner nature was contained
by seas untouched by empire - dismembering empire was prerequisite
for the reaffirmation of English nationhood.* So the post-colonial cut
required the repudiation of any sort of colonial legacy that could be con-
strued as more than the emaciated narratives of capitalist accumulation
or the attempted proselytisation of the higher-orders of liberal civilisa-
tion and its railways. In response to challenges that Britain’s economic
advantage had been won at the expense of impoverishment of colonised
nations, Powell decried ‘[i]t is nonsense — manifest, arrant nonsense.?
This was possible because Englishness had supposedly remained
intact and unaltered by empire — its intimacies not affecting its immuta-
ble core.’? In Powell’s hands, the English nation was defined by sovereign
power, which was demonstrated by cultural characteristics that were
exclusively inherited and maintained as white. Whiteness was the tran-
scendental core of the nation - ‘the English are a white nation’ as Powell
stated, both as eugenic principle and declaration of cultural accord.
However, as the organising principle and foundation of Englishness,
whiteness was defined apophatically - against that which it is not.
Whiteness could only be animated by its other, intimacies with whom
had threatened to corrupt the integrity of Anglo-Saxon stock.
If the manufacture of sovereignty after empire was to be won through
the purity of the island nation, it was under threat from non-white
commonwealth immigration. As such, it has become typical to trace
abrasions and vehemence characterising citizenship and belonging to
this singular moment - of post-war settlement that was fractured by the
inwards travel of the colonies. Bill Schwarz encapsulates the thought as
follows:
.. just at the moment when the English were able once more to imagine
their nation, not as diaspora, but as home, they were confronted with a
presence at home which could not have been more unhomely.”
This doesn't quite square with the story given in previous chapters. The
sovereignty of the British state at large had from the start been born from
the assertion of power and authority over its others. As described in the
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 85
previous chapter, the manufacture and virulent policing of this other was
not accidental, but was rather a necessary exterior used to prop up the
order of the social world.’ Britain was economically, politically and log-
ically dependent on its colonies. It was this which compelled Britain’s
refounding at home.
The exercise of sovereignty, as Amy Niang suggests, ‘is not a fixed and
unchanging fact but a flexible, mutable, negotiable, and layered norma-
tive principle’ In the context of extreme instability post-colonial Britain
renegotiated the terms of sovereignty through the ongoing legitimation
of extreme and violent subordination of non-Europeans. The conditions
that were productive of British sovereignty had long relied on logics and
hierarchies of matter out of place, together with practices producing
their naturalisation through violent enforcement. Knowing little of itself
beyond empire, it is unsurprising that Britain’s navigation of nationhood
would continue to be funnelled through these same frameworks. As I’ve
argued in previous chapters, what followed was a phase change within
colonialism rather than a break from it. In a sense, the cut was already
available within the foundations of colonialism. English exceptional-
ism had always relied on a paradoxical universalism. The distancing of
empire from Britain was possible through logics already available to it: of
the racialised other who was produced as waste, segregated and violently
policed.
In an attempt to reproduce the cut as post-colonial, this fundament
was translated into an underlying tension: between the myth of a pristine
island nation and the ‘necessary evil’ of bringing colonial subjects back
into the motherland alongside continuing socio-economic interven-
tion abroad. This tension was the condition of post-colonial Britain.
The presence of those made ‘unhomely’ was not antithetical to Powell’s
nation-building project - it was its prerequisite. The movement of a
colonial outside inwards was itself a production of attempts to calcify
a new image of Britain around its island edges, and Powell was instru-
mental to this formation. The coherence of Powellian Englishness - as
immutable whiteness - relied on the reproduction of basic ‘structures of
colonial thought.
In this chapter I follow this line of thought to first show that, whilst
moves towards state multiculturalism have often been positioned as
antagonistic to Powellian nativism, they reproduced a threat to English
nationhood that was framed by racial demography.’ The privatisation
of race made way for the pathologisation of specific cultural formations
86 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
which, by the early twenty-first century, were increasingly singled out as
problem for social disintegration, segregation and lack of ‘community
cohesion. Together with concerns inflamed by the discursive weapon of
Islamic ‘terrorism; this fixed in place a long war at home. The war did not
issue from a ready-made nation that was under attack, but as the man-
ifestation of antagonisms essential to the coherence of a nature under
reconstruction. For example, in 1970, Powell had argued as follows:
Britain at this moment is under attack. It is not surprising if many
people find that difficult to realise. [...] When we think of an enemy,
we still visualise him in the shape of armoured divisions, or squad-
rons of aircraft, or packs of submarines. But a nation’s existence is not
always threatened in the same way. The future of Britain is as much at
risk now as in the years when imperial Germany was building dread-
noughts, or Nazism rearming. Indeed the danger is greater today, just
because the enemy is invisible or disguised, so that his preparations
and advances go on hardly observed."®
Held on a precipice, the integrity of this new Britain would require par-
anoiac vigilance to ensure its stability. With this historical background,
counterterrorism reinforced the progressive synthesis of criminalisation,
paramilitarisation and cultural stigmatisation - finding their home in
strategies of counter-insurgency. Though demonised by the Conserva-
tive government at the time and more liberal political formations since,
I finish by arguing that the core logic of Powellism continues to drive
the formation of Britishness. The British nation is not only guarded by
borders of exclusion, it is a fabrication reliant on the proliferation of
borders beyond national territories and across all of society - borders
carried by people who are at once metropolitan citizens and colonial
other. The nation continues to be built as a normative principle and
material assemblage through an alloy of protectionism, securitisation
and counter-insurgency against the other within. The remaking of
Britain as a fantasy ethno-state and neo-imperialist infrastructure has
produced internal colonies whose tensions have led to the collapsing
together of total policing and total warfare.
CULTURAL VALUES AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISMS
Powell’s nationalism has long since been dismissed as a nativism con-
signed to cultural and political conservatism, and supposedly cast off
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 87
by multiculturalism. In this section, I'll suggest that the latter hasn’t
undermined attempts to produce Englishness through the post-colonial
cut. Rather, this has been reinforced by the way state multiculturalism
operated as a mode of control producing differential racisms. In this
context, Gove’s invocation of the ‘swamp’ is not an anachronistic aberra-
tion, rather it reveals the basis on which multiculturalism and its alibi in
British values have always operated as tools for harm.
A line of defence to a mode of control
In 1966 then Labour party home secretary Roy Jenkins gave a speech
on race relations that set out the coordinates for what has since become
known as multiculturalism. As Charles W. Mills puts it, this has always
been less a set of policies and more a conceptual grab bag that has come
to symbolise practically anything relating to race in Britain since.’
Jenkins advocated for integration over assimilation of migrants from the
New Commonwealth, arguing that it should be defined by ‘equal oppor-
tunity accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual
tolerance."* Putting race-talk aside, Jenkins emphasised the value of
cultural differences, and considered equal opportunities legislations to
be a means of ensuring their integration. These were enshrined in the
Race Relations Act two years later, finding opposition in Powell’s Rivers
of Blood speech in the same year. The act made the state arbiter of what
could count as racial prejudice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the founder
of the Racial Adjustment Action Society Michael X was charged and
imprisoned for anti-white racism under the act just a year after it came
into effect.
Multiculturalism provided a way to launder race-talk whilst prop-
ping up the integrity of Englishness. Invoking the presence of diverse
cultures within a sovereign nation, multiculturalism offered a language
where culture became a cipher for race and difference from a white
core. Central to state discourse was the suppression of biological bases
for racism together with the safeguarding of their supposedly epiphe-
nomenal outworking as cultural difference. For example, the Colour and
Citizenship report published in 1969 by the Community Relations Com-
mission set up by the act explicitly foregrounded cultural difference,
whilst assuring people that it should not be equated with inferiority. As
Jodi Melamud writes,
88 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
[t]he replacement of white supremacy’s biological paradigm with a
liberal paradigm defining racial formations as cultural formations has
long been heralded as a victory against scientific racism.’
Initially, however, activists and writers had foregrounded Britain’s mul-
ticulturalism as a way to challenge Britain’s supposed ethnic purity and
form a bulwark against racist movements and Powellian nativism. Mul-
ticulturalism evoked the continued and unabated existence of Black and
Asian people. From the late 1960s, this had been consolidated around
the political stance and cultural category of British Blackness, and
grounded in a shared experience of oppression and a discourse position-
ing them as ‘coloured. In this context, as Gilroy argues, the appearance of
multicultural policies in the wake of anti-racist movements was far from
accidental.*° As a response to the 1981 uprisings, multiculturalism was
used by the state to move ‘from a line of defence to a mode of control.
Multiculturalism took hold as an aspirational ethos that foregrounded
the recognition of cultural difference. State sponsored multicultur-
alism sought to integrate anti-racist movements with alliances with
community leaders and forums for cultural expression. One way this
happened was through representatives from racialised communities
entering the criminal justice system and other positions of power. In
the wake of Brixton’s anti-imperialist rebellion, the Home Office sug-
gested that liaison officers should be appointed to overcome ‘cultural
barriers’ between racialised communities and the police. By the end of
the 1980s, people from these communities were increasingly positioned
within state administration, politics and criminal justice systems. This
was coterminous with a growing (if small) Black and Asian middle class.
According to Arun Kundnani’s analysis, this was a designed attempt to
create a ‘parallel society’ mirroring the British class system, which could
be ‘relied on to maintain control’
Long discussed in the context of internal colonies in the US, one
strategy used by the state and corporate elite to deradicalise Black
political revolutionaries was through a recognisably colonial operation
that combined militarised attack with co-option and indirect control.
Drawing on Kwame Nkrumah’s work, Robert Allen reflects on the dif-
fusion of dissent in the US by co-opting people into positions within
colonial frameworks, who would ‘run the black communities and keep
them quiet for you.*? England was similarly primed after the Brixton
riots. Existing forms of anti-racism could be co-opted to form support for
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 89
community-based practices as a way to mediate unproductive engage-
ment with the state.* There was good reason for community-based
policing in the face of decades of violence and stigmatisation, thinking
that political and social responsibility in the public arena could help to
shift the tide of racism, and that capitalist gains are the single most sure
way to stability and inclusion. As a result, as Alana Lentin writes,
policies aiming to take ‘ethnic minorities’ under the state’s wing, a step
forward from seeing ‘immigrants’ as temporary guest workers soon
to return home, extinguished the fires of dissent lit by a generation
coming to political consciousness in the 1980s.”
The complex structures of co-option operated to actively undermine
community and racial solidarities through the necessity of engagement,
and ultimately complicity with, systems that maintained colonial forms
of control.
Differential racism
Under the cloak of multicultural doctrine and Race Relations Acts,
anti-racism ascended to a social value, becoming absorbed into a
broader ‘common sense’ for many. However, in the process, communi-
ties were both homogenised and fractured, leading to the disintegration
of alliances and the solidification of hierarchies that were increasingly
defined by ethnicity and religion. Interpreting the strategies of ongoing
colonialism discussed up to this point through a lens of racialised culture
translated coloniality into regimes of integration and formal equality. As
Nisha Kapoor writes,
[the] increasing stratification among non-white groups and the posi-
tioning of racialized minorities within the upper echelons of state
administration, in particular, have come to symbolize all the burden
of proof required for those advocating we have now entered a ‘post-
race’ era.”
The formation of a parallel society seemingly consolidated multicul-
turalism as both aspirational ethos and disciplinary structure. The
‘celebration’ of ethnicity became a cipher for the dissolution of race as a
stratifying signifier, with cultural groups narrativised as the beneficiar-
90 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
ies of supposedly multicultural Britain. At base, this was a ‘municipal
anti-racism, as Gilroy puts it, whose core strategy was to produce dif-
ferential racism that became consolidated around distinctions between
‘multicultural world citizens’ and ‘monocultural others.*”7 The former
category seemingly demarcated a strata of people deemed capable of
cohering with the values of contemporary British society, and so given
access to a politics of inclusion. The latter relied on the stigmatisation
of people considered incapable of sharing these values, of freedom of
speech and religious or sexual tolerance.
The coexistence of these distinct categories served to reinforce each
other:
[the] existence of racial minorities in professional occupations is taken
to be a sign that racism is no longer an issue, and if racial minorities
are poor it is because they are not working as hard as these ‘model
minorities.”
The ‘honorary humans’ who occupied relative positions of power
functioned as meritocratic alibis for municipal antiracism. Their signi-
fication actively secured multiculturalism as a mode of control against
the majority. In the process, as Stuart Hall remarked, class institutions
that had been divided by race were fractured further still, in an attempt
to neutralise the possibility of resistance by ‘confining them to strate-
gies and struggles which are race-specific, which do not surmount its
limits, its barrier.*? This both framed discriminatory practice through a
lens of inclusion and exclusion, and rationalised the latter as a product
of dysfunctional cultural traditions and individual behaviour. Lending
further justification to the pathologisation of poorer Black and Asian
communities and woven through a supposedly post-race landscape, this
sought to delegitimate the public role of race and race-based complaints
altogether.
The Labour commissioned Macpherson report (1999) after the
murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 briefly returned a dis-
course of structural racism to the political spotlight. The report both
named racism and linked it with the structuration of institutions. But
echoing Scarman’s report, racism was again delimited by individual
attitudes and prejudices. Whilst the terms of race were considered once
more, response to the report drove them further into the private realm,
enabling their continued evaporation from the public sphere.
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ~* 91
Community cohesion
As state multiculturalism swiftly unravelled towards the end of the twen-
tieth century, its systems of differential racialisation came to the surface.°°
Successive governments since the 1990s have relied on distinctions
between deserving and undeserving migrants, calling for community
cohesion as protection against disorder, and decrying a lack of integra-
tion. In 2001 the Cantle report, entitled Community Cohesion, laid out
a strategy for the Labour government to secure order across northern
towns like Bradford.** There, an uprising had taken place earlier in the
year in response to police failures to protect young British Asians from
racist violence. The report stated that segregation and community divi-
sions were deeply entrenched across England. The onus for integration
was placed with migrant communities, with self-segregating whiteness,
political policy and economic exclusion nowhere to blame.
Echoing Locke, these communities were again positioned as regres-
sive and hostile to modern civilisation - as Cantle wrote, ‘[i]f you
want to change a community, the community must want to change’
First-generation migrant families were supposedly answerable for
failures to learn English and adequately integrate into British society. As
such, they were judged responsible for maintaining poverty and depriva-
tion that could supposedly have been avoided - their hereditary cultural
pathologies had been reproduced through their children.*? At the time of
the report’s publication, David Blunkett, then home secretary, introduced
compulsory citizenship exams with mandatory English language testing
and a possible oath of allegiance to the nation for all people applying for
British citizenship. These sought to establish collective belonging by a
slightly less brutish version of Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘cricket test’,
which conceived of patriotism as support for the England team.
The New York attacks in the same year led to an intensifying ‘war
on terror’ that would increasingly centre British Muslims’ cultural and
religious ‘values’ together with their supposed lack of integration. The
cultural fixity of those who had been pathologised under multiculturalist
regimes was forged into more explicit forms of threat to British values
and social harmony. As Claire Alexander writes,
While questions of race and racism largely fell off of the agenda, issues
of religion, ethnicity and identity moved centre-stage, with evocations
of ‘parallel lives’ and ‘community cohesion conjuring familiar and
92 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
well-worn tropes of cultural difference and incompatibility [...] but
now with a global securitized sheen.+?
The precarity of good character
Where the 1981 act had written British citizenship as whiteness, this
had subsequently been translated into regimes of control that enforced
connections between citizenship and political belonging. Citizenship
would operate as a means to constitute the exclusion and hierarchical
formation of subjects and aliens. The Nationality, Immigration and
Asylum Act 2002 made naturalised British citizenship conditional on
‘cultural’ knowledge and language, whilst implementing a tighter system
of governance of asylum. This included increased powers of deporta-
tion, removing the right to appeal in cases seen to be ‘clearly unfounded’
(where the country of origin was deemed to be ‘safe’), introducing biom-
etric information requirements and establishing immigration control
powers at other ports in the European Economic Area (EEA).
The act rendered explicit the idea that citizenship should be earned
and demonstrated, whilst also putting in place a barrage of policies and
legal measures that increased state powers over citizenship deprivation,
passport removal, refusal of naturalisation and extradition.*4 These
were written into the 2005 Home Office report Controlling Our Borders:
Making Migration Work for Britain, which was a five-year strategy
for asylum and immigration. The report unequivocally justified the
measures by reference to a British nation who was ‘under threat from
those who come and live here by breaking our rules and abusing our
hospitality.
Gordon Brown’s 2009 Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill,
and the Path to Citizenship then further enhanced state powers and
introduced a staged citizenship process requiring a demonstrable com-
mitment to British socio-economic life. A greater emphasis on ‘good
character’ was put in place across immigration and nationality legisla-
tion. This was enforced by policies such as automatic deportations for
non-EEA nationals who were sentenced to twelve months or more in
imprisonment under the UK Borders Act 2007. The good character
requirement didn't only align with strategies of criminalisation - with
even misdemeanour convictions constituting grounds for citizenship
refusal - but also cultural strategies reflecting those involved in the con-
struction of gangs such as affinities and associations, social networks,
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 93
geographical modelling, and financial status. Amidst crises of multicul-
turalism as mode of control, mandatory Britishness and an emphasis on
good character formed part of a broad set of policies that had withdrawn
rights and introduced a permanent status of precariousness for asylum
seekers and migrants of colour.
Whilst the logics of Powellism had largely remained submerged under
New Labour, the war on terror returned focus to the conjoined threat of
an enemy within and the enemy at the border. A submerged Powellism
became visible once more, with the figure of the terrorist now joining
the ranks of enemy within. It is here that we find a decisive shift in the
mechanics of internal colonialism as they become bound up with strate-
gies of counter-insurgency against an increasingly precarious population.
ECOLOGIES OF CIVILIAN COMBATANTS
The confluence of immigration policies, criminal justice and weap-
onised multiculturalism came to the fore in shifts in strategy from
counterterrorism to counter-insurgency (COIN) techniques that were
manifested by the CONTEST strategy.*> Developed since 2003, the strat-
egys two primary domestic components are Pursue and Prevent. The
former is mainly composed of military intelligence and investigation
and the latter with a hearts-and-minds approach to terrorism. The turn
is important for several interrelated reasons. First, it draws explicitly on
strategies developed through colonial military and police control (many
of which Ive discussed in the previous chapter); second, it considers
a generic atmosphere and ecology of insurgency to have taken root in
Britain, but also globally (through the idea of global jihad, for example);
third, it develops both targeted and distributed approaches that produce
multicultural communities as latent enemy insurgents.
In this and the following section, I argue that the use of counter-insur-
gency strategies implicitly relies on the premise of non-white Britain as
forming an internal colony of the kind described by previous chapters. In
the process of employing these strategies, this is consolidated, normal-
ised and made explicit. In other words, the regime of multiculturalism
and its ‘failures’ have formed the conditions for a continuing war at home.
CONTEST as COIN
Techniques of counter-insurgency were consolidated in the context
of resistance to colonial violence and control, particularly in attempts
94 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
to quell uprisings that had not been dealt with by colonial policing.*°
These were honed in the mid-twentieth century in struggles to maintain
colonies in Malaya (1948-60); Indonesia (1948-62); Cyprus (1955-59);
Kenya (1952-56); Northern Ireland (1969 to present); Palestine (2001 to
present). Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency describes
tactics developed from his experience in the Malayan Emergency, and
subsequently used to underpin those employed in response to the Mau
Mau uprising in Kenya. Core to both approaches was a clear and hold
strategy — clearing an area of possible insurgents, policing it against subse-
quent incursion, and using information warfare to gain popular support
from civilians who remained in the area. In the context of Malaya, and
more visibly in Kenya, the strategy also included a network of intelli-
gence collection posts, cordons, frequent stop and search, detainment
and the use of undercover pseudo-gangs to gather intelligence.
As described in the previous chapter, the slippage between military
combat and policing was familiar across empire, with ‘normal’ and
‘exceptional’ circumstances often collapsing into one another. After his
retirement from a military career, Charles W. Gwynn wrote of the need
to continually maintain the fragile foundations of British rule, arguing
that colonial order necessitated restoration at all times.3” This fluidity
of order and disorder was prevalent in the framing of insurgency, with
‘natives’ becoming ‘insurgents’ becoming ‘peasants, as suited context
and objective. The simultaneous coexistence of resistance, neutrality
and support across colonised populations were the grounds upon which
irregular warfare was developed. Counter-insurgency strategies arose
from this inferno of racialised anxiety - as C.E. Callwell’s classic text
on colonial rebellions Small Wars (1896) puts it, in ‘expeditions against
savages and semi-civilized races. As Radhika Natarajan writes, ‘British-
ness and insurgency are two sides of the coin of empire, one reaching
out with the possibility of inclusion, and the other the sign of persistent
exclusion?3®
In these contexts, several features of counter-insurgency were devel-
oped and used to train a domestic haute police that would draw on the
expertise of military personnel who had served in the colonies. Most
significant of these were: the integration of civil and military power;
the use of intelligence; the role of communications; the use of excep-
tional legislation; the exercise of pre-emptive controls. All of these are
found in contemporary iterations of counter-insurgency, but they are
perhaps most clear in the work of military consultant David Kilcullen. A
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ~* 95
considerable influence on Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, Kilcullen had
worked in counter-insurgency contexts for the Australian army in East
Timor and the Middle East. Since developing a career as a strategist and
consultant, he has consistently advocated policies of counter-insurgency
over counterterrorism. To do so, he promotes a renewed understanding
of counter-insurgency that removes it from the limitation under colo-
nialism to a single well-defined territory. Instead, counter-insurgency
is required, according to Kilcullen, to forge an emergent warfare across
entire ecosystems of potential insurgents.
In Countering Global Insurgency, Kilcullen argues that Islamic ter-
rorist networks comprise a mass-scale insurgency in which ‘the global
jihad represents a federated virtual state’3? The domestic parallel
society mapped out in the previous section is here reformulated as a
kind of shadow state, whose distributed networks cut across territorial
boundaries:
In classical counter-insurgency, the ecosystem was the nation-state. In
globalised insurgency, the ecosystem is all of world society. Therefore
liberal democracies are inside, not outside the jihad ecosystem. We are
part of the system of global jihad - we provide inputs that sustain the
insurgency, are affected by its boundary interactions and outputs, and
are actors in the broader environment.
By this measure, we are all implicated within these wider ecosystems of
potential civilian combatants.
Deradicalisation as weapon of war
Through research driven by conservative think tanks such as The Centre
for Social Cohesion and Policy Exchange, theories of radicalisation have
been developed in service of state security to consider the process through
which the ‘terrorist’ is made. These new terrorists are not thought to
derive their malice from political motivation but from an incorrigible
antipathy toward the “West’*° A decade after Cantle’s report, in 2011 then
Conservative prime minister David Cameron argued that state multicul-
turalism had failed because it had given rise to the toleration of segregated
communities. In this narrative, multiculturalism became identified with
the degradation of the social fabric of England, as threat to Britishness as
whiteness. The post-racial discourse of segregation gave support for an
96 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
emergent consensus that Muslims are generically at risk of radicalisation
and so pose an inherent threat to security. As such, frameworks that had
been productive of criminalisation and lawlessness were rapidly trans-
lated into the context of terrorists and insurgents - both subject to the
law’s highest orders, whilst their actions are not possibly shaped by them.
Radicalisation’s root cause had been identified as a ‘cultural psycholog-
ical disposition’*' In this way, discourses of radicalisation continue the
metamorphosised pathologisation of migrant populations as a kind of
depoliticised terror that is rooted in religion and culture. Radicalisation
is not considered a process rooted in socio-political contexts so much as
the awakening of an innate predisposition.
Since the Conservative government relaunch of Prevent in 2011,
shadow units such as the Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU) were set up
to implement state counterterrorism policies. Primarily a research
organisation, the EAU operated under the direct authority of the home
secretary to provide advice and analysis to several departments within
government: Prevent Delivery Unit (PDU); Joint Terrorism Analysis
Centre; Foreign Office; Department for Education; Department for
Communities and Local Government; Department for Health; Police.
Operating across criminal justice, military and social domains, its data is
regularly disclosed to other agencies within the criminal justice system
as well as foreign governments.
The primary aim of the EAU is to characterise Islamist extremism
by considering several factors that together may lead to radicalisation.
These include systems for measuring adherence to British ‘values, the
critique of core values and anti-Western sentiment, which are used to
create typologies for scrutinising communities and demographics within
Britain. Using the tools of surveillance, profiling, tracking and data col-
lection, these typologies are mobilised through Prevent to supposedly
stop people from becoming terrorists in the first place, and are backed
by Channel, which works as a program of ‘deradicalisation. Through the
Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, Prevent and Channel were
placed on a statutory footing.
With information operations integrated into the wider security appa-
ratus by the Ministry of Defence in 2009, information has become used
in domestic contexts not just as a mode of analysis, but as a mode of
influence or ‘weapon of war’? Continuing the erosion of distinctions
between violence and coercion (Pursue) and information collection
(Prevent), information operations are used as part of an aggressive
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM -< 97
approach to defeat insurgents through tactics such as electronic warfare,
profiling, deception, physical destruction, information security and Key
Leader Engagement (KLE). In 2007, the Research, Information and
Communications Unit (RICU) was set up to work across police internet
referral units and media organisations to produce strategically focused
counter-narratives that involve propaganda and community-based
relationships.
The UK counter-narrative campaign began with a series of research
projects carried out under the RICU regarding Muslim identity, belong-
ing, Muslim people’s use of the internet and media consumption, and
community credibility.4* Subsequently, organisations invested in deploy-
ing counter-narratives were recipients of Home Office support, with the
content produced then promoted to targeted users of online platforms.
RICU ensured consistency in promoting messages like “Terrorists attack
the values that we all share’ and countering messages like “Terrorism is
not a real and serious threat to us all. The terrorist threat is exaggerated
by the UK government?* Breakthrough media is the primary company
used by the Home Office to deploy these counter-narratives, by working
through a network of grassroots community organisations.*° They also
engage specialist PR companies to aid in the production of campaigns,
including members of the M&C Saatchi group.
Central to the efficacy of this programme has been ensuring the
appearance of authenticity of the content as authentic voices within
targeted communities. For instance, the account @thisiswoke functions
across social media platforms to pose as a popular Muslim project
involving Muslim activists with posts about Hijab and racism. This is
a Home Office-funded project run in conjunction with Breakthrough
Media. Similarly funded by the Home Office, Super Sisters Mag is an
east London magazine discussing Muslim feminism, which operates
with white staff members regular posting as Muslimahs. In 2014, the
#MakingAStand campaign was launched by an organisation called
Inspire. Its objective was to encourage Muslim women to make a stand
against terrorism, to feel empowered in their communities against
radicalisation. At the time, Inspire were adamant that they were
independent from the government, but internal documents revealed that
it was a RICU counter-narrative product. A particularly clear example
of state-funded discourse-manipulation transpired in the context of an
attempt to resist Somalian asylum seekers in 2013. Somalian refugees had
already been long maligned by the media as the most dangerous refugee
98 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
community in the UK. RICU used a UK NGO called the Anti-Tribalism
Movement to promote the message that Somalia was now safe and stable,
and with Breakthrough Media helped produce a documentary for the
NGO to be aired worldwide. The Home Office later declared Somalia
safe for the deportation of refugees.
Broader strategies work to create links between state, police and
community leaders (religious leaders; local councillors; youth workers).
Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT) is a fund that is part of the
Counter Extremism Strategy. BSBT funds groups involved in counter-
extremism projects working to ‘create more resilient communities,
stand up to extremism in all its forms and offer vulnerable individuals
a positive alternative.” In her withdrawal letter from the BSBT-funded
Bradford Literature Festival, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan understands
that community projects and Muslim groups are often drawn to this as a
source of funding in the context of austerity. Nevertheless, as she writes:
this is a part of the apparatus of tools used by the government to legit-
imise counter extremism [...] the ways we are able to work with our
own communities become dependent on the very project which sees
us as criminal by default.**
The funding requirements involve information collection and the provi-
sion of evidence of counter-extremism related outcomes. This implicates
and conditions community groups to reproduce the discourses and prac-
tices of their own criminalisation, making them complicit in discourses
that Muslim communities are at once the inevitable source of violent
extremism and should be working to undo its causes and conditions.
Concretising threats
Continuing the pathologisation of ‘problem families, Prevent social
workers engage in supposedly civilising and domesticating work. This
purports to improve racialised communities and pre-empt the possibil-
ity of radicalisation by identifying cultural practices that might create
vulnerable children. Of the 7,318 people referred to the Prevent pro-
gramme in 2017-18, 2,426 came through education and 57 per cent
were aged 20 years or under.*? Induction into Prevent training was rolled
out into the private sector in 2019, targeting employees in retail, travel
and entertainment. Now compulsory to report against indicators of rad-
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM - 99
icalisation across the public domain (and increasingly incentivised in the
private domain), since 2012 a Muslim is nearly 80 times more likely to be
referred by Prevent for Channel deradicalisation.*°
This disproportionate targeting of Muslim people has often been
used to show that Prevent is a racist set of policies and practices that
have little basis as counterterrorism strategy. But racism and Prevent are
much more entangled than is suggested by the idea that Prevent is racist,
or even that it leads to racist outcomes in an ambient media environ-
ment that routinely vilifies Muslim people. Rather, Prevent is part of a
broader series of mechanisms that craft racialised pathology, stigma and
inferiority. This has the result of differentiating entire demographics as
potential threat. We can think of this discourse of threat in terms of the
equation of migration with the erosion of liberal British values framed as
a struggle between increasingly concrete demographic blocks.
For example, notably reactionary academic Slavoj Zizek contends
that ‘[w]e have to be clear they are in our culture [...] We should be
more assertive toward our values [...] Europe means something noble’.
This is also ventriloquised in the recent work of Matthew Goodwin and
Roger Eatwell’s argument that ‘[i]mmigration and hyper-ethnic change
are cultivating strong fears about the possible destruction of the national
group’s historic identity and established ways of life. And, perhaps most
clearly, Sam Harris articulates the position of sedimented demographic
threat intertwined with defence of liberal values:
Throughout western Europe, Muslim immigrants show little inclina-
tion to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and
yet exploit these values to the utmost - demanding tolerance for their
backwardness, their misogyny, their antisemitism, and the genocidal
hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques.
This had been stoked in recent years by the profusion of media stories
about inner-city no-go zones in British cities supposedly free from the
rule of police and under Sharia law. Fox News pundit Steve Emerson
claimed that parts of London and the entire city of Birmingham were
entirely under Muslim control, into which non-Muslims simply don’t
go. Reproducing Powell’s analytic demographics, the atemporal core of
Britishness as whiteness is increasingly animated by the mythic idyll of a
pre-immigrant English community.
100 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
In 2016 Ted Cantle and Eric Kaufmann produced a report that lent
supposed empirical weight to these claims, arguing that segregation was
increasing in Britain. According to the report, white populations were
decreasing in several areas such as Slough, where the white population
fell from 58.3 to 34.5 per cent, Birmingham, where it went from 65.6 to
53.1 per cent, and Leicester, where it decreased from 60.5 to 45.1 per
cent. In the London borough of Newham, just 16.7 per cent of residents
were white. Segregation was defined not in terms of diversity of ethnicity,
but in terms of a white British majority who supposedly felt increasingly
isolated. The strategies of internal colonialism that had produced segre-
gation and criminalisation were aggressively routed into evidence of a
regressive migrant nature that was antithetical to the supposedly liberal
and tolerant Britain which had been discursively secured by regimes of
multiculturalism.
Here, as Nandita Sharma observes, race is increasingly fixed to place.**
Bodies are territorialized as subjects of specific nations and sovereign
power, and migration is again seen as a form of miscegenation and
cultural degeneration. Again, this relies on frameworks of waste that
position the immigrant body as out of place and out of time - as back-
wards, illiberal, anti-modern and superfluous. Islam is considered to
reject the values of life itself, representing the threat of death and social
dissolution fundamentally. A weaponised multiculturalism comes to the
fore, with newly concretised demographic blocks quantified and judged
for their lack of integration and degree of separation from British values.
Pre-emptive power
The translation of racial analytics into quantified data has been written
in to core operations of Prevent, with communities and bodies encoded
in the supposed neutrality of algorithms and risk assessment. They
underpinned the development of pre-emptive strategies that have
formed a fundamental tenet of counter-insurgency - to identify threats
and intervene prior to crimes taking place. Emphasising prevention has
facilitated shifts towards the explicitation of pre-emptive power that
could ground anticipatory strategies ‘beyond the threat of violence or
detention? Moreover, the authorisation of coercive action prior to the
manifestation of crime has legitimated the routine elision of legal protec-
tions and processes under the force of national and economic security.
For instance, Tony Blair vividly stated that:
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM »* 101
[w]hat we are desperate to avoid is the situation where at a later point,
people turn around and say: ‘If you'd only been vigilant as you should
have been, we could have averted a terrorist attack.
As a result, terrorism legislation since 2000 and especially under the Ter-
rorism Act 2006, has allowed for suspects to be held without charge for
up to 28 days, people prosecuted for expressing unacceptable opinions
or supporting foreign charities or individuals to be extradited; closed
courts to be used with suspects having access neither to legal representa-
tion nor even to the evidence against them. In this context, as Zedner
writes, ‘the post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly
overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security.»
The anticipatory logics of preventative frameworks rely on the
expanded intelligence-gathering capacities of multiple agencies, together
with the development of ‘crime science’ that analyses datasets to provide
criteria for the determination of threat. Working with theories of radi-
calisation, and with culture already translated into a stand-in for ethnic
background and religion by multiculturalist narratives, systems of risk
assessment are produced. From the CTA to gang databases to CONTEST,
the informational marking and remaking of bodies has been a persistent
feature of the demonisation of racialised communities. The collation
and combination of bits of knowledge under network analysis, risk pre-
diction models and kinships are given meaning as indicators of risk,
whose contingency has worked through colonial logics of the patholog-
ical other. Continuing practices that had been embedded in strategies
of criminalisation and racialised policing, race, ethnicity and religion
became proxies for risk.
The creation of this data relies on the employment of service-providers
as makeshift risk-assessors. For instance, Blair’s 2007 Britain’s Preventing
Violent Extremism programme supported the formation of the database
through partnerships enlisting Muslim community organisations, youth
workers, health workers and teachers to refer through to Channel. The
Prevent Training and Competencies Framework for the NHS opens as
follows:
Prevent is part of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy
CONTEST and aims to stop people becoming terrorists or support-
ing terrorism; as such it is described as the only long term solution
to the threat we face from terrorism. Prevent focuses on all forms of
102 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
terrorism and operates in a pre-criminal space, providing support and
redirection to vulnerable individuals at risk of being groomed in to
terrorist activity before any crimes are committed. [...] Staff must be
able to recognise signs of radicalisation and be confident in referring
individuals who can then receive support in the pre-criminal space.*
Supporting documentation for these partnerships lists signs of potential
radicalisation as: abandoning current associates in favour of a new social
network; experiencing a crisis of identity or family separation; express-
ing real or imagined grievances.” These pre-criminal space operations
then provide the material for a formerly secret government database,
accessible by police and other agencies, of thousands of people referred
through Prevent primarily due to what they were perceived to believe.
Through surveillance, data analysis and categorisation, policing
would reach back from the future to protect against the possibility of
threat. The pre-emptive futurity of Prevent is dependent on seemingly
neutral techniques that attempt to evade any possible characterisation
as racism. However, their technological containment has allowed for the
resurfacing of racialisation inscribed in biological bodies - the potenti-
ality of Muslim extremism hypothetically captured by brain scans, for
example.5* The bedrock of multiculturalism provided the conditions
for these fluid racial torsions. Reinforcing one another, the simultane-
ous concretisation and making fluid of racialisations - of demographic
blocks and algorithmic affinities - converge to produce new forms of
differential racism.
There is substantive evidence that these systems don't just fail to
identify potential threats, but actively hinder the detection of terrorists.*
The sheer magnitude of mass surveillance has seemingly sabotaged the
ability for the state to identify ‘real’ terrorists. For instance, police facial
recognition systems consistently falsely identify non-white faces. Even
more damning is that the tiny number of terrorism-related datapoints
in comparison with the entire dataset leads to a false-positive paradox
- false positives are far more likely to be returned by predictive systems
than true positives. However, predictive analysis is not just a process that
could identify an existing threat, it is inherently productive - working
to piece together and correlate data to define the potentiality of threat.
Since 2015, when Prevent was placed on statutory footing, around twelve
people a day have been referred to Channel. These flows of information
don't just form systems by which people can be enclosed and immobi-
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM * 103
lised, they provide the machinery necessary to produce new forms of
social composition and interaction through statistical affinity and sug-
gestive correlation.
Patterns of movement, content and forms of communication, religion,
downloaded apps, search activity, friendships, facial hair - these reach
beyond phenotypical generalisations to form a constellation of data
through which the Muslim terrorist has been made into a measurable
category. The complex convergence of algorithmic markers and the dis-
tributed responsibility for policing communities has produced abstract
and variable categories for the fluid transcription of race. Submerged
and neutralised, differential racisms haunt our socio-political forma-
tions inherently - they have become ‘both spectral and fractal.°°
In this way, the power of pre-emptive policing is not just constrictive,
it is also productive and flexible. I am thinking of power as an intersub-
jective relation, operating as a background modulation and orientation
of our practices in which a ‘field of responses, reactions, results, and
possible inventions may open up, as Foucault wrote. In this sense,
power operates as ‘a way of orienting bodies in particular ways. As
McCulloch and Pickering write,
The ‘preventive counter-terrorism framework is concerned less with
gathering evidence, prosecution, conviction and subsequent punish-
ment than in targeting and managing through disruption, restriction
and incapacitation those individuals and groups considered to be a
risk.®
Pre-emption operates as an explicit form of control, working not to single
out potential threats so much as gain hegemonic control over the manip-
ulation of the social and political environment for all citizens. Drawing
on Kilcullen’s work, NATO defines COIN as ‘a complex form of security
operations to enable stability using all available instruments of power to
create a secure environment, and to enable promotion of legitimate gov-
ernance and rule of law. This is a far broader aim that that suggested by
typical counterterrorism strategies of unmasking and unveiling. If state
hegemony is the aim of COIN, then its primary achievement would lie
with an ability to conscript the consent and complicity of British citizens
in its broader work.
As Stuart Hall noted, producing hegemony over social order requires
shifting social dispositions within ‘contending forces in a field of struggle
104 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
and the articulation of that field into a tendency:® Central to this
struggle has been the manipulation of economies of fear, as Miller and
Sabir write:
the laws and programmes that underpin these strategies have been
created intentionally and purposefully to coerce and instil fear within
the Muslim community and those who stand with it.°°
If coercion and fear are the intentionally racialised results of Prevent -
rather than its symptoms or side effects — these are predicated on much
broader systems of fear. As discussed previously, the interplay of fear and
threat have reverberated across the post-colonial cut as both the effect
and condition for creating new ‘surfaces or boundaries of bodies and
worlds in the metropole.” In the wake of a ‘failing’ multiculturalism, the
post-colonial dread of intimacy with the unknowable other is increas-
ingly animated by Powellian fears of white genocide, miscegenation
and ruptured borders. Security is the outworking of this aporetic logic,
now finding its figure in the spectre of the terrorist who has ‘taken on a
god-like power, equivalent to the plague of earlier times.
Whilst radicalisation is embedded in segregated communities posi-
tioned as threat, it is also understood as a contagious pathogen. As Jasbir
Puar writes,
Terrorist bodies as a ‘statistical populatio” coagulate through an
imagined worldwide collectivity - the Muslim world - that perversely
transcends national boundaries and is metaphorised through viral
networks of contagion, infection and the frustration generated by
inaccessibility of sleeper cells that need to contact to reproduce them-
selves: rampant, uncontainable, spontaneous.
Muslim populations are concretised as the home of civilian combatants,
whilst these domestic zones also form the contexts in which racialised
presence is forged through algorithmic processes that are not attached
to singular bodies but to probabilistic affinities. Dread is dispersed over
unknowable and invisible threats. Whilst proliferating paranoia in their
failure to capture this invisible enemy, this has also legitimised the infil-
tration of massive yet ineffectual surveillance systems. As such, fear is
dis-located from a specific locus and a specific time, fear is anticipatory
and haunted by the ‘danger of not-knowing.”°
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ° 105
Kilcullen’s ecosystemic approach makes fear become ambient, its
affective economies enveloping us. Fear is unconfined and intensified
by the impossibility of containment. As such, fear is both expansive and
constricting - it upholds the ambitions and incursions of state security
operations whilst constricting and stratifying the movements of their
subjects. These processes may be felt subjectively, but they are objectively
structured — as embodied sensations that reverberate across abstractions
and motile bodies, communities and socio-political structures. The
supposed failures of CONTEST as counterterrorism therefore under-
write its expansion through circuits of racialised paranoia that are fuelled
by the conjoined threats of internal proximity and external intrusion.
SPECTRAL BODIES BECOME BORDERS
I want to end this chapter by considering how bordering practices more
generally fit into the machinery of counter-insurgency. The above shifts
in racialised power help to explain how the COIN has operated within
the context of a Powellian strategy for maintaining Britishness against
an enemy who is reproduced by strategies and economies of fear. In this
section, I consider whether the systems through which national security
is maintained have animated a protectionist framework that might also
be characterised as a form of COIN.
Total policing/total warfare
Counterterrorism provided a route through which counter-insurgency
would continue the erosion of the boundaries between police and
military that had steadily begun in the metropole since the 1980s. The
integration of national security and criminal justice has required coop-
eration across military, policing and public bodies. Operation Nexus,
introduced in London in 2012, embeds immigration officers within
police stations to gather information and identify people who could be
deported even without criminal offence. The operation involves immi-
gration status checks and police-questioning for non-criminal purposes
and without any procedural protection. Through analysis of spent con-
victions, withdrawn charges and police encounters, people who are
classified as ‘high harny threats are then referred to deportation pro-
cedures.”’ Whilst this preventative framework fortifies boundaries and
consolidates segregations on the inside of the state, the integration of
106 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
immigration, police and military also underpins the pursuit of national
security beyond territorial borders.
Since the ‘migrant crises’ of the mid-2010s, the UK has vastly expanded
its involvement in the militarisation of borders of ‘fortress Europe’: in
surrounding non-EU states (Morocco, Turkey and Libya) as gatekeepers
through humanitarian aid; at key migratory routes in northern Africa;
attempted prison-building projects in Jamaica and Nigeria for deporta-
tions of their UK-incarcerated nationals. More broadly, the EU’s Frontex
border management agency has attempted to externalise and outsource
bordering by establishing a system of security enforcement beyond
its territorial edges. Primarily situated in northern Africa, the EU has
exported surveillance technology, engaged in information exchange and
installed border guard units.” Asa result, whilst thousands of people from
sub-Saharan Africa attempt to make their way toward Europe each year,
many are trapped within a northern Africa buffer zone across which the
EU supports detention centres and camps. The EU strategy was perhaps
clearest in the proposed plan to create disembarkation zones that would
immediately return migrant people to their supposed country of origin
in exchange for finance and technological support. Though the project
was ultimately opposed by leaders of African states, similar projects in
Niger and Libya already support migration partnerships with countries
such as Nigeria and Ethiopia to assist the return of migrant people, with
aid often conditional on their cooperation.
Whilst outside of the Schengen zone, Britain is part of the Schengen
Information System. Though Britain only has observer status on the
Frontex management board, it has been active in several operations
throughinformation gathering, assistance and practices ofnon-assistance.
Peripheral member states of the EU such as Hungary and non-European
states such as Libya now pre-empt migration reaching heartland Europe,
acting as ‘wardens of the European border regime’?? Meanwhile, as
Jennifer Hyndman details, the UN has adopted a containment approach
to human displacement since the 1990s, attempting to keep refugees in
their regions of origin through strategies of ‘preventative protection.”* As
of 2017, 30 per cent of global refugees were detained in sub-Saharan
Africa as part of the European Union-African Union-United Nations
joint programme.
At the intersections of foreign action and domestic criminal justice,
bordering becomes productive of the shape of the contemporary nation-
state. Foregrounding this “world-configuring function’ of borders brings
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ° 107
to light the bodies that are reconfigured through these regimes, both
domestically and far outside of British island territories.7> In conse-
quence, as Mbembe writes,
Contemporary movement restrictions are not limited to national
boundaries. They are at work on a global scale. They are deepening the
space and time asymmetries between different categories of humanity
while leading to the progressive ghettoization of entire regions of the
world.”°
Empire and internal colony are intertwined at these sites of bordering
and movement - the detention centre imprisons those subjects who are
situated on the outside of the nation whilst being subjected to the most
vehement force of its sovereignty.
Illegalisation
Policies and practices of securitising borders have progressively remade
refugees as ‘irregular migrants. As Harsha Walia writes, they are:
displaced as a result of the violences of capitalism and empire, and
subsequently forced into precarious labor as a result of state illegaliza-
tion and systemic social hierarchies.”
The Immigration Act 1971 made legalised migration from poorer coun-
tries nearly impossible, with migration often permissible only through
seeking asylum. Nonetheless, Britain does not accept asylum appli-
cations lodged abroad, but neither does it provide aid for travelling to
make the petition in Britain. Moreover, the British visa regime is particu-
larly stringent for countries producing large numbers of asylum seekers
such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria,
Sudan. Within this regime, migrant people without visas are never able
to legitimately enter the UK and so they are produced as illegal migrants
who are not possibly genuine refugees.
The regime relies on the fluidity even of Britain’s physical borders.
For example, according to the 2001 Channel Tunnel Order and 2003 Le
Touquet Treaty, control zones operate between French and UK borders.
Within these zones, either state receiving asylum claims is not required
to process them, and can refuse entry in accord with that state’s immigra-
108 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
tion policies. This allows for the wielding of differential power through
the ability to choose amongst competing state regulations. This means
that migrant people potentially never enter UK territory and so have
no access to the machinery of appeals or other legal aid. The punitive
nature of this border was ramped up in 2014 with the 20 September
joint UK-France declaration to: ‘[s]tem the flow of illegal migration
into Europe [...] deter illegal migrants from congregating in and around
Calais.”* Subsequently, the infamous Calais Jungle was violently dis-
banded in late 2016. This involved substantial police and social abuse
against migrant people, which limited access to shelter, food, healthcare
and clean water - removing drinking fountains from public parks, for
example. As a result, migrant people were forced into public spaces and
informal economies, where they have been subject to regular physical
violence by the police-become-border-guard.
More recently, on 24 January 2019, the UK signed a declaration with
France building on the Sandhurst treaty of 2018. The declaration fore-
grounds additional support for the Centre Conjoint d’Information et de
Coordination who work against irregular migration in northern France
and the Pas-de-Calais, and the National Maritime Information Centre
and Prefet Maritime who will share threat assessment and engage in
joint operations in the Channel. In addition, Britain promised additional
funding of £44.5 million for fencing, CCTV and detection technol-
ogy in Calais and other Channel ports. Whilst this border work makes
migration into Britain more difficult, it does not make it impossible. The
securitisation and expansion of border regimes shape journeys towards
increasing peril, precarity and death. For example, the introduction of
thermal imaging monitoring at British ports has led to people making
the journey over the Channel in refrigerated containers. As direct result
of this, in November 2019, 39 people were found to have suffocated to
death at Purfleet port.
Once physically inside British territory, migrants are subjected to ‘an
active process of inclusion through “illegalisation”.”? Since 2002, asylum
seekers have no longer had the right to work in the UK (or volunteer),
whilst also having differential access to the means of survival such as
healthcare, finance, legal aid and freedom of movement.® In May 2012
coalition home secretary Theresa May told the Daily Telegraph:
The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for
illegal migration. Work is under way to deny illegal immigrants access
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ° 109
to work, housing and services, even bank accounts. What we don’t
want is a situation where people think that they can come here and
overstay because they're able to access everything they need.
The Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016 expanded executive powers
against irregular migrants so that minor crimes are increasingly used as
grounds for deportation or detention. Since 2014, between 12,000 and
15,000 people are forcibly removed from the country each year. Britain
has also seen a dramatic increase in citizen deprivation and nullification
over the past ten years, with nearly 200 cases of nullification occurring
in 2013 alone and many of which were later judged unlawful. Since the
early 2000s, both Labour and Conservative governments have overseen
the mass expansion of immigrant removal centres, with the Home Office
now cataloguing and surveilling all asylum seekers through strategies of
mandatory reporting, asylum housing and electronic tagging.* Tagging
asylum seekers administers a mandatory curfew, with both tagging and
detention having no limit on their duration.
These strategies of illegalisation are enforced by the 27 Immigration
Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams across the UK. The teams
perform raids on residential addresses, often under cover of night, as
well as at restaurants, shops and factories. The latter illegal working raids
see thousands of people arrested each year, the majority of which are
quickly overturned when people are found to be not removable. In these
raids ICE teams often collaborate with employers, with reductions of
fines for employers of illegalised immigrants in return for cooperation.
In 2016 Byron Burgers complied with a plan to lure workers to raids
under the guise of a staff meeting launching a new burger. However, as
leaked Home Office intelligence documents from 2014’s Operation Cen-
turion suggest, the majority of operations begin with uncorroborated tip
offs from members of the public.
As discussed in Chapter 2, Britain has relied upon migration for cheap
labour, and has both enabled transnational capital accumulation and
tacitly accepted irregular migration as part and parcel of this:
Illegal workers are at the heart of the UK economy: building workers,
office cleaners, food pickers and packers, warehouse lifters, drivers
and couriers, the menials in every service industry. The ‘discount’ on
illegal workers makes a fundamental contribution to every business
model.
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With up to 720,000 irregular migrants currently in London, Britain's role
in shaping migration regimes has facilitated the creation of a permanent
and large-scale illegalised workforce. Whilst Britain’s labour needs have
to some extent been satisfied by the eastern expansion of the EU, they
have also been met by irregular migrants who are included in Britain as
economic participants but ‘denied the status of insiders.*
Citizens become police
The intersections of immigration and differential access to the basic
means of survival are firmly built in to the everyday bordering prac-
tices legally required by the Immigration Act 2014. This aimed to ensure
Britain is a hostile environment to immigrants, requiring landlords to
conduct immigration checks and establish that new tenants have the
right to rent in the UK. These checks enact borders across point of access
to shelter, legally backed up with the expansion of deport first, appeal
later policies. As part of this hostile environment strategy, in 2013 vans
were dispersed by the Home Office across London bearing the message:
‘In the UK illegally? Go Home or Face Arrest? Outsourcing specialist
Capita was then charged by the government with sending text messages
telling people “You are required to leave the UK as you no longer have
right to remain:
Bordering, and the socio-political spaces produced through it, cannot
be grasped through the concept of territory — as if space is a container for
organisation and categorisation of exclusions and inclusions.** Borders
are carried by people as they attempt, or are deterred from attempt-
ing, to access welfare, education, health, justice, paid labour, housing.
In this way, bordering practices are productive of pre-crime spaces writ
large. They are produced across vast assemblages of actions, agencies,
objects and affective economies. These pre-crime spaces are differenti-
ated by relative ease of movement - not the end of movement so much
as its channelling, control, stability and flexible adaptation. As Mbembe
writes, this has the effect of making social and physical spaces progres-
sively more viscous and perilous for Black and Brown bodies:
Such bodies are kept shifting between invisibility, waiting and efface-
ment. They are trapped in fragmented spaces, stretched time and
indefinite waiting.*
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ° 111
Economies of fear sustain and give shape to this pre-criminal space
through which certain bodies are bound together, unified and made
intelligible as objects of threat. Not just Muslim bodies, but all migrants
of colour have been produced as an ‘endless series of threats.*°
Complicity in bordering practices is supposedly state enforced, but
it is rendered legitimate under fear of pervasive threat. Even just our
passive consent embeds and institutionalises fear, creating affinities
between certain bodies and the ways in which they navigate social space.
Since we are all implicated within these ecosystems, our engagement -
both with CONTEST and everyday bordering from their distribution to
points of access to state services and workplaces, to announcements of
‘See It. Say It. Sorted’ on our daily commute - maintains a social order
that is required to give stability to their hegemonic power. Implicated
in this landscape of power, we are all involved in some aspects of its
reinforcement, however partial this may be. These complex networks of
insinuation, co-option and pre-emption legitimate pervasive strategies
that declare war on our ‘will to dissent or resist.5”
Pressed towards conscription into total policing, Britain increasingly
witnesses the brittleness of these differential regimes of time and space
as the tendency that turns ‘discounted bodies into borders.®* The social
death and disappearance of precarious citizens transpires alongside the
genocidal tendencies of border regimes. The Mediterranean and Aegean
Seas are mass graves — between 1993 and 2019, at least 36,570 refugee
deaths are attributable to European border policies.*® Empire is acutely
spectral - haunting Britain - not as quantifiable, factual, statistical mass,
but through an experience of loss and disappearance - of extraditions
and deportations - of ‘state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts
to harrowingly haunt a population into submission.”
With national security rewritten as counter-insurgency, this implicates
all citizens into complicity with these massive ecosystems of racialised
power. If Powellian logics reach their apotheosis in bordering as COIN,
then as Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson put it,
White people are not simply those the state protects and serves: white
people are themselves a part of the policing structure, and the notion
of public safety cannot be separated from this deep complicity and
investment in this form of state violence.”
It is here that citizens become police.
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The inexorable logic of spectral empire
Whilst the colonial roots of COIN are readily acknowledged by both
advocates and detractors, it is not uncommon to see explanations of its
failures put down to its unfeasibility outside of the context and support
of colonial institutions and practices. In the above discussion, Ive
argued for a kind of reversal of this position: that the adoption of COIN
as domestic strategy both relied on and reproduced Britain’s internal
colony. But also, in turn, that the refounding of Britain through the
post-colonial cut has found its culmination in COIN.
To consider this history briefly, it should be noted that the ‘successes’ of
mid-century counter-insurgencies like those in Malaya are widely under-
stood to have depended on the promise of Britain’s withdrawal from that
colony. In this light, consider again Fanon’s proposition that ‘the colonial
world is a world divided into compartments’ discussed in Chapter 2. If
my characterisation of Britain’s internal colonies is correct, then these
compartments are fluid, viscous spaces, not frozen but perhaps tending
towards zones of petrification. These spaces are mediated by exclusions
that are not defined only by spatial borders but by more flexible regimes
of space. Broader systems of bordering constituted under COIN work
not only to confine and territorialise people, but ‘to inscribe them into
temporalities and spatialities that are disjointed to the point of giving
these populations the illusion of being territorially separated, as Cédric
Parizot writes.°? These differentiating and disjointed spatio-temporal
regimes are manifest where ‘[d]ivision already exists and is undeniable; it
is embedded in the architectural markers of everyday life in the colony’
Echoing Fanon, the successes of COIN seem, at first glance, to lie in the
absolutisation of this division — the ends of this perpetual war could only
be found in forms of figurative and literal ethnic cleansing.
However, as Fanon goes on, drawing upon Sartre, ‘this general
clean-up destroys the thing one wants to save.* Translating into our
context, the absolute purification and cleansing of Britain of its internal
colonies would be ‘the perpetual absurd temptation of the colonialists.
Even if it were possible, this would ‘amount to the immediate destruc-
tion of colonizatiom.®® As proffered in discussion of the post-colonial
cut above, whilst this might seem prima facie desirable to the Powel-
lian, it is a structural impossibility. The nation narrativised through the
post-colonial cut has been a fabrication reliant on the proliferation of
borders, viscous spaces and differential regimes. Britishness-as-white-
HOMELAND WARFARE AND DIFFERENTIAL RACISM ° 113
ness is possible only in its identification with its other. How could the
Powellian nation possibly give up its logic of existence and condition of
being? The incessant tendency towards purification, containment and
repression is therefore necessarily incomplete. Inescapably haunting the
Powellian project, this incompleteness forms the tension through which
‘were notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much
alive and present, messing or interfering.”
5
Extinction Politics
Existence is resistance
humans should not be at risk of extinction
(Shareefa Energy, ‘Displaced Development’)'
Ihear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements’;
diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about socie-
ties drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions
undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic
creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.
(Aimé Césaire, Between Colonizer and Colonized)
INTRODUCTION
Colonial strategies of regulation, containment and exclusion have
attempted to reproduce Britain as a space primarily for white Britons
against those whose labour, lands and resistance built Britain from the
outset. This has been tangled up with eugenicist approaches to non-
white immigration as a threat to the purity of the nation. These threats
were understood in terms of an alien insurgency and translated into
financialised circuits of extraction and hyper-exploitation, the policing
of Britishness as mode of life, and supposedly race-neutral algorithms of
risk and insecurity.
In this chapter I am interested in recent political formations that have
pitted themselves against a regime of neoliberalism that is supposed to
have been at work since around the mid-1970s. The support for former
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn formed part of a broader socialist project
arising in a context that is frequently associated with hopes for the end
of specific forms of globalist capitalism and a crisis of liberal democracy.
This found its narrative arc in the rise of the right and the idea that we
are witnessing an increased authoritarianism. It has become common-
place to see the root cause of this alleged crisis in post-industrialisation,
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 115
economic downturn, the financial crisis in 2008 and subsequent auster-
ity policies. This section of the left has responded by considering welfare
to be bounded by national territories, and migration to exacerbate our
current crises by driving down wages or using dwindling resources.
In the last 10 years, there has been a gigantic experiment at the expense
of ordinary workers. Countries with vast historical differences in wage
rates and living standards have been brought together in a common
labour market. The result has been sustained pressure on living standards,
a systematic attempt to hold down wages and to cut the costs of social
provision for working people. (Len McCluskey, 20 June 2016)
This presents a very different story about Britain than the one I have
given in previous chapters. The result has been a movement that relies
on the nation-state as its basic political unit, and which, I shall argue,
produces the nation as the horizon for political change. In light of this,
I want to ask how thinking about our central struggle as between neo-
liberal global markets and national welfare has come about; what are its
ramifications; what trajectories does it push us toward?
What there wouldn't be is the wholesale importation of underpaid
workers from Central Europe to order to destroy conditions, particularly
in the construction industry. (Jeremy Corbyn, 23 July 2017)
Ultimately, I shall argue that whilst an increasingly explicit authoritar-
ianism does seem to characterise the trajectories of British politics as
discussed in the previous chapter, this is best explained as a phase change
within the management and control of Britain’s internal colonies and its
coloniality further afield. I first outline how neoliberalism allowed for the
re-forming ofthe geopolitics of the British state. Reliant on logics ofnatural
limits and waste, as well as practices of bordering and hyper-exploitation,
the neoliberal era worked to reproduce a natural order whose globalised
form relies on the sedimentation of the nation-state.
The next Labour government will rebuild communities ripped apart by
globalization. (Labour party, 2017 Manifesto)
The inner-workings of neoliberal capitalism that supposedly led to the
crises driving contemporary politics have been inherently shaped by
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their reliance on the justification for layers of differential exploitation by
a supposedly natural order. This has been enforced through quarantine,
criminalisation, precarity and pre-emptive forms of power working to
produce hierarchical regimes of control.
To win we must revive this progressive patriotism and solidarity in a
form fit for modern Britain. (Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour leadership
pitch, 2019)
In the wake of the 2019 election defeat of the Corbyn-led movement,
hard-fought attempts within the party to shift Labour away from the
horizon of the nation look likely to be set aside. Political pragmatism is
set to pitch an even stronger nation-state that will protect the interests
of working- and middle-class Britons. An embedded imperialism can be
found at the heart of progressive politics: the hegemonic reliance of polit-
ical movements on the everyday imperial practices inside and outside of
the British state that serve to differentiate and control, which form the
necessary condition for Britain’s ongoing sovereignty and citizenship.
... adequate protection and security for its people’s well-being and the
nation’ future - to secure the solutions needed to avert catastrophe and
protect the future. (Extinction Rebellion, 2018)
I finish by arguing that, under discourses of climate crisis, these politi-
cal trajectories risk becoming a cipher for geopolitical reconfigurations
whose end is the lifeboat state. Politics under the horizon of the nation
is thus produced through distributed architectures of sovereignty and
differential governance, and therefore, is in no position to imagine or
practise their undoing.
NEOLIBERAL LIMITS AND LIMITATIONS
There is a narrative becoming commonplace on the left which tells us that
since around the 1970s we have both seen the ascendancy of the total-
ising power of the neoliberal ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’
and that its hegemony is now in tatters.* This relies on a commonplace
view that the neoliberal era was largely consistent with neoclassical
approaches to economy and globalist approaches to trade. For example,
David Harvey argues that:
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The neoliberal label signaled their adherence to those free market
principles of neo-classical economics [...] Neoliberal doctrine was
therefore deeply opposed to state interventionist theories.’
Neoliberalism is very often understood as an embedded set of power
relations that remade society and subjects in the image of the market,
and as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. This leads to the
view that economic rationality is entrenched across all society, in which
humans are remade as homo economicus.
It has been supposed, therefore, that neoliberalism ‘was not inherently
ethnonationalist, authoritarian, or plutocratic, as Wendy Brown puts
it.4 The rise of contemporary forms of nationalism must be ‘profoundly
antagonistic to the neoliberal agenda’ according to Harvey. Implicitly, the
suggestion is that, for the most part, neoliberalism has held nationalist
and racially charged movements at bay, whether working as a civilising
and progressive force for its advocates, or eviscerating the social domain
through the logic of capital accumulation and restoration of class power
for its critics.
Its demise is seemingly evidenced by the nostalgia for a nation-state
pitted against global finance; anti-migrant politics in the name of labour
protection; mainstreaming far right arguments; data-driven immigrant
valuations; anti-Muslim alliances; the resurgence of race science as intel-
lectual discourse. As Will Davies puts it, over the last few years, we have:
witnessed popular movements diametrically opposed to the economic
common sense that has held sway in the UK and US since the 1970s.
These movements are fervently anti-neoliberal [...] inasmuch as neo-
liberalism embeds particular forms of economic rationality.°
What holds these movements together is a political emphasis on nations
and the securitisation of borders over the economic programme of neo-
liberal globalisation.
In this section, I seek to problematise the dramatisation of our
contemporary struggle that is situated in the so-called collapse of neolib-
eralism. To do so, I first provide a counter-narrative of shifts in Britain’s
geopolitical formation under what is commonly called neoliberalism
by highlighting the role of the commons and its limits as inheritor of
Lockean logics of development. I briefly outline how the globalist order
emerging in the 1960s and 1970s emerged as an alibi for the continual
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restoration of natural order tied to neo-imperial power and population
control. Far from dismantling it, these required the restoration of the
state under the post-colonial cut. This has ramifications for under-
standing the economic and political power of Britain in its neo-imperial
global form.
Managing a global commons
In the wake of a decolonised and destabilised world order, the emer-
gence of the idea of a global commons was consolidated in the 1970s
in the context of attempts made by dominant states to create the pos-
sibility for global governance. The concept of the global commons had
emerged from concerns to put in place shared standards for global
trade and international relations that would work through post-Bretton
Woods institutions and the Washington Consensus. Whilst advocates of
globalisation theory have emphasised how this made way for globalised
free markets beyond the limitations of nation-states, this new form of
governance is better understood as locking-in regulatory sovereignty
and anti-democratic movements and promoting global capital mobility.°
New forms of knowledge had emerged that cohered with the idea of a
global commons, emphasising local interaction and ecological inter-
connectedness whilst abjuring top-down interventionism.’? Drawing
on cybernetics and ideas of self-organisation, the image of the world
produced was one of information flows simultaneously breaking down
boundaries across a global ecosystem, whilst also naturalising their
reproduction as the emergent manifestation of underlying processes.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, architects of neoliberalism
like Friedrich Hayek had developed a similar analysis of spontaneous
organisation — of crystals, markets, nature and society. Global order would
emerge from the seeming chaos of local actions. Moving away from neo-
classical models of economic equilibrium that focused on exchange and
allocation, in Hayek’s view the market is a coordinator of information
between agents. Economic significance is tied to the value that individ-
uals place on goods through the expression of their consumption needs.
These are manifested through individual preferences and aggregated
through a system where the market acts as a complex calculation device,
where prices ‘tell the individual how to best contribute to the pool from
which we all draw in proportion to our contributiom* The price system is
therefore both the emergent result of economic practices and their pre-
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 119
condition. According to the theory, when dealing with scarce resources,
huge numbers of people will, without explicit knowledge of that scarcity,
move ‘to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move
in the right direction.’
This model didn’t assume equilibrium like neoclassical economics,
but foregrounded the dynamics between nature and human through
local interactions and feedback loops. As Philip Mirowski puts it, clas-
sical liberal economists like Adam Smith ‘imagined a night watchman
state that would set the boundaries for the natural growth of the market,
like a shepherd tending his flock.*? Core principles of good governance
and liberty would then be set in place by the natural rights of citizens
acting as they should in a liberal society. As such, markets require pro-
tection from state intervention as far as possible, whilst society would be
protected from any potential disruptions of the market by natural rights
and the principle of individual liberty. As described in Chapter 3, the
‘natural order’ comprised freedom for the parochial European as human,
won through spatial and temporal differentiations, racialised segrega-
tion and violent extraction from the non-European other. This relied
on a civilised form of the ‘laws of nature, wielded against the unnatural
order of those produced as other to it.
Working in this lineage, the preservation of regimes of private property
and their inheritance was central to a neoliberal approach to the global
commons. If classical liberalism understood laissez-faire markets as
natural and benevolent entities, then neoliberalism as Foucault observed
‘on the contrary, should be regarded as a call to vigilance, to activism,
to perpetual interventions.* Against the naturalisation of liberalism’s
genocidal freedoms, neoliberal markets were understood to be con-
structed, rather than natural, so requiring vigilance and work to build
and maintain: ‘[iJn no system that could be rationally defended would
the state just do nothing:* The very idea of a free market is based on a
false dichotomy between a state acting or not. Neoliberal markets have
not required state roll-back so much as state-repurposing.
The major economic function of government lies in the organisation of
markets to protect and promote competition by rules developed through
spontaneous organisation. These rules must be implicit in individu-
al’s behaviour and abilities, rather than transparently accessible to the
rational subject or made explicit in public fora. Herein lies Hayek’s appeal
to societal norms and the ‘calming authority of tradition, together with
the injunction that we ‘[t]rust the standards inherited from the past.
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The idea is that social competition has determined the most advanta-
geous norms for our society, selecting abstract social rules through our
individual practices and interactions. These pre-existing norms and
practices have supposedly been articulated and systematised into laws.'4
Even explicit laws and policies are both dependent upon a system of tacit
rules, and productive of knowledge that is tacitly possessed. So it is par-
amount that such knowledge is not disrupted or distorted in such a way
as to prevent the smooth functioning of the free market.
Generalised in Hayek's later work, this made way for a systems ecol-
ogy that fosters the resilience ‘of individuals and social, ecological and
financial systems against unknowable, unpredictable and unmanage-
able catastrophe.'> Whilst nature would no longer provide an alibi for
imperialist capitalism, this shift between liberalism and neoliberalism
was motivated by the conditions under which the spatial and tempo-
ral freedoms of “Western mar could be executed. In the period after the
Second World War, the anxiety expressed on behalf of the neoliberal
Mont Pelérin Society’s (MPS) to wit that ‘the central values of civilization
are in danger’ is explicable against the threat of a decolonising world.'*
The tragedies of neoliberal development
Consistent with this approach to the global commons was its combi-
nation with the idea of natural limits. From the late 1960s, limits on
the commons became popularised as a problem of scarcity of energy
supplies and population excess.’ Garrett Hardin's parable “Tragedy of the
Commons’ (1968) drew on what he called the ‘cybernetics of competition’
to compute the consequences of population growth on ecological equi-
libria. He pictured herdsmen driven by the desire to maximise personal
gain ultimately ruining common pastures for all.
Hardin’s parable was written as a critique of Adam Smith’s doctrine of
laissez-faire, calling attention to the inevitable destruction of common
resources by a rising population. He positioned his work as an ecolog-
ical counterview to Smith, working in later papers to advocate for the
close management of the commons through enclosure and privatisa-
tion. Echoing emergent neoliberal critiques of laissez-faire economies,
Hardin argues that the tragedy of the commons could not be pre-
vented by self-regulation, but required their mandatory enclosure and
privatisation:
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[...] the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under con-
ditions of low-population density. As the human population has
increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after
another."
Whilst officially abjuring Hardin's talk of overpopulation and limits, as
well as his insistence on state coercion as requisite solution, Hardin’s
parable provided neoliberal economists with the justification for inter-
preting scarce resources as common goods.
Together, the notions of ‘global commons’ and ‘limits’ underpinned
a pragmatic approach to international markets and resources as a way
of ‘handling a range of things according to a procedure of abstrac-
tion in which laws, norms, or values are derived from [...] a common
measure.” Supposedly operating across networks that didn’t recognise
nation-state/market distinctions, this approach shifted attention from
the local commons of newly sovereign, decolonised nations to a global
commons and helped to justify interventionist forms of management as
prophylactic measure against those pre-emptively judged to act against
this common measure. What emerged was not a globalised system of
free markets, but the development of neo-imperialist relations across
borders.
Deemed authoritative by the IMF and the World Bank, Hardin's
allegory can be read, speculatively, as a symbol of a neoliberal struggle
to protect global resources against the backdrop of post-war instability,
providing justification for neo-colonial development. Hardin's tragedy
targeted the seemingly inevitable decisions of the global South, of
‘impoverished communities in developed states and the people of the
Third World”? As with neoliberals more generally, Hardin relied on a
characterisation of the human as homo economicus as the universal con-
ditions of all social relations. However, as he made clear, there was a rift
that lay within the concept of the human itself: between the rational
liberal subject and the resource-grabbing other.
The era of structural adjustments, land grabs and militarised inter-
vention was sedimented through these logics. As Rob Nixon argues, the
figure of the herdsman in Hardin’s essay provides this racialised splitting
with its neo-colonial mythos. The herdsman is the symbol of a decolonis-
ing world. Following in the footsteps of Locke, the racialised herdsman
is supposed incapable of the production of private property, now trans-
muted through the rational appropriation of market-based behaviour. In
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this way, Hardin ‘helped vindicate a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby
privatization through enclosure, dispossession, and resource capture is
deemed necessary for averting tragedy.*' Judged out of sync with the
normative order of the global commons, coercion against people in the
periphery was legitimised because they lacked the conscience necessary
for its preservation.
On the latter, the corollary of interventionist economic coercion was
the protectionism we have seen through the development of brutal
migration controls, the proliferation of bordering practices and the
hardening of nation-states as primary political container and agent.
The virulent protection of Britain’s property regimes required not just
the expropriation of global resources, but also their fortification from
possible incursion through the normalization and sanctification of
‘the national exclusion of economic migrants and other nonnationals,
whom they designate as political strangers: The theory of natural
limits espoused by Hardin underpinned arguments for border controls,
whilst discourses of the global commons legitimated international legal
systems that governed the relative freedom of movement. For advocates
of limits, the neo-Malthusian resurfacing of the population question
was directed primarily at movements of populations across borders.
Migration was an unnatural motor of population growth with poorer
immigrants’ infiltration of wealthier countries creating the conditions
for the disastrous breakdown of the supposedly natural limits defined by
territorial borders.”
‘PROGRESSIVE’ LEFT NATIONALISM
With this context in mind, let us consider how recent political move-
ments have relied on the nation as their basic political unit as supposed
protection against neoliberal globalism. In this section, I suggest that
there has been a strong tendency within left state politics that implic-
itly relies on neo-Malthusian logics of natural limits and the naturalised
nation-state. Not only a limit to the political imagination, the nation is
reproduced as horizon for political thought and policy.
Economic nationalism
I am primarily interested in tendencies towards nationalism in the state-
based movement within and around the Labour party that attempted
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to push it towards a specific form of socialist politics.*4 Its make-up can
be characterised by the intersection of traditional left stalwarts of the
Labour party (Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Seamus
Milne) together with Len McCluskey of Unite union and Jon Lansman of
Momentum, newer Members of Parliament such as Rebecca Long-Bailey,
and popular approaches to post-capitalism influenced by Paul Mason,
Novara Media, Owen Jones, and Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek. Not so
much a doctrine, but a collection of loose affiliations and antagonisms,
there are a number of strands to this new socialism, many of which are
antagonistic to one another. Moreover, given the spectacular defeat of
what has been termed ‘Corbynisny in the 2019 general election, I want
to avoid any simplistic autopsy of political failure. In what follows, then,
I am concerned primarily with a particular set of political trajectories
within the political left. For want of a better phrase, I shall refer to the
alliance of these trajectories as the ‘progressive left. Their alignment cer-
tainly found focus in Corbynism, but has arguably been more evident
since his resignation.
The political trajectory I have in mind turns on a characterisa-
tion of neoliberalism cohering with those presented and countered in
the previous section. What emerges is an increasingly common-sense
critique of neoliberal capitalism, focusing on disaggregating forms of
governance such as those enacted through debt and austerity. This is
to be rectified, so the thought goes, by aggregating forms of action and
policy under the rubric of renationalising provision of health, education,
childcare and income, and returning control of the economy to local and
national scale. At the core of this position is, as Matt Bolton and Freder-
ick Harry Pitts write,
...a steadfast faith in the ability of the nation-state to eradicate ine-
quality and poverty through a radical programme of intervention in
the domestic economy.”
The guiding suggestion is that nation-states are the most viable vehicle
for the protection of workers in resistance to capital.
The proposed form of this economic nationalism is such that the reg-
ulation of capitalism requires the strengthening of the state as ultimate
arbiter of production, circulation and distribution. Such a project
would therefore likely require some form of ‘delinking from the global
economy, in order to reclaim the national economy ‘as a site of demo-
124 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
cratic politics:*° Under the weight of arguments against imposed austerity
measures, increased state oversight over capital flows is promoted as
means to decelerate capitalist speculation seen to be at the root of our
current crises. As Jamie Marchant describes, this would involve ‘sub-
ordinating financial institutions to the national state by withdrawing
or sheltering them from the world market.’” The effects of this kind
of project were made explicit by Paul Mason's discussion of a socialist
economic strategy:
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. This is a programme to save democracy, democratic
institutions and values in the developed world by reversing the 30-year
policy of enriching the bottom 60% and the top 1% of the world’s pop-
ulation. 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.”*
This is a protectionist programme to regulate capital inflows and
outflows, which is consistent with a view of neoliberalism as unfettered
corporate globalism that has undermined national welfare.
Inextricable from this programme, though not always explicitly con-
joined with it, have been arguments for the end of the free movement of
labour.”® Subsequent to the Brexit referendum, the Labour party 2017
manifesto pledged to end free movement from the EU regardless of Brexit
negotiations, with a policy more extreme than their Conservative oppo-
sition. These arguments for immigration controls found justification
primarily in the suggestion that immigration drives up unemployment
and depresses wages for ‘ordinary’ workers. When questioned about
Labour’s position on freedom of movement in 2017, Corbyn answered
‘[w]hat there wouldn't be is wholesale importation of underpaid workers
from Central Europe in order to destroy [working] conditions, particu-
larly in the construction industry.*° Len McCluskey of the union Unite
has similarly argued that the needs of working people require greater
controls over labour flows, and the stability of communities."
Under these logics, freedom of movement is made synonymous with
flows of capital and labour. In response, the left economic project has
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therefore emphasised controls over both. These controls are supposed
to protect nationally produced wealth and to prevent jobs sliding away
from localities.3* The framework through which this is squeezed is
that of a nation-state as a defined boundary that could protect against
fluctuating financial systems and foreign capital investment. But this
misunderstands the ways that a strengthened nation-state was already
forged in the fire of neoliberalism, and not its antidote.
Borders, finance and risk
As described in Chapter 2, whilst financialisation operates as a disci-
plinary practice across national lines, it is neither reducible to abstract
economies nor does it simply elide borders. Put simply, financialisation
relies on a calculus of risk on anticipatory value. This is grounded in
loans, often in the form of investments, and these require the prolifera-
tion of limits (including borders) to produce asymmetries along which
risks are calculated and punitive measures exercised. For this reason,
regimes of indebtedness in the decolonising world operated to open up
newly sovereign nation-states to the influx of financial speculation and
resource extraction in the same moment as border regimes were strength-
ened allowing that power to be wielded.
Capital inflows into Britain continue to rely upon globally distrib-
uted supply chains, transnational ownership and the financial relations
between them. Maintaining all of these requires an operation that works
with the affordances of borders and limits. These affordances rely upon
the highly differentiated nature of borders and connections, as Doreen
Massey writes:
Different social groups and different individuals are placed in very
distinct ways in relation to [...] flows and interconnections. This point
concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn't, although
that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation
to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct
relationships to this anyway - differentiated mobility: some are more
in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others
don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are
effectively imprisoned by it.?
126 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
The management of these relative flows relies upon a vast global
machinery of transnational controls, differential laws and policies, and
integrated technologies and information systems. The previous chapter
also showed how the management of this machinery relies on regimes of
fear, violence and surveillance.
As described above, neoliberal attempts to manifest a system of global
commons involved international border policies that set out to manage
resource, capital and labour movement. In part what these achieved were
asymmetries across relationships and borders in order to produce surplus
value. Allowing for the continuation of imperialism under the regime of
neoliberalism, their aim was to appropriate value and resources from the
global periphery. For example, we often see the periphery depicted as a
hamstrung and damaged world that is in need of development. Against
these standard narratives, which focus on aid from OECD to non-OECD
countries, disparities are in part preserved by vast transfers of value in
the opposite direction - via unequal exchange, transfer pricing, income
and capital flows, and seigniorage — estimated at around £3.8tn each year.
These are cross-border flows of profit, interest and rent that fundamen-
tally rely on the relative fluidity and porosity of borders to differentially
include and connect. Disparities in production costs and local workers’
rights in the periphery are essential to the accumulation of capital in
the imperial core. As Mark Graham and Mohammed Anwar describe in
their analysis of the global gig economy:
...a planetary market doesn’t do away with geography; it rather exists
to take advantage of it [using] uneven geographies to facilitate labour
arbitrage, cross-border competition.**
With bordering not spatially fixed but operational across our lives, these
regimes sediment perverse hierarchies through the abstraction of risk
into political and financial speculation. For instance, financial specu-
lation drives inter-state agreements such as those between Britain and
Africa as well as developing supply chains across borders. These work
together with attempts to manage a migrant labour supply that can be
stemmed and diverted by detention camps and border policies. Labour
arbitrage is therefore made possible through regional and intra-state
competition and capital flight that dismantles the possibility of localised
labour power. The proliferation of comparative limits is part of the struc-
ture through which financial speculation has been made possible.
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In shifting towards the fluidity and flexibility of spatial regimes,
‘cross-border operations, as Angela Mitropoulos terms them, have
become central to the coalition of capital and state.?> The transfer of value
from the periphery to Britain is primarily achieved through interna-
tional trade under the tendency to equalise rates of profit. Global trade in
goods and services has the appearance of equality of exchange. However,
the equalisation of profit rates is set by competition in markets that are
shaped by unequal development and border protections. As a result, on
top of the surplus-value extracted in the periphery, an additional portion
is extracted by the imperial core. This portion has steadily risen since the
19708, with hyper-exploitation one of its major drivers — both inside and
outside of British shores. The public-private partnerships that I have dis-
cussed throughout, but particularly in the context of bordering, similarly
clarify the ways that borders are vital to transnational regimes in which
spatio-temporal differences, legal relationships and affective regimes are
capitalised upon both financially and politically.
As Nadine El-Enany argues, Britain’s immigration and national-
ity laws can be understood as an attempt to draw a border around the
spoils of British colonial conquest as a final act of colonial theft.3” The
above analysis also shows that such ‘theft’ is ongoing - Britain's borders
continue to ensure unequal exchange. Under the auspices of what many
writers have termed neoliberalism, the twin logics of a global commons
— as universalised common rule - and natural limits - as differen-
tially prescribed - conspired to manage ongoing resource extraction
and protectionist bordering. This has included the conditions through
which currency variations, different laws and production costs, offshore
manufacture and the making of hyper-exploitable groups of people
are facilitated by borders, territorial limits and market segmentations
by ‘trading on ranked differences.3* In analysing how these operations
involve both connections and boundaries, what emerges is a picture of
neo-imperialism that has been grounded on the management and orien-
tation of global movements of capital, goods and people. For this reason,
the era has witnessed dominant states not just protecting but shaping
and producing both markets and borders.
Lean exploitation
To put this succinctly: proliferating borders have been fundamental to
the manifestation of neoliberal forms of capitalism, which are better
128 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
understood in terms of neo-imperialist relationships of dependency.
However, this characterisation has remained largely absent from the
analysis of neoliberalism underpinning the progressive left. This is par-
ticularly apparent in arguments regarding the influx of immigrants
depreciating the wages of ‘native-born workers. These replace analysis of
power, finance and extraction across massive-scale circulations of extrac-
tion, accumulation and consumption ‘with national aggregates of wage
and employment rates that give the impression of a well-defined uni-
formity among workers within nation-states.*° With neo-Malthusianism
barely left implicit, the production of ‘surplus populations’ is then con-
sidered in relation to the ‘carrying capacity’ of a mystificatory notion of
national economy. Increases in population size are understood as a deter-
mining factor for wage and employment levels on the nation’s interior
rather than being considered one cog in the complex machinery of global
capital relations.
This kind of argument has become practically chapter and verse
across the political spectrum, where, supposedly, advocates from ‘Karl
Marx to Milton Friedman, have agreed that an over-supply of labour
depresses wages.*? The apparently Marxist suggestion is that flows of
capital tend towards the production of a reserve army of labour required
as a condition for expanded production as discussed in Chapter 2. This
surplus population is, therefore, intimately linked to the capitalist accu-
mulation cycle, as surplus to capital’s need to produce value at a specific
time. However, as Mitropoulos argues, this fails to support the analysis
that migrant people lower ‘native’ wages, in the main because it does
not account for the relative nature of the surplus populations of workers.
Any reserve army is, for Marx, always an artificial overpopulation that
is endogenously indexed to the dynamics of capitalism at work in a par-
ticular context. These dynamics involve wage-setting through politically
secured exploitation that has segmented labour markets and ensured
that wages for white Britons are incrementally far higher than racially
cheapened labour in Britain and across the periphery.**
A more nuanced account of surplus populations can be found in the
stream of post-capitalist and post-work literature that has influenced the
progressive left. There, the suggestion is that we ought to consider how
neoliberal economies have increasingly expelled labour from the formal
wage. The redistribution of wealth upwards since the 1980s has polar-
ised income and led to rising levels of unemployment and precarious
work. These result from the combination of automation of low-wage jobs
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 129
and the outsourcing of median wage jobs to dominated nations together
with the disaggregation of labour power - both by political force and
by labour sector differentiation and working conditions.* It is these
specific conditions rather than the shaky abstractions of population size,
which have resulted in the increase of temporary and precarious work.
Through the gig economy, or platform capitalism, as Nick Srnicek terms
it, we are witnessing an increasingly precarious proletariat and increas-
ingly informal economies.*?
However, as discussed in Chapter 2, the mechanisms through which
surplus-value is produced require us to also understand practices of the
dehomogenisation of the proletariat - something which is often only
alluded to in post-work discourse. Consider, for example, the make-up of
precarious workers. In 2017, Black and Minority ethnic people in the UK
were over twice as likely to be unemployed as white people.** At almost
all qualification levels, white people were more likely to be employed
in 2017 than people classed as Black and of Minority ethnicity.4° To
draw on the arguments of Chapter 2, any suggestion that automation
and the neoliberal disaggregation of labour power has made for the pro-
duction of a relative surplus population of potentially proletarianised
wage-labourers necessarily requires taking into account the mechanisms
establishing racialised groups as redundant and pathologised citizens
from the outset. Far from automation smoothing out these discrepan-
cies, it is much more likely that they will be exacerbated further.
Precarious workers have been continually funnelled into specific econ-
omies without workers’ rights or access to welfare, hence underwriting
unequal exchange within the territories of nations. This is not the case
by necessity, rather it has been produced by the continuities and ruptures
with empire to subsidise the metropole and create hyper-exploitable
groups of people within and without of British shores. As argued in
Chapter 2, far from driving down wages, the classification of migrants
was a condition of the possibility for relatively stable wages and asset
ownership by subsidising labour and capital for the largely white middle
classes. Obscuring this, discussions of surplus populations tend to figure
the differential exploitation of migrant people as only a collateral effect
of capitalism, whose universal drive to accumulate goes unquestioned.
However, these shifts relied on the sedimentation of people into a sup-
posedly natural order of classification in which certain people have been
deemed out of place: bodies that have become borders in regimes of
modulation, precarity and hyper-exploitation.
130 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
As Srnicek points out, whilst the confluence of automation with plat-
form capitalism creates a distinct set of affordances, the dynamics of
lean platforms such as Uber and Amazon's Mechanical Turk are best
understood as exacerbating techniques that are familiar to other forms
of precarious labour.** By consolidating precarious contracts between
labour and capital with workers figured as independent contractors,
these platforms expand and centralise labour markets that have often
been informal, filled by migrant populations, and characterised by poor
working conditions and rights. As described throughout this book, the
conditional entry and citizen-status of migrant workers coupled with
their exclusion from workers’ rights and welfare has been a consistent
feature of post-war British economies. It is unsurprising, then, to find
that jobs characterised by precarity and lack of rights are twice as likely to
be filled by Black and Minority ethnic people than white workers. Of an
estimated 1.1 million people on zero-hour contracts, a quarter are Black
or Asian (who make up approximately 13% of the overall population).*”
Excluded from, or marginalised within, traditional labour markets, racial-
ised groups continue to be pushed into forms of employment with fewer
rights, less security, lower pay and less likelihood of career advancement.
Lean platforms do, however, afford the ability for employers to engage
in labour arbitrage by outsourcing workers and offloading costs, with
Uber, for example, requiring workers to provide vehicles, their mainte-
nance and insurance. More importantly perhaps, these platforms enforce
a degree of formality upon an informal economy. For example, they
often require the use of tracking technologies and bank accounts, whilst
continually allowing for the extraction of data across the platform with
a ‘layer of pervasive surveillance’** For all of the promise that the future
of work will be characterised by the gig economy, lean platforms have
seen relatively small increases in labour force share in the UK, with only
around 3.9 per cent of the labour force working through lean platforms
at least once a week.*? In other words, platform capitalism functions as
adjunct to capitalism proper, continuing to take advantage of, and repro-
ducing, the precarity and hyper-exploitability of disproportionately
racialised groups of people.
Platform Keynesianism
Thinking about our current predicament as a struggle against globalised
finance and the free movement of labour potentially reproduces the
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 131
logics of neo-imperial forms of capitalism. The ongoing exploitation of
migrant workers has been necessary to carve out the category of citizens
who would benefit from the progressive political project:
The strategies and technologies which define them (their containment
within informal economies; the random policing which maintains
them in a position of vulnerability) are also implicated in the con-
stitution of insider-citizens, whose relative privilege now reflects the
specific practices made possible in and through the spaces of the
global political economy.*°
The reliance on this deployment of colonial distinctions and practices to
remake ‘insider-citizens’ is perhaps most evident in the rush to recentre
a ‘white working class: Focusing on economic anxieties caused by aus-
terity since 2008, the white working class have been consistently framed
as those ‘left behind’ by global neoliberalism.”
According to Mason, the vote to leave the European Union was an
expression of wider social attitudes that define this bloc of British voters:
...unsettled by high inward migration, turned-off by the cosmopoli-
tan lifestyle of big cities, apt to call middle class people ‘luvvies’ - as
the Sun does every day - proud of their industrial past and deter-
minedly patriotic.>
Invoking this patriotic and nationalist group of people follows an
emerging consensus that left politics needs to pay attention to ‘legitimate
concerns’ regarding the protection of national sovereignty, opposition to
immigration and British values. As a result, policies aimed at protecting
the economy of the British nation-state have often focused on support-
ing this alleged social bloc. This was made clear by Labour’s 2017 Build it
in Britain Again campaign, which intended to galvanise British produc-
tion against a reliance on cheap foreign labour and global capital.*3 These
policies are inextricable from neo-Malthusian complaints regarding the
population growth of migrant workers. As Mason put it, they are required
to ‘meet the objections of low-paid workers to wage suppressiom.**
As Labour approached the 2019 general election, movements within
the party fought to reverse the 2017 policy on ending free movement.
This resulted in the passing of a conference motion to extend free
movement, close detention centres and award equal voting rights to all
132 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
UK residents. However, the victory was short-lived in terms of affecting
party policy. Lost in a storm of voter pragmatics and union wrangling,
the position did not even make it to the election manifesto. The fallout
of the election defeat looks incredibly likely to entrench this trajectory, as
Labour under Corbyn is narrated as too far removed from the concerns
of white working classes regarding immigration and multiculturalism.
As Unite leader Len McCluskey put it, the party emphasised liberal
values such as ‘openness, tolerance, human rights’ at the expense of the
‘traditional’ working class who ‘have their own values of solidarity and
community. In the wake of the defeat, prominent voices on the left
such as Michael Walker and Thomas Fazi seized the opportunity to make
the case that opposition to immigration should not be likened to racism,
and that we should accept that national identity is the basis for any form
of socialist politics. To win, apparently Labour should resolutely reject
a ‘woke-liberal’ approach to borders, immigration and sovereignty, and
focus on state security and civic nationalism.*°
In this vision, migrant workers are bodies out of place, in a wholly
distinct category to the white working class. The naturalisation of this
distinction is prerequisite for arguments regarding the struggle for scarce
resources to even get off the ground. For instance, every substantive
proposal for Labour's ‘radical’ economic policies of a universal basic
income or citizen dividend is in reality far from universal. Rather, they
proscribe provision to recent migrant people until they have proved
national allegiance through work or length of residence. The question of
the global flows through which a surplus is produced so that it may be
distributed to British people is not even mooted in these analyses, nor is
the subsidising of British workers by empire, ongoing neo-colonial
extraction, and migrant labour.
Politics under the horizon of the nation thus necessitates the erasure
of hyper-exploitation and strategies of ongoing colonialism in order to
frame a proletariat as both homogenised and delimited by territorial
borders. Unlike Srnicek’s more nuanced analysis, the production of
relative surplus populations typically becomes another argument for the
control and scapegoating of migrant workers in the context of suppos-
edly dwindling resources. What results is a project that circumscribes
equality and welfare within territorial borders, together with a secession-
ist fiscal policy underwritten by a moral economy of naturalised limits.
The strengthened ‘socialist’ state would therefore operate much like
a state monopoly through which the state would extend its control over
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 133
populations.*” Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski have argued that this
kind of socialist state has been made possible through shifts in increased
automation and platform capitalism, readying large-scale monopolistic
companies for state takeover.>* In this vision, a strong state is required
to nationalise services and industry, to promote alternative models of
ownership, and to shift decarbonisation from private companies to solve
climate change. Since practically all of Britain’s problems are chalked up
to globalised financialisation, the strong state is required for social sta-
bility, and contemporary socialism takes the form of a kind of platform
Keynesianism. For example, the decision by Transport for London in
2017 to potentially suspend Uber’s licence to operate in London was
hailed as a necessary step towards socialist monopoly by Mason, who
stated that:
Transport for London finally gets tough with Uber. There are some
good minicab firms that play fair by the rules. Let’s have a single, free
public minicab booking app for London.°*?
The safety of Uber users was cited as amongst the central reasons for
the suspension. The platform allows unauthorised drivers to upload
photographs to authorised drivers’ accounts. Uber drivers had used the
loophole allowing undocumented workers to share or rent accounts.°°
TfLs decision was exacerbated by the inability to monitor Uber due to its
use of the encrypted software Greyball that could push different versions
of the app to different users. The implications are clear: the layers of
pervasive surveillance enabled by Uber should be transparent to state
monitoring, and the systems through which undocumented workers
have been able to attain access to lean platforms should be shut down.
The framework of the nation is the central imaginary of this approach
to socialism. Focusing on a central antagonism between national capital
and international capitalist competition, socialism is rewritten as national
protectionism. Under these conditions, the political imaginary is limited
to building social institutions and movements inextricably tied to the
form of the nation, with their protection, preservation and reproduc-
tion made synonymous with national interest. Nonetheless, in even the
most mundane operations of everyday life, British economy and politics
are rooted in cross-border operations. Ultimately, progressive leftism
would exacerbate the racial stratification and differential precarity of
relative surplus populations. Without actively undermining a geopolitics
134 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
productive of unequal exchange, a state monopoly over increasingly con-
centrated economic power would be inextricable from the protection of
a highly differentiated surplus population, whilst ratcheting up border-
ing, securitisation, regimes of risk and violent exclusions.
EXTINCTION POLITICS
In this section, I trace the fault lines of the characterisation of struggles
against globalised markets as productive of a strengthened state and the
sedimented imaginary of the nation as the political horizon determin-
ing the boundaries of possibility. As described over the past chapters,
these trajectories were forged through immigration policies and colonial
practices since the middle of the twentieth century, but here they tend
towards a politics of elimination that has become increasingly intense.
The resurgence of the drive towards the restoration of the natural order
makes explicit an underlying logic of people out of place.
Increasing surveillance, making temporary
Suggestions for policy after Brexit shifted over the moves between the
tenure of Theresa May and Sajid Javid as prime minister and home sec-
retary, respectively, to Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. However, Johnson
continued May’s insistence on a return to a ‘one-nation’ conservatism,
which promotes a far more explicitly interventionist government than
is familiar to those typically associated with the neoliberal state. Plans
suggest not the ending of the movement of workers but an increasingly
controlled and highly differentiated spatio-temporal regime brought
under closer state management.
Changes in migration policy after Brexit have often been presented as
simply expanding what is currently policy for non-EU migrant people to
those from the EU. At present, Britain has a tiered point-based system
for non-EU migrant people that assesses English language skills,
company sponsorship and salary threshold. Under the euphemistically
named ‘skills based’ immigration system, EU free movement would be
ended whilst remaking migration under a single system that is grounded
in the assessment of skilled workers and employer sponsorship. However,
this is distinct from current policy for non-EU migrant people, which
takes a decentralised approach that allows employers to decide whether
or not somebody is qualified for a specific job.*' Decision-making would
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 135
be brought directly under the power of a branch of the state, whilst
allowing an income threshold of £30,000 to decide migrant numbers.
Under home secretary Priti Patel’s proposals, this will be expanded to put
in place a ‘point based system’ following that in use by the Australian
government. This moves away from the kind of market-based allocation
of the prior incumbent's skills-based approach to a more careful manage-
ment system for different industries and different needs. As such, the
state would have much more direct and unmediated control over those
desiring to cross its borders and to work in Britain. Both approaches also
allow for lower-skilled migrant workers under more stringent limita-
tions to work on temporary visas of up to twelve months.
Motivated by calls to restore order to ‘natural’ increases in the size of
the labour force over ‘unnatural’ shifts due to immigrant workers, Priti
Patel in her speech at the 2019 party conference called to ‘end freedom of
movement once and for all. However, this should not be misunderstood
as the end of movement altogether. Instead, the call seeks to augment
and quantify stratifications across the migrant workforce. The proposed
shifts in policy afford an assemblage of power and interests across state(s)
and (trans)national corporations to more tightly survey, orient and cali-
brate the movement of people across and inside territories. Proposals to
control immigration for highly skilled, or points-scoring, migrant people
allow the state to intervene in defining their parameters and demograph-
ics. Under a self-fulfilling set of purportedly neutral criteria regarding
intelligence and appropriateness, this serves instead to reify racial ana-
lytics as ‘data. Shifts towards a state-controlled point-based system allow
for the shaping of the race and religion of migrant people, whilst also
offloading the costs of training higher-skilled migrant people to their
countries of origin.
Supplementing these migration controls will be the increase of tempo-
rary and conditional statuses on migrant people, whilst operating under
a much more closely guarded system of control and management. There
will be an expansion of seasonal worker, overseas domestic worker and
tied visas, the former two granting rights to stay in the country for a
maximum of six months to a specific employer (though under certain
controlled conditions this may be transferable), and the latter tying
workers to a specific employer and location. Whilst some roles such as
farm labour have been filled primarily by Eastern European workers,
after Brexit it is likely that Britain will look further afield for these tem-
porary roles. Two recruitment operators, Concordia and Pro-Force, were
136 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
contracted by the Home Office to manage a pilot scheme for identifying
migrant workers from outside of the EU for seasonal work on a Tier 5,
six-month visa.
As they currently operate with very little oversight, the temporariness
and precarity of these forms of migrant employment have often led to
substantive physical and economic abuse with little supervision. Their
precarity exacerbates the potential for exploitation by tying workers to
specific employment conditions with little recourse against them, since
workers face deportation at the termination of contract. These condi-
tions are likely to worsen as the ability for these workers to access support
and welfare diminishes or is more tightly controlled. For example, NHS
Improvement which currently implements upfront charges in the NHS,
are piloting a programme for assessing creditworthiness by sharing iden-
tifiable data with private company Experian. The immigration health
surcharge already operates a form of double taxation by requiring
migrant workers, whose taxes contribute to the NHS, to pay a premium
for healthcare. Increasing temporary and conditional migrant employ-
ment thus prevents more people from accessing claims on the state or on
corporations whilst maintaining regimes of fear and disposability
through the sedimentation of citizenship hierarchies. This would pro-
duce a highly controlled and hyper-exploitable labour force that is
precluded access to basic welfare or employment rights and who can be
easily repatriated.
Repatriating citizens
The repatriation of migrant workers has become ever more possible
through changes in policy, trans-agency collaboration and experimen-
tation with legal and alegal procedures. One way this has been manifest
is the more substantive targeting of homeless people and rough sleepers
in collaboration with charities providing immigration support. Amongst
others, the Home Office collaborated with the Salvation Army and St
Mungos charity for the homeless in central London, both of which are
positioned as offering safe spaces for asylum seekers and homeless people.
Whilst posing as charity support staff, state delegates ran sessions with
both organisations that targeted precarious migrant people. ICE teams
have also ramped up collaboration with private businesses, leading to
coordinated raids on subcontracted workers across Amazon warehouses
in the south of England, for instance. There are also trials to link street
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fingerprint scanning with immigration enforcement as part of the
growing redeployment of police as internalised border control.
Whilst these practices more pervasively survey, target and single out
migrant people, state powers to repatriate have been enhanced over a
number of years. The 2014 Immigration Act provided the ability to make
naturalised Britons stateless if the British state thinks it is possible that
person can become a citizen elsewhere. By their design these powers are
self-selecting for non-white citizens. They are enforced through infra-
structures for massive-scale deportations: charter flights; private security
firms; partnership schemes between Britain and countries via trade; the
use of ICE raids to identify people without full evidence of nationality.
Since removals on charter flights began in 2001, there have been around
28,283 removals on 798 flights.
Light has recently been shed on these practices most visibly in the case
of the Windrush scandal in 2018. This involved the wrongful detention
and attempted repatriation via deportation of people who migrated from
the Caribbean before 1973. Deprivation of citizenship is not uncommon
and has been steadily rising, with 104 people deprived of British citi-
zenship in 2017, up from 14 in the previous year. In 2013, then home
secretary Theresa May announced the idea that ‘citizenship is a privilege,
not a right, and the Home Secretary will remove British citizenship from
individuals where she feels it is conducive to the public good to do so.
This privilege of British citizenship has been enforced by the testing of
state powers in what Nisha Kapoor has called ‘experimental authoritari-
anism.® It has led to the increased precarity of the status of certain kinds
of British citizens, with cases such as the Windrush scandal, for Kapoor,
functioning as an alibi for creeping totalitarianism. Executive powers are
tested that have the potential to fulfil the anti-immigrant projects under-
lying British nationalism.
This is lent support by the previous chapter's analysis of Britain’s
national project as a form of COIN. Increasingly, this tends not towards
purification through the end of immigration, but towards the restora-
tion of a natural order both inside and outside of territorial boundaries.
Policies of migrant control and repatriation on the one hand, and policies
attempting to attract temporary workers on the other may appear to be
contradictory, but they are better understood as a productive tension.
We are seeing a series of moves towards the intensified temporariness,
control and precarity of racialised people's ability to live and work in
Britain. This trajectory was put in place decades ago: to reproduce
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people, not just as an undeserving poor under pressure of the production
of surplus populations, but as a hyper-exploitable and expendable poor
to be repatriated as deemed necessary. The ends of this surplus are not
proletarianized exploitation, but elimination, exclusion and the depriva-
tion of citizenship.
The horizon of extinction
At Heathrow a potential third runway has become a site of controversy
after the British parliamentary declaration of the climate crisis as a state
of emergency, a successful legal case against it, and a long appeals process.
Heathrow is already the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions
in the UK, with aviation set to contribute more than any other sector
by 2050. In travelling to Harmondsworth on train and bus and foot, the
region is littered with signs protesting the building of a third runway.
Its stakeholders are not just owners of capital but also unions in thrall
to the protection and production of British jobs. The expansion would
mean the destruction of the detention centre, to see its re-emergence on
recoded greenbelt land likely slightly further north.
The runway would increase Heathrow’s carbon emissions by approx-
imately 40 per cent, yet they will appear as zero on the balance sheet.
Tackling climate change has, for a long time, involved the acceptance
of net-zero targets. These have incentivised creative carbon accounting,
greenwashing and eco-sensitive fossil fuel companies. It is likely that,
in part, Heathrow’s future will look toward liquid natural gas (LNG) to
cope with emissions targets. LNG is hailed by many in the global North
as an ecological salve, becoming known as clean fossil fuel, whilst its
CO, emissions are still 81 per cent of those of oil. The shift from fossil
oil to LNG is set to be the new, greener, aeronautical fuel that will power
charter flights to cleanse the British nation from the supposed destabili-
sation of migrant bodies.
Its extraction is an instance of the continuation of informal imperial
intervention operating via coalition in places that Britain never formally
colonised like Mozambique. As Idai struck in the north of the country, the
capital Maputo saw financiers and executives from the oil industry meet
to flesh out plans for a massive-scale project in the north of Mozambique
to extract and export LNG in tandem with the Mozambique government.
Whilst few LNG projects have been approved globally, for US company
Andarko Petroleum, the Rovuma Basin is set to transform Mozambique
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into a leading global energy supplier. Central to the project is Andarko’s
building an LNG export facility on the coast in Cabo Delgado, expected
to export up to 23 million metric tons of LNG per year.
LNG wont just be used for our planes; we will cook with it and heat
our homes as well. Centrica, whose headquarters are in Windsor, Berk-
shire, are the largest domestic energy supplier in the UK. A month or
so before Idai, they confirmed the ongoing purchase of massive quan-
tities of LNG from the project, in a 20-year-long contract. Operating
under British Gas, the Centrica contract interweaves our homes with
the fishing grounds being destroyed, with Quirimbas National Park (a
UNESCO biosphere reserve of coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds)
being threatened. With projects begun before environmental impact
assessments were made, dredging, waste disposal and the immediate
and after-effects of construction will destroy endangered plant and
animal species.® Oil spills and chemical and waste leaching are likely,
toxic compounds used in lubricating drilling machines will become
intricated into the food web, and there will be a significant increase in
methane emissions.
To offset emissions, these fossil fuel companies plan to plant forests
in the region. Rather than protect ecosystems that already absorb emis-
sions, offsetting incentivises quick-fix compensation schemes, with
tree plantations that reduce biodiversity on expropriated land. These
creeping acts of assault on land are coupled with the forced displace-
ment of people. Geographies of historical colonialism give shape to
these forces that divide and destroy land and lives once again. Some of
the machambas (farmlands) onto which the project is moving people
are not arable because they had been degraded by colonial cotton
plantations.
These interventions materially contribute to the conditions that
lead to people’s movements through Africa and towards Europe - their
movement propelled and shaped by neo-imperialism. This meets the
sharp edge of purposive extinction in the exacerbations of climate
change and the offsetting of carbon emissions to dominated nations. For
example, Britain is the largest net importer of emissions per capita in
the G7 group of wealthy nations, mostly due to its importing of goods
manufactured abroad. Between 1992 and 2007, this increased by 200 per
cent.” Effectively offshoring the effects of climate change to the waste-
lands of the periphery, deaths are again brought to those whose land and
livelihoods have been plundered time and time over.
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Green nationalism
The most aggressive political movement against climate change in recent
years has been Extinction Rebellion (XR). For them, nature becomes
a powerful chaotic force from which we can no longer be cocooned.
Their focus on imminent extinction folds apocalypse into the present,
so making us all equal victims of a nature thrown off balance. In the
process, nature out-of-sync becomes a common force that conceals the
causes and effects of climate violence. As a consequence, their politics is
grounded on the movement of a supposedly universal people against the
crimes of humanity that have produced climate change. This populist
undertaking is made out to be the condition of possibility for forcing
the state to make the decisions necessary to see nature restored and our
children’s future secured.
In their declaration of rebellion, it becomes clear that this repro-
ductive nationalism is core to their drive to protect ‘all we hold dear:
this nation, its peoples, our ecosystems and the future of generations
to come. Focusing on how the ecological crisis is impacting the nation,
they declare it our duty to act on behalf of the ‘security and well-being
of our children. The bounded nation and its perpetuation ground XR’s
demands for securing a future beyond the horizon of extinction. The
apocalyptic register within which their manifesto sits reinforces a logic of
progressive politics for ‘us’ that is complicit with a securitised approach
to threat. Under these conditions, XR petitions the state apparatus to
ensure ‘adequate protection and security for its people’s well-being and
the nation’s future - to secure the solutions needed to avert catastrophe
and protect the future. Behind this desire for securitisation is the threat
of climate change driving mass migration as crisis:
We are in the sixth mass extinction event and we will face catastrophe
if we do not act swiftly and robustly [...] Flooding and desertifica-
tion will render vast tracts of land uninhabitable and lead to mass
migration.
This ‘green nationalism’ frames migrant and climate crises as intertwined
threats. The implicit logic of explicit calls for nation-based security is
therefore the coupling of a universal commons with differential limits,
whilst implicitly legitimating Britain’s violent bordering under threat
of climate catastrophe. Neo-Malthusianism is made explicit here, with
EXTINCTION POLITICS - 141
incursions on the nation and climate catastrophe collapsed into one
another, creating a vicious circle that is forged under the imaginary of
nature itself.
In the process, what becomes clear is that the drive toward a national-
ist political horizon in the age of global catastrophe is best understood as
a cipher for geopolitical reconfigurations whose end is the lifeboat state.
In the eschatological phase of Hardin's tragedy, wealthier countries are
likened to lifeboats that must be economically and ecologically stabilised
by protection from the global poor. Whilst calling to mind the literal
analogues of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, this is the broader,
deterministic outworking of the tragedy of the commons as a ‘theory of
selective salvation propounded as a moral economy of “natural limits”.
A revanchist program of expansive accumulation through neo-colonial
property regimes is repackaged by borders around the naturalised limits
of nations. This fixes certain people in place, and remakes value procured
by imperial and neo-imperial theft into the natural inheritance of
wealthy nations. Whilst eco-fascism makes explicit the violence at the
heart of this position, its liberal variant is written off as a combination of
natural disaster and incivility in the periphery together with austerity
politics at home.
Both progressive politics and XR’s environmentalism rely on an image
of disorder which foregrounds a notion of the natural order of the nation
and obligates its necessary restoration. Brexit has brought forth calls to
end racial prejudice in the face of increased racial violence and recon-
sider the movements of migrations across British borders, as if violence
began in 2016. But Britain’s problems lie not just with discrimination and
attitudes toward migration. Britain is built through hyper-exploitation,
precarity, violent policing, surveillance and the ultimate expendability
of largely migrants of colour and people deemed to fall outside of its
matrix of whiteness. The staging of the battle between global finance and
markets against the natural order of a native labour force dramatises an
aesthetics of disordering and operates as an alibi for a politics in which
increased protection against tragedy becomes imperative. National pro-
tectionism thus becomes essential and inextricable from securitisation
and militarised expulsion.
6
The End of Britain
river, river, bath us from tear of trouble st-
eer us, stream us, trail us aford
to home’s imperturbable current
of peace, o
(Petero Kalulé, ‘River’)*
I'll tell you what Freedom is to me. No fear.
(Nina Simone)
ENTANGLEMENTS UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS
Britain’s internal colonies were formed through the redeployment of
logics of waste to underlie productive tensions of the liberal and the
post-colonial other. They have been shaped by practices developed else-
where, though still within Britain’s imperial terrain.
Without trace, he’s taken from Harmondsworth to Brook House, just
beyond the wire fences of Gatwick’s outer hangars. Just as quick, he’s gone,
released. Emphatic and overjoyed, case overturned, he’s been turned out -
not into Home Office care - but at the last minute ‘allowed’ to present an
address — his cellmate’s mother.
To segregate, to subsidise, to hyper-exploit, to extract; to make criminal,
to subject people to the violent force of the law whilst being necessarily
incapable of lawfulness, to make subject to surveillance and control, pre-
carity and non-belonging; to launder race under culture, to reduce
agency to integration, to pre-empt and neutralise struggle, to produce
raced communities as suspect and raced bodies as spectral and threat, to
shape Britain as a matrix of borders that sifts and shapes, to rely on the
violence of unequal exchange, to deport, to make citizenship temporary
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and conditional, to closely monitor and guard; to sentence to death, to
expedite extinction.
At ‘mom house’ sipping heavily sweetened tea, he’s homed for a while.
Until inter-family fractiousness and unexpected visitors mean he’s turned
out, again. Despite dutifully reporting to ‘prob officer’, he’ forced to use
his bag as pillow on a park bench.
This chapter asks what the tactics and strategies of violence that we've
considered might have to tell us about a topography of struggles.
He can eat at temple, but he won't pray because he hasn't been able to
shower. With some sustenance, he’s sat in the park waiting for a charity
line to speak to somebody in his mother tongue. The phone dies before he’s
put through.
If the productive force of the tensions at the core of the post-colonial cut
have led to Britain as a COIN operation, its principal form is distributive
apartheid — a systemic atmosphere whose segregations are produced as a
terrain of affordances and interactions between bodies, laws, policies,
capital, interpersonal relations, consumption, surveillance, force.
His ‘prob officer’ says that the council refuse that they have a duty of
care. He should report to the job centre and sign up to universal credit. In
the meantime, the park.
At the intersections of intimacy and dispersal, this has produced a
tortuous and labyrinthine world - the viscosity and peril of passing
through and within spaces felt by some is the condition of the relative
ease for others.
They tell him there'll be an interpreter at the job centre, but there isn't.
Agitated by the feeling of not being able to communicate, he’ trapped in
an office under suspicion, and before long they're on the phone to the
Home Office - checking’ his credentials. Unnerved, he runs.
Not only driven by existential crisis, this is rooted in the violent enclo-
sures and exclusions required to reproduce differential wealth in an era
of diminishing returns. A Britain reliant on subsidy, hyper-exploitation
144 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
and expendability endures by weaponising hospitality, constituting
belonging and non-belonging on distinctions manifesting lawlessness
and lawfulness, enlisting its citizens as police, building a category of tem-
porary citizens and illegalised people.
Having spent wet nights between bus depots and park benches, he
manages to get enough money together for a night in a shared room in a
hostel. It costs double to pay in cash what it would online.
In this movement of exterior violence inwards, the nation is excessively
identified with its aporetic other — the spectral, the wastelands, the aliens,
the insurgents. As its culmination, the fragility of Britain’s refounding is
woven into counter-insurgency writ large. Britain’s neo-colonial struc-
tures are expansive across Africa and intensive across internal regimes in
which all spaces are intersected by calculations of risk and threat.
Without a bank account, his passport not yet come through, somebody
at temple offers him work above a shop. Cash in hand, a lifeline.
However, the threat of the real haunts Britain’s formation. As Abdou-
Maliq Simone writes, ‘[d]arkness is both condition and cover, and under
cover of darkness emerge forms of “rogue care”.* I am interested in how,
from the undercover conditions of coloniality, living can be practised in
a time concerned with the violent enforcement of limits.
We should be careful to foreground struggle and moments of gentle
resistance, as well as imposition and composition through active and
passive complicity. Even under watch of the shark, in desperation lies
hope, overwhelming love and kinship. It is within this entangled politics
of care that I want to situate this closing chapter, and to consider the
question of how it might be possible to undo the harms of Britain itself.
TO DESTROY A COLONY
The shape that colonialism takes has ramifications for any project that
seeks its end. But attempts to prefigure the ends of colonialism are
fraught. For this reason, in the mid-1970s, Robert Blauner, who had
been instrumental in constructing the concept of internal colonialism in
the US, recanted the ‘colonial analogy: Whereas overseas colonisers
might be repatriated to Europe, no such simple solution offered itself for
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Americas domestic colonies, which themselves resided within
Indigenous land. Blauner could see little in the idea that offered
revolutionary hope or practical solution, the disconnection between
theory and practice seemingly providing evidence of conceptual flaw.
However, Blauner’s reasoning is short-circuited by the premise that
colonialism was sloughed off through the deportation of the white
invader. This is undermined by arguments that we've made throughout:
that the post-colonial cut was the condition of colonialism’s continuation.
In this section, to address this knottiness more fully I consider three
suggested forms of colonial struggle that might be pursued in the context
of internal colonies: anticolonial nationalism, inclusive reform and
anti-subordination.
Nation within a nation
Charles Pinderhughes disagrees with Blauner’s decision to withdraw
support from the theoretical framework of internal coloniality. His
argument rests on an analogy between colonised nations and internal
colonies in the US as geographically discontinuous, where ‘each single
internal colony exists within its own contiguous territory:* This contin-
ues a longer US tradition, where the question of internal colonies came
to circle around the idea of a ‘nation within a nation.’ Given this charac-
terisation, a strategy for anticolonial resistance became apparent: the
Black nation should struggle for the right to self-determination and
existence as a separate state. So in 1968 the Black Panther party produced
a ten-point platform, in which it stated:
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised
plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black
colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of
determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
The demand for separatism should not be confused with insularity.
Rather, calls for political autonomy had long been intertwined with anti-
colonial struggles across the world. In the tradition of Garveyism, Black
nationalism was inextricable from Pan-Africanist internationalism.
Whilst perhaps less blatant within British Black Power movements, the
Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP) and Black Liberation Front
146 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
(BLF) had also formed in the early 1970s around the drive to self-deter-
mination and Black nationalism.° But similarly evident in both the Black
Voice publication of the BUFP and the 1973 BLF Manifesto was that
British Black Power struggles were inextricable from international
struggles.
To a degree this emphasis coheres with Fanon’s argument that ‘national
consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an
international dimension.” According to Fanon, national consciousness is
required to produce the people as a political and social body of anticolo-
nial struggle. Nonetheless, Fanon is clear that national consciousness is
just a stage in a process through which ‘a social and political conscious-
ness’ should be reached.* For Fanon, the goal of anticolonial struggle, as
Sajed and Seidel write, ‘is not simply the removal of the coloniser (thus
ending the colonial occupation) and the establishment of an independ-
ent nation, but the overall transformation of state and society’?
Anticolonial nationalism thus becomes propaedeutic to struggles that
could reach far beyond nation-building.
This weakens Blauner’s concerns, but also expands the horizon of
anticolonialism to consider broader geopolitical struggles and forma-
tions. Whilst this expansion is fruitful, it seems likely that a temporal and
logical grounding in nation-based movements is inadequate to the shape
of internal colonialism in Britain. Britain’s geographical intimacies do
not offer an easy analogy of nation with a nation, and its structures of
coloniality are stretched across borders beyond the nation-state. Whilst
any anticolonialism will necessarily be derived from the legacies of anti-
colonial and anti-apartheid struggles, I have approached internal
colonialism to think of quite different contexts. I have employed its
conceptual tools not as a descriptive formalism that would freeze its
object in contiguous space, but as highlighting the processual machinery
of regimes that reverberate across colonial spaces and times. Doing so
has also drawn attention to the ways that politically independent
post-colonial nation-states were ‘reincorporated into the Western world
system.’°
Whilst trajectories towards the absolutisation of coloniality in spatio-
temporal regimes have produced the territoriality of camps and detention
centres, they have also produced dissociated forms of movement through
everyday life. With borders ‘transported into the middle of political
space’ as Balibar puts it, the internal colony is better understood as the
manifestation and sustenance of ‘a thousand petty fortresses:* The
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motile and diffuse nature of Britain’s distributive apartheid within and
beyond territorial limits seemingly evades characterisation under the
auspices of a nation within a nation.
Reform the colony!
Calls to separatism are perhaps best understood as a response to the uni-
versalising structures of colonialism that so often deflate anticolonial
struggles into movements for reform. The routes through which Black
people have gained some right to self-determine have been fraught with
co-opting reformism. Many writers have drawn attention to the exclu-
sions produced under liberal humanism." But their end-game is rarely
anything approaching a significant terraforming of the power inequities
upon which liberal democracy is founded, and, more often than not, is a
matter of the inclusion of plural voices in liberal political spaces. There
are well-worn arguments, for example, against the abstract universalism
at work in liberal approaches to democratic deliberation. These tend to
emphasise the exclusion of agents, viewpoints and specific interests,
together with the subsequent masking of that exclusion. Appeals to
impartiality, according to Iris Young, reduce a plurality of social posi-
tions to form a singular basis for subjectivity, and so ultimately assimilate
the identity of the other to the identity of the ‘one’.'* Such universalisa-
tion has rightly been criticised, therefore, for the exclusion of gender,
race, class, sexuality and so forth, from political discussion proper.
However, by emphasising the ‘problem’ of difference, the political
theorist is allowed a wedge between ideals and practices making room
for the idea that we may solve problems of power through increased
inclusivity. The harms of coloniality are not due only to exclusions from
access to political sovereignty - that exclusion is produced as the condi-
tion of possibility for political sovereignty. So rectifying these
misrecognitions could only possibly fail within the constrictions of a
nation-state whose sovereignty is arbiter of inclusions and recognitions.
This is to offer minority groups a ‘space within liberalism’ as Elizabeth
Povinelli put it, without accounting for the ways in which those spaces
are constitutively bound up with racialised power.’
This is perhaps also why calls to decolonise Britain have often been
drawn towards near synonymity with social justice. Power aligns, it
diffuses resistance and opens up new corridors in which bureaucratic
work transforms struggles into exhaustion. Arguably, decolonisation has
148 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
been hollowed out and reframed as the work of diversity officers and
curricula development in our institutions.’® Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s
work reminds us that decolonisation should not be used as a metaphor
for the resistance of oppression or improvements to society and educa-
tion. Terminology has efficacy. Accentuating exclusion and inclusion
requires us to have already given up on the terms of internal colonialism
- it makes little sense to reform a colony or make it more inclusive. As
discussed in Chapter 4, inclusivity lends itself to a normative standard
against which differences may be measured and differential racisms
produced. However, this is not just a matter of terminology but also of
erasure and sublimation as well as of attempted containment of the real-
ities of colonialism.
Writing from the context of settler colonialism, Tuck and Yang's
analysis of decolonisation necessarily involves the repatriation of Indig-
enous lands and life. We risk falling into the trap of metaphor through
simple extensions of their argument to the kinds of colonialism dis-
cussed in this book. But their analysis is limited to a historically specific
and geographically particular form of colonialism, whose central form
was dispossession and struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. In centring
dispossession as the fundamental reality of colonialism, we would also
risk eliding its other modalities whose form might also give shape to
distinct approaches to struggle. As David Marriott writes in his discus-
sion of Fanon, ‘the nature of colonialism necessarily affects the nature of
the resistance to it.'7 Identifying the contours of internal colonialism
then offers a language through which opposition to reformism can be
strengthened. How could you reform a colony whose economy is rooted
in extraction, hyper-exploitation and subsidy; whose police system is
grounded in the reproduction of colonial control; whose integrity has
become defined by a COIN operation driven toward extermination
under pressure of ecological limits?
With the terms of inclusion and exclusion quantified and concretised
as the regime of multiculturalism falters and returns to a sublimated
ethno-nationalism, the gradualism of reforms increasingly confirms
logics of extinction. Consider the contortions through which Kaufmann
and Cantle’s frameworks of white segregation and cohesion are supposed
to support humanitarian reforms in the refugee system. Kaufmann’s
argument runs as follows. There is persistent political pressure and
hostility towards the permanent settlement of migrant people and
refugees in Britain. So-called liberal arguments for more open borders
THE END OF BRITAIN < 149
exacerbate this hostility, which is felt not only by economic and irregular
migrants, but by ‘genuine’ refugees, because they are seen as a first step
towards the right to remain. Political discourse around migration
therefore turns on arguments for limitations, management and quotas.
With these inexorably squeezed, a greater stringency is employed in the
way that Britain deals with claims for refugee status. As a result, there are
more unsuccessful claims, and refugees who fail to succeed are returned
to countries where they are at risk of death or persecution. The solution,
according to Kaufmann, is to build permanent refugee camps inside
Britain, with refugees given the ability to move between these shadow
zones globally, without entering the host country.
This would eliminate hostility towards the provision of refuge, accord-
ing to Kaufmann, whose primary cause is not economic so much as fears
that the ethnic composition of Britain is being dismantled by migrant
and refugee influx. The confluence of arguments regarding incursions
on the nation and demographic genocide thus find their apotheosis in
this proposal for a humanitarian segregation at a global scale. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Hardin had anticipated these moves:
[w]e are now in the process of destabilizing our own country through
the unlimited acceptance of massive immigration [...]. In time the
slowly reproducing population will be displaced by the fast one. This
is passive genocide. It may be that no one is ever killed, but the genes
of one group replace the genes of the other. That’s genocide.*
Whilst finding an obvious home in the context of Hardin’s eco-fascism,
the idea that multiculturalism coupled with overpopulation is destroying
the natural order of the nation is to be found in less vehement form in,
for example, XR spokesperson Rupert Read’s arguments against mass
migration on the basis that it leads to the dissolution of social cohesion."
Kaufmann’s ghost-towns provide us with an image of spatially segre-
gated zones that could become a simple target of the increasingly explicit
discourse of fascism. We should be careful with our deployment of the
spectre of fascism lest it erases a past and present colonialism, recouping
the trajectories of violence underwriting liberalism’s supposedly peace-
ful violence. Nonetheless, the point should be clear: reformism under
pressure of ecological limits, COIN and demographic threat rapidly
gives way to a politics of extinction.
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Towards anti-subordination
For similar reasons citizenship does not offer an obvious category
through which struggles against coloniality could be adequately fought.
The protection of Britain's wealth is increasingly defined by the tempo-
rary and precarious inclusion of Britain’s others and the machinery of
unequal exchange. Appeals for entitlement to citizenship status or indef-
inite leave to remain within Britain thus prop up both its wealth and its
legitimacy as the arbiter of who is able to access it. However, in a context
where the notion of secure borders has become inextricable from
national collective belonging, the agency of migrant people might be
figured as a means through which acts of citizenship contest the existing
political order:
We can define acts of citizenship as those acts that transform forms
(orientations, strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers,
outsiders, aliens) of being political by bringing into being new actors
as activist citizens (that is, claimants of rights) through creating or
transforming sites and stretching scales.”°
This works against making the movement of people synonymous with
movements of capital resources, which fails to consider migrant people’s
experience and agency in practices of movement in relation to their
attempted control or regulation. Even so, my concerns with the sugges-
tion are twofold. First, responsibility is awarded to migrant people
themselves, whose activities tend to be valorised as inherently produc-
tive of a capacity to unsettle and destabilise the foundations of Britain.
Second, considerations of the political force of migration are misplaced,
and so are underwhelming.
For example, Tendayi Achiume argues that migration can be under-
stood as a form of decolonisation, formulated as an act of struggle by
people currently subordinated under imperialism.* More equitable
interconnection, rather than national independence, is figured as
providing the grounds for decolonisation in this context. Whilst interde-
pendence between imperial and dominated people remains, shifting
power within the terms of that relationship is approached as a form of
anti-subordination. So decolonisation would not require the severing of
connections, but their renegotiation on terms of rebalancing the differ-
ential of power. The emphasis is on the enhancement of self-determination
THE END OF BRITAIN © 151
carried by individuals within neo-colonial empire - in which context
migration is decolonisation.
Tendayi Achiume clarifies the position in terms of claims made on
Britain by people originating from its prior colonies. In a study on Zim-
babwean diaspora in Britain, Dominic Pasura writes of migrant people
who feel a moral justification in their presence in Britain, claiming a
right to be here because ‘as you once ate in our house now it is our turn
to eat in your house} as migrant Mthokhozisi put it.7 Another Zimba-
bwean, Matthew, responded similarly:
This country takes responsibility why we are here. It’s because of colo-
nialism. The British people oppressed us; they took our land and made
us live on infertile land. We were made captives in our own land [...]
People grew up under oppression and it became even worse when we
attained our independence as our economic situation deteriorated. It’s
our turn to come to this country. God is making an equation that
somebody who used to gain might also, even though not suffering,
serve somebody.
The assertion of agency and moral rights is taken as evidence of the
intent and ability to counteract colonialism and its legacy. In this regard,
Tendayi Achiume suggests that migration should be understood as a
technology for the reform and equalisation of Britain’s global interrela-
tions. However, as she remarks, even with the legal reformations required
to support such migration, such decolonisation would only shift power
within these relationships rather than beyond them.
The difficulty is that an emphasis on exclusion and subordination
potentially leaves any route towards decolonisation left in moral terms
that don’t account for the real form that Britain takes, its modulated
forms of inclusion, and its wounded attachment to colonialism. The
other side of this coin is that the position also underestimates what such
a movement might achieve. For example, arguments in support of border
abolition have also called for the re-articulation of rights away from their
association with membership in a national state. The general idea would
be that rights are not to be granted by national sovereigns, but are carried
by people themselves. This faces thorny issues, particularly regarding the
way in which a system might be implemented such that it doesn’t simply
replicate a series of more insidious bordering practices at a global level.
Nonetheless, importantly, a no borders politics refuses the amelioration
152 * THE EMPIRE AT HOME
of border reforms. For example, Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma and
Cynthia Wright argue that in a world that is shaped through movement,
its restrictions are synonymous with the production of inequalities that
ground the nation-state in the imperial core.*4 For them, the end of
border regimes would also involve a renegotiation of the global commons
that would no longer be enforceable under the artifice of natural limits.
In other words, if migration as decolonisation were envisaged through
the dissolution of border regimes, it would call into question both the
legitimacy of nation-states and the limits through which capital is accu-
mulated and wealth is stored. More bluntly, decolonisation would then
be better figured as anticolonialism - its results would not leave the
world intact.
ANTICOLONIALISM AS ABOLITIONISM
Moving on from his rebuttal to Blauner, Pinderhughes argues that the
theory of internal colonialism offers a central motif through which anti-
colonial movements can be forged. An internal colony can be ended in a
project of its positive abolition. For Pinderhughes this is hamstrung by
an insistence on geographical contiguity as definitional of the internal
colony. So for all its radicalism, this leads to a remarkably detoothed
form of abolitionism as the ‘equality of result for the life-outcomes of
internal colony residents relative to life-outcomes of the historically
dominant population’> Thinking of outcomes in terms of dominated
and dominating populations presumes rather than dismantles the
national territorial container. Instead, let us consider how, in the context
of Britain, abolition offers an anticolonial politics neither through sepa-
ratism, reform, nor more equitable interdependence.
Ghosts of empire
If Britain since the middle of the twentieth century was in the process of
nation-building at the end of empire, the 1981 Nationality Act is its
symbol. The act defined British nationality as whiteness, with citizenship
and whiteness indelibly forged as a regime of property and belonging
over the spoils of empire.*° It categorised those who belong in Britain
whilst making immigration law into a form of domestic control. Aliens
were produced within the nation’s borders by removing citizenship enti-
tlements from British nationals in the former colonies from 1983
THE END OF BRITAIN < 153
onwards. At the time of its passing, Powell marked the act as instituting
the ‘end of our brief imperial episode [...] and the laying of that ghost,
the Commonwealth.”” This attempted cut was the frame through which
the manifestation of ghosts could be warded off and territorialised.
Britain’s whiteness is apophatic. It has been defined on the basis of its
other - on whom it has been dependent for existential, political and
economic integrity. The boundary lines drawn by whiteness are, there-
fore, fluid and flexing since the ability to hegemonically produce and
control this other is always partial. From the magic mountains of
northern India to white flight to British suburbs and the Muslim as ter-
rorist, Britain's whiteness is riven with fear of the ghosts of empire.
So in this sense, we are not currently witnessing Britain’s post-colonial
reckoning, which had been staved off. Rather, Britain is necessarily stuck
within the stuttering time-loops of the post-colonial cut. The supposed
reckoning with attempts to recapture sovereignty that are highlighted by
discourses around Brexit is better understood as an explicitation of the
tensions underlying the colonial premise of Britain’s attempted refound-
ing as post-colonial nation. What results is a nation-state whose form
increasingly tends towards extinction.
The end of the colony is the end of Britain.
Universalism and universalities
In Theory, Dionne Brand makes the following observation:
How do you recover from a wound? I asked her. To recover isn’t to
betray or forget, I said. It’s to resist the definition of the wound as the
whole incident.*®
Holding this thought, it is important to keep in mind that internal colo-
nialism has not just been an incomplete and failing project, it is only
possibly incomplete.
Reformist arguments against liberal humanism’s exclusions have
tended to settle on its universalisation as a process through which the
other could be identified with the one.”? The idea is that a universalised
form of liberal humanism is imposed like a rubber stamp across all
humanity and without respect for differences. The solution to this
posing of the problem would be to expand the universal ‘one’ to include
all people. The thought is that this might destabilise the initial
154 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
universalisation through an openness to mutual recognition. I have
argued, to the contrary, that the problems of liberal universalism lie not
with exceptionalities whose wounds could be retroactively sutured into
the one. Rather, they lie in the attempted totalisation through which the
one could be considered at all.
Because Britain is refounded on a whiteness that is apophatic, it is also
ever consuming - the coherence of the one is possible only through
excessive identification with its other. This aporetic core is at the heart of
the totalising drive of the liberal subject. Britain’s juridical universalism
is made possible only under the violent extermination and engulfment of
its other. As David Roediger puts it, ‘[i]t is not merely that whiteness is
oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and
false.3° With the universal one paradoxically written as a particularity
that requires insulation from demographic incursion, Britain under the
post-colonial cut has been beholden to an incessant tendency towards
purification, containment and repression that is necessarily incomplete.
The supposedly recent unravelling of a liberal consensus towards its
fascistic and violent form is just the outworking of Britain’s inner logics.
Mass support for either platform Keynesianism or for ethno-nationalism
is also support for neo-imperial extinction politics. Their divisions shed
light on a web of tensions that point towards the same direction, where
‘First World democracy finds its sine qua non in [...] national chauvin-
ism increasingly embraced by capital in crisis.3*
But this also points us towards a terrain of struggle that has been
forged under cover of darkness. Whilst the other is a necessary produc-
tion for the totalisation of the one, it is far from containable under it. The
mechanisms of stability that have held together Britain’s coloniality have
also provided the conditions for spaces of excess, resistance and rupture.
As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it,
The earth moves against the world. And today the response of the
world is clear [...] The more the earth churns the more vicious the
world’s response. But the earth still moves [...] The earth's procession
is not on the world’s calendar.*?
Calling into being the Earth’s procession against the world resolutely
refuses the terms of universalism under struggles for recognition. Uni-
versalism is juridical - it is grounded by a nation-state that maintains
itself through coercive and productive regimes, private property and
THE END OF BRITAIN «< 155
sovereign rights. Moreover, universalism’s totalisation is not just exclu-
sionary but it is vehemently apophatic - the contemporary threat of
destabilisation drives more explicit and vehement forms of protection.
Recalling the Copernican revolution in which the universe no longer
turns around man, Moten and Harney evoke the decentring and destabi-
lisation of the world-as-universality. That ‘it still moves’ articulates a
universality that lies beyond and without the purported universalism of
the totalising one. This Earth which acts against the world is not, there-
fore, just another universal that could be integrated or warded off. Rather,
it might be understood as ungraspable possibility that undoes the uni-
versalising fundament of the world irrevocably. The closures required to
produce universalisation also provide the conditions through which
rupturing universalities can be born. This is because the world cannot
comprehend the earth, which exists beyond the possibilities demarcated
by its universalising form. Massimiliano Tomba offers an account of
such universality - as always insurgent.? For Tomba, insurgent univer-
sality is grounded in the particularity of concrete acts that decentre the
nation as horizon of political representation. Yet, such universalities are
inevitably insurgent against the political and social order, and expressed
through the ways that people act together beyond the legal order.
A rupture from within
According to Tomba, it is in particular and concrete forms of insurgency
- to ‘eat in your house’ - through which universality is born:
In insurgent universality, the human is the subject who, by acting as a
citizen, albeit beyond one’s legal status and the putative boundaries of
citizenship, puts both the social and the political order into question.*4
This shifts the ground on which struggles are understood to take place.
For example, it is so often supposed that struggles are grounded by a
desire to be counted as human: of bodies that could rely on recognition
under the violence of state regimes; to be counted under law rather than
rendered lawless; to be included in systems of labour and finance that
demand their exploitation; to be citizens belonging to a state that has
been made and remade as a world that is uninhabitable for the majority.
Instead, anticolonial struggles are positioned at nodes of insurgency that
156 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
could destabilise and abolish these universalisms, rather than count
amongst them. As Simone puts it, this is a politics of:
refusal to be subject to a law that refuses to recognize you [...] a
politics defined not by opposition or necessarily resistance, but instead
a refusal of the very premises that have [been] historically negated.
Consider as example, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s poem ‘British
Values. This contains the powerful evocation that:
Britain is bismillah
Britain is basmati rice
Britain is box braids and black barber’s shops, Bollywood, and
bhangra**
One can imagine this being read as a claim on behalf of a racialised
minority to inclusion with Britain and British values. That is, to think of
the so-called British values encapsulated in liberal humanism, of toler-
ance and openness, freedom of speech and so on. Their universalism
then figured as a commitment to the commonality of humankind whose
exceptions might be forgiven and exclusions reneged on. That reading is
immediately ruined, however, by the claim that, since ‘the sugar and tea
had strings attached,
Britain is the terror to be countered
Here, Britain names both existential horizon and the massive machinery
that takes the form ofa colonial present inscribed in security operations.
This is not a security that could safeguard Britain, but a complex produc-
tion of hyper-exploitation and subsidy under protection from the
entitlements of others by the exercise of colonial sovereignty through
surveillance and violent force.
Claiming that Britain is bismillah does work analogous to Matthew’s
statement that ‘God is making an equation. Both claim Britain in both
partiality and particularity - as colonial machine - and through an
insurgent universality that resists the definition of the wound as the
whole incident. Manzoor-Khan goes on to say that,
youd be left with the fact that I am inside
Iam Britain now, cos
THE END OF BRITAIN °< 157
This insideness - this threat of the real - is the universality through
which Britain has been forged by histories that are always already those
of anticolonial struggle. It also clarifies the terms upon which struggles
are made. Framing claims as issuing from the outside, for inclusion,
access and entitlement is a figment that was produced under the post-
colonial cut. Struggles of insurgent universality don’t take the shape of
external other or a Schmittian enemy to be included or separated-off.
Instead they arise from internal ruptures - from the ‘fact that I am
inside’*”
Kinship at the end of the world
If the Earth moves against the world, what are the weapons that could
engage the Earth in the end of the world that is totalised in the form of
Britain?3* As Moten and Harney write, ‘[t]he more the earth churns the
more vicious the world’s response. The mechanisms through which a
global ecology is held together in complexes of property, power and
counter-insurgency — where these become weakened sanctions, punitive
measures, dissonance and violence will be strengthened in favour of
extant power. Public pressure against charter deportation flights has
been knitted together, catalysed most prominently in the resistance of
the Stansted 15 on the grounds of slow and patient work of SOAS
Detainee Support (SDS), End Deportations, No Borders Network UK,
Anti-Raids network, DocsNotCops and so many others. In response,
however, the state reorganises and deploys new tactics across fluid
regimes entangling military, corporation, criminal justice and immigra-
tion enforcement.
It is nonetheless in these practices through which the Earth still moves.
The circuitous and frustrating bureaucracies of doing casework for
people caged in detention centres brings into being an expansive rela-
tionship, operating within but also against the often semi-legalities with
which those regimes are maintained. They offer distance and spaces
through which communities coalesce and harms are abated. These are
weapons whose form is a field of relations, affordances and materials to
hand, but at whose core is kinship and solidarity.
Politicking tells us that nationalist horizons are merely pragmatic, that
public ‘common sense’ is too wedded to the form of the nation. But the
insistent and ongoing forces required to maintain the shape of the world
are exhausting. We should ask who this public is - what are their inter-
158 : THE EMPIRE AT HOME
ests, and how are they shored up? And, to whose common sense are
these appeals made? The invocation of ‘common sense’ is, of course,
defined by the very horizon that we would like to see unstitched.
Common senses are made and remade constantly. They are built through
complicity and co-option, and through passive consent and active itera-
tion. Their glacial sedimentation and construction occur at the level, not
of discursive rules, but of assumptions, habits and dispositions. Common
sense is not the sort of thing that can be discursively elaborated, being
composed of dispositions that are open-ended, differential responses to
each other and to contexts, emotions and embodied actions. Neverthe-
less, since this social background shapes the meanings within which lives
are formed, it is also the central site in which our local interactions and
contexts are tied to broader structures, practices and sanctions.
As such, it is not correct to think that racisms are generated by the
state as a means of control, nor that they arise simply through the
passions of those from below. I have argued that race and racisms are
technologies of colonialism whose underlying systems carve up the
world and upon whose unequal terrain our interests are collected. So a
reliance on the nation-state is not merely symbolic, it is required to
maintain Britain - both as nation and economy as a white possession
requiring protection from incursions from it. Whilst the common-sense
structures of a nationalist horizon often look to be entrenched, natural
and objective, they result from this matrix of processes and power rela-
tionships, and require ongoing maintenance through material and
normative force.
What is currently common sense is a functional, usually invisible,
means by which the present state of things is naturalised and masks the
ability to consider the social world beyond its current form. But no social
norms, nor the system of power in which they are embedded, is deter-
mined. Systems of common sense are never static - they require constant
reinforcing and reforging. So there are dynamic tendencies for their
modification in every situation, however sealed off they may appear. The
conglomeration of these tendencies form resources that may be deployed
to construct new forms of common sense.
Of course, as Sara Ahmed points out, common sense is so often
figured as security:
[mJaintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along
with it. To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which
THE END OF BRITAIN °< 159
you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others
uncomfortable.*°
Within this fabric of comfort, the force of internal rupture may be
enacted in moments of insurgency. Actively unhoming from that which
has become so common sense as to appear natural, insurgent universal-
ity provides the conditions for actively deracinating those systems from
their contingent conditions. As Ahmed writes, ‘[b]y snapping you are
saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think
should be borne’*? The categories of common sense are fragile - of lawful
and legal citizens, and those made illegal and lawless; those who deserve
the right to life, and those who do not. Their preservation requisitions
our complicity. Since common sense is looped in to its material practices
and structures, we can move against its maintenance.
To establish a moratorium on Britains coloniality would remove
support from the institutions upholding it and the systems providing it
with legitimacy. Many of the processes constitutive of Britain are rein-
forced by legal systems, institutions and policing. But as such, they are
dependent on political legitimacy, and so also on the ways that everyday
practices are involved in the production and reproduction of those struc-
tures - in part simply by acting according to the accepted norms of the
communities in which we live, we reinforce Britain’s coloniality.
To make a start - ending participation with regimes of expropriation,
criminalisation, detention, incarceration and immigration, together
with active sedition where necessary. Not calling to reform Prevent, but
the abandonment of CONTEST and the collateral of counter-insurgency
methods, increased state powers and special measures revoked. The
dismantling of state-instituted violence requires the end of bordering
regimes producing extreme wage differences, life prospects and disparate
harms; immediate decriminalisation, decarceration and excarceration,
closure of gang databases, repeal of joint enterprise, and the end of stop
and search. Let us grasp wholeheartedly the revolutionary call unwittingly
made by Conservative commentator Ollie Wright that ‘a nation without
borders is barely a nation’*
As Tomba writes, universality is ‘not given by spatial extent, but by a
way of practicing politics.‘ In this practising politics new publics are
made: not in abstract solidarity, but in concrete relationships through
which our position in the apparently natural order of the world could be
put always in question. Kinships bring about a sense of dis-belonging to
160 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
the horizon of the nation and belonging together under new imaginaries
of freedoms. To provoke universality where many worlds fit.
A sense in common; an Earth in common
As we've seen, colonialism’s projects have always been expansionist, even
under the supposed post-colonial cut. The world has been terraformed
in planetary enterprise, its distributive apartheid has been instrumental
in forming the contours and corridors of neo-imperialism. Current
property regimes rely on enclosures that are structured by the exclusion
and improvement of waste, extraction and hyper-exploitation through
unequal exchange. This concentration of wealth and property in the
hands of a largely white minority violates the freedoms and existence for
the majority. In light of this, perhaps it might be possible not only to
deracinate ‘common sense’ but also to forge new senses in common, and
an Earth in common that might exist after the end of this world.
According to Mbembe this would bring with it ‘a radical openness of
and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insula-
tion.*4 I wonder if we should be wary, however, of rushing towards a
world in common that might be presented as a positive project. Undoing
the proliferation of limits begins a process through which property
regimes could also be dismantled. The dissipation of borders is also the
de-formation of systems of risk, surveillance and arbitrage that currently
sustain financial extraction and the accumulation of wealth. Interference
in cross-border operations of profit, interest and rents would therefore
decelerate the extraction of additional value subsidising the imperial
core. This might also accelerate proscriptions from the hoarding of
wealth through its reallocation and distribution. But would this neces-
sarily constitute movement towards an Earth in common?
Answering this question would also require manoeuvring beyond the
horizons under which recent socialist calls to redistribute wealth have
been made. Invoking something like a wealth tax, these induce minor
measures that could redistribute assets via the state. The reallocation of a
small amount of wealth away from the minority elite would not prevent
the extraction of rents nor the distribution of land ownership and
housing through which their wealth continues to be created. Herein lies
the problems with state monopoly over property in addition to those
characterised in the previous chapter - leaning on the nationalisation of
capital, state ownership relies on the contingencies of the state and its
THE END OF BRITAIN °: 161
strategies for distribution to citizens. But to bring about the end of Brit-
ain’s colonialism and neo-imperialism would necessitate infrastructures
that are not dependent on the contingencies of the state - embedding
more foundational shifts and the sequestering of property that could not
be revoked without great upheaval. These would surely be otherwise
derailed under pressures of the coalition between state and capital, which
increasingly take the form of green nationalism. For decades, internal
colonialism has stoked feelings of white possession as a natural right to
dwindling resources, with any claim against them subject to discourses
of management or revanchism depending upon which has better politi-
cal efficacy. This trajectory will ramp up violent differentiations driven
by rising economic inequality and increasing underemployment pushed
towards ever diminishing returns.
If the annihilation of colonialism is required as a condition for an
Earth in common, then it is also the condition for the end of the world.
This is also why to live together demands the end of a Britain that could
only be built on exploitation and elimination, and whose survival is
dependent on the extinction of others. Otherwise we are left with the
grim logics of lifeboat states propelled to excess — their threadbare facade
unravelling under threat of climate destruction, territorial incursion and
unequal exchange of the right to life.
Our continued subsistence demands the ends of this world to imagine
another way of living with the Earth.
river, river, bath us from tear of trouble st-
eer us, stream us, trail us aford
to home's imperturbable current
of peace, o*
Notes
PREFACE
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NOTES °< 163
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Scrutiny of child-raising was familiar, and particularly evident in analyses of
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widespread practice for West African student parents temporarily residing
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removing children from harms caused by living in London shared
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conditions of foster homes, with 18 African children having died in them
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April to a gathering of the associates of St George’s House and distinguished
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Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. For Harvey, the logic justifying welfare
retrenchment was as follows: individual freedom in the workplace meant
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work below a certain reserve price; unemployment rises when this reserve
price is set too high; the reserve price is partly set by welfare payments; so,
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statistical data and the way it was collected. However, I hope that it is clear
that the arguments regarding demographic analytics and ethnicity made in
Chapter 4, together with the argument throughout that such demographics
should always be understood as a colonial construction, problematise the
category at root. For one, we should question what work the characterisation
as a minority racialised people who undoubtedly form the global majority is
doing.
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measure used by the Child Poverty Act 2010, as household income below 60
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Gulliver, Forty Years of Struggle.
Roughly, a corporation takes over responsibility for the development, not
upkeeping maintenance and improvements so allowing its value as property
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172°
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71;
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Desmond, M. (2012) Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty.
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To an extent my discussion follows Schwarz, B. (2000) Actually existing
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and Sexuality: Britain 1968-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
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Schwarz, Actually existing postcolonialism.
This complements, but also differs from, Valluvan’s recent analysis of
contemporary nationalism: ‘today’s nationalism might be best understood
as the set of discourses by which primary culpability for significant
sociopolitical problems, whether real or imagined, is attributed to various
ethno-racial communities who are understood as not belonging, Valluvan,
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Schwarz, Actually existing postcolonialism. See also Mercer, K. (1994)
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remake Britishness in the intimate presence of its other. Using Google's
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values, incidences remain low until the mid-1940s, from which point they
rise by 2,329 per cent. This was brought to my attention by Charlotte Lydia
Riley.
Shilliam, Populism and the spectre.
Powell, The enemy within.
Mills, C.W. (2007) Multiculturalism as/and/or anti-racism? In
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Kundnani, The death of multiculturalism. That this can be understood as
‘parallel’ is well evidenced by the fact that disparities in pay, academic
success, criminalisation and wealth remain when class is controlled for. See
also Meghji, A. (2019) Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires,
Cultural Consumption. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Allen, R.L. (2005) Reassessing the internal (neo) colonialism theory. The
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24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
NOTES - 181
writes that Fanon’s analysis illuminates how through: ‘dividing and ruling
she [the colonial ruler] has created a native bourgeoisie [...] Europe has
multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and
sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to
bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies?
Pitcher, B. (2016) Race, debt and the welfare state. New Formations, 87,
47-63. See also Baumann, G. (1999) The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking
National, Ethnic and Religious Identities. London: Routledge. For some
critics, it is precisely these shifts that render frameworks of internal
colonisation unworkable because they centre racial affinity rather than
material class experience. Cedric Johnson argues this because it is
complexified by an expanding black middle class, the class fissures being
ignored by the thesis. Not only are the production of new forms of social
stratification traceable to forms of colonial control, they are not reducible to
class stratifications — for all of the reasons discussed in previous chapters.
Johnson, C. (2017) The Panthers can't save us now. Catalyst, 1(1), 57-87.
Lentin, A. (2014) Post-race, post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture
after multiculturalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(8), 1268-85. See also
Spence, L.K. (2012) The neoliberal turn in black politics. Souls: A Critical
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Index
2011 uprisings, 70-73, 75
Ahmed, Sara, 158-9
Alexander, Claire, 91-2
Anderson, William, 111
see also Samudzi, Zoé
Anzaldta, Gloria, 1, 15-16, 18
Arghiri, Emmanuel, 38
Balibar, Ettienne, 146-7
Beveridge, William
Beveridge Report, The (1942), 5
Bhambra, Gurminder, 3
Bhandar, Brenna, 26
Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 15
bordering, 20-1, 81, 105-13, 115, 122,
140-41
abolition of, 151-2
fluidity of, 107, 126-7
peril, 108, 109-10
as ‘taking space with you, 15-16
as viscous, 110, 112-13
Brexit, 124, 134-5, 141, 153
Britain, 3-9, 12-15, 23-4, 54-5, 62-7,
87-9, 107-12, 114-16, 142-61
abolition of, 18-19, 142-4, 150-53,
155-7, 160-61
as Britishness, 15, 96, 105
as COIN project, 93, 105, 112-13,
143
as colonialism, 4-5, 7-9, 24-7, 81,
83-6, 125-7, 147-9, 159
as empire, 5, 52-3
and good character, 92-3
paradoxical universalism, 85
and the post-colonial cut, 81, 83-6,
112-13, 153
as whiteness, 64, 84-5, 95-6,
99-100, 141, 152-4
British Nationality Act (1948), 4, 6, 63
British Nationality Act (1981), 63-4,
92, 152-3
Brixton uprising, 51, 58-9, 63, 88
Broadwater uprising, 69-70
Cantle Report (2001), 91-2, 95
Césaire, Aimé, 65, 114
climate emergency, 9, 116, 133,
138-41, 161
colonialism, 3-5, 7-15, 50, 83-6,
144-9, 151-2, 160-1
and capitalism, 5-6, 14-15, 25, 78,
115-16, 129-30
and coloniality, 11-15, 18, 21, 48-9,
64-5, 80, 115, 144-7, 159
as historical process, 11-15, 73-4
and liberalism, 53-7, 147-9
as property relation, 26-7, 48
and race, 11, 17-18, 48-9, 89-90,
100, 158
see also internal colonialism,
post-colonialism
common sense, 37, 61, 117, 123,
157-9
deracination, 158-60
fluidity of, 126-7, 153, 157
as matrix of power, 157-8
naturalisation, 85, 92
Commonwealth Immigrants Act
(1968), 3, 63
containment, 2-3, 13-14, 20-1, 35-6,
48-9, 50, 64-6, 73-4, 79, 102-6,
112-13, 114, 154
CONTEST, 20, 93-5, 101-2, 105, 111,
159
contradiction of colonialism, 112-13,
153-5
in Fanon, 49, 112-133
as necessarily incomplete, 112-13,
153-4
Powellian, 85, 99
Cope, Zak, 39, 154
Coulthard, Glen, 16
counter-insurgency, 4, 12-13, 20,
73-4, 81-6, 93-5, 100, 105, 111,
144, 157
CONTEST, 93-105, 111, 159
as emergent warfare, 94-5
across empire, 66-8, 94-5
potential civilian combatants, 93-5
Prevent, 93, 96-102, 104, 159
Pursue, 93, 96-7
securitisation, 107-9, 117
and state hegemony, 103-4
threat, 98-105
criminalisation, 13-14, 19-21, 50,
56-61, 74-9, 86, 92-3, 95-101,
116, 159
Dahrendorf, Ralph, 33
Davis, Angela, 78
decolonisation, 6-7, 144-152, 152-161
as a metaphor, 147-8
and reform, 144-5, 147-9, 153-4
De Genova, Nicholas, 106, 108
deradicalisation, 95-8
co-option of community groups,
98, 111
propaganda, 96-7
detention centres, 1-3, 77-8, 106-9,
131-2, 138, 157
curfew, 109
tagging, 79, 109
dispossession, 3-4, 19, 23-7, 36, 65,
121-3, 148
distributive apartheid, 20, 27, 48-9,
143, 146-7, 160
alien territories, 6-7, 19, 23, 35
Manicheanism (Fanon), 27-8,
112-13
segregation, 11-12, 36-7, 44-6, 91,
99-100, 149
waste as threat to social order,
23-7, 47-8
INDEX < 199
Duggan, Mark, 70-71
E]-Enany, Nadine, 48, 127
Elkins, Caroline, 66
empire, 23-7, 27, 50, 52-3, 63-7,
83-5, 152-3
architecture, 23, 31, 107
criminalisation, 50, 56-61, 79, 95-6
‘end of, 4, 18, 83-6, 152-3
ghosts of, 111, 152-3
and imperalism, 4, 83-4
law and, 24-7, 55, 58, 61
mechanisms of, 27-8, 35, 65, 78,
94, 129
property regimes, 25, 30, 53-4,
121-2, 160
small wars, 94
Empire Windrush, 5
Energy, Shareefa, 114
entanglement, 7-9, 16-18, 23-49,
142-52
eugenicism, 57-8, 114
and patriality, 5, 84
exceptionalism, 85
extinction politics, 114-16, 134-41,
149, 153-4
Extinction Rebellion, 116, 140-41,
149-50
extraction, 8, 26-7, 35-6, 41, 78, 114,
119, 125, 127-30, 132, 138-9,
160-61
Fanon, Frantz, 23, 27-8, 49, 112, 146,
148
fear, 30-2, 59-60, 103-5, 110-11, 142,
153
Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 14, 16, 37,
55, 61
finance, 9, 19, 34, 40-9, 106, 108,
117-34, 141, 155
austerity, 19, 21, 45, 98, 114-15,
123-4, 131, 141
bank branch closures, 42
differential access to home loans,
31-2, 34, 42-3
extortionary inclusion, 40-1
200 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
indebtedness, 7, 41, 125
predatory lending, 42-3, 46
fortress Europe, 18, 105-6
gangs, 69, 73-7, 94
county lines, 76-7
gangs database, 74-6, 101, 159
and joint enterprise, 75-8, 159
manufacture of, 56-7, 60, 73-4,
92-23
Gilroy, Paul, 61, 88, 90
Goldberg, David, 56
Grenfell Tower, 48
Gutzmore, Cecil, 60-1
Glissant, Edouard, 16-17
Hall, Stuart, 45, 60, 90, 103
Harmondsworth, Immigration
Removal centre, 2-3
Harney, Stefano, 154-5, 157
Harris, Cheryl, 38
Hartman, Saidya, 14
Heathrow
immigration removal centres, 2-3
third runway, 138
see also Harmondsworth
housing, 3, 9, 27-35, 45-9, 76,
108-10, 145, 160
black plague, 30-1
development, 30-1, 35, 43, 46-7
PFIs, 40-4
see also Finance
racial cheapening, 19, 26-7, 37-40
shifts from rental to private asset,
19, 28-9, 41, 129
sink estates, 43, 47-8
white flight, 30-1, 76-7, 153
zoning and segregation, 23-4, 27,
44, 48-9, 50-1, 59, 85-6, 91-2,
100
Housing Act (1969), 29
Housing Action Areas (1974), 29
Housing Act (1980), 34
Housing Act (1988), 42
Idai, cyclone, 9, 138-9
immigrant detention, 1-2, 77-9,
100-101, 106-9, 126, 131-2,
137-8, 146, 157, 159
incarceration, 1-3, 14, 52-3, 77-9,
92-3, 106, 159
New Futures Network, 78-9
prisoner workforce, 78
rough sleeping, 78-9
suicide, 2, 78-9
insurgent universality, 22, 155-9
internal colonialism, 9-10, 59-60,
106-7, 145, 152
abolitionism, 152-61
anticolonial nationalism, 83, 145-7
anti-subordination, 144-5, 150-52
as condition of possibility, 147-52
decolonisation, 147-52, see also
decolonisation
as domestic colony, 4-5, 9-11,
94-6, 112-13, 144-7
inclusive reform, 144-5, 147-9
as process, 11-15, 46-47, 81
wounded attachment, 151-2
irregular migrants, 107-10, 148-9
illegalisation, 107-10
Byron Burgers, 109-10
Jackson, Nicole, 59-60
Kalulé, Petero, 142, 161
Kapoor, Nisha, 88, 137
Karatani, Rieko, 3-4
Kilcullen, David, 94-5
Kinouani, Guilaine, 18
kinship, 101, 157-60
under the shark, 144
and care, 144
dis-belonging and belonging,
159-60
Kundnani, Arun, 88
labour, 3-4, 6, 12-14, 19, 23-30,
36-40, 63, 78, 109-10, 114-15,
117, 124-34, 135-6
colour-bar, 24-5, 28, 30-33, 38
hyper-exploitation, 19-20, 38-40,
46-9, 50, 78, 114-15, 127-32,
136-138, 141, 142-3, 148, 156,
160
moral economy, 39, 132-3, 141
racial subsidy, 37-8, 45-6
labour arbitrage, 39-40, 126-7, 130
Labour Party, 29, 33, 62-3, 77-8, 90,
109
Corbynism, 114-16, 122-4, 131-2
New Labour, 2-3, 8, 43, 91-3
lawfulness, 20, 54-6, 71-3, 79-80,
142-4
Lawrence, Stephen, 90
Lefebvre, Henri, 110
Lentin, Alana, 89
Li, Tania, 21
liberalism, 3-4, 25, 59-60, 78-80,
99-100, 119-20, 132, 147-9,
153-4
as aporetic, 154
as defining the space of politics,
52-6, 72, 78
economic marginalisation, 75-6
and fascism, 141, 149, 154
and Kant, 54-5
pathologisation, 55-7, 79-80,
90-91, 98-100
and permanent refugee camps,
148-9
problem of difference, 87-9, 89-90
productive of exterior as threat, 56,
102-3
reason, 54-6, 70-73, 79-80
recognition politics, 88, 153-5
social exclusion, 55-6
see also, lawfulness / lawlessness
lifeboat state, 21-2, 116, 141, 161
Macpherson report (1999), 90
Mahmud, Tayyab, 57
Malthusianism, 122, 127-8, 131,
140-41
border controls, 122
population growth, 120, 122, 131
INDEX <- 201
natural limits, 115, 120-22, 127,
141, 152
Manzoor-Khan, Suhaiymah, 50, 98,
156-7
Marxist analysis, 13, 36-7, 128-9
May, Theresa, 83, 108-9, 134, 137
Mbembe, Achille, 81, 107, 110, 160
McKittrick, Katherine, 36, 40, 146
Melamed, Jodie, 12, 87-8
migration, 4, 28-9, 35, 63-4, 99-100,
106-10, 122, 149-52
increased state control, 134-6
points-based system, 134-5
repatriation, 136-8
seasonal workers, 135-6
as supposedly exacerbating crises,
21, 92-3, 114-15, 140-41
tied visas, 135-6
Windrush, 5, 23, 44-5, 137
Miller, David, 96-7, 104
see also Sabir, Rizwaan
Mitropoulos, Angela, 121, 127-8, 141
Moore, Jim, 52-3, 60, 64
Moten, Fred, 154-5, 157
multiculturalism, 22, 34, 82-3, 101-4,
132, 149
disciplinary structure, 88-9
as municipal anti-racism, 86-8,
88-90
parallel society, 87-8, 94
state strategy, 20, 80, 86-93, 99, 147
undermining solidarities, 87-8
see also housing
nation, 3-9, 63-4, 106-7, 125-7, 144-7
conditioned by ‘natural’ order,
26-7, 32, 61, 83-6, 114-15,
149-53, 157-9
container, 10-11, 110-12, 122,
128-9, 152
as horizon for political change,
21-22, 116, 122-5, 132-4,
140-41
material assemblage, 86
as normative principle, 85-6
protectionism, 86, 122, 133, 141
202 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
nationalism, 6-7, 83, 86-7, 117, 137,
148, 154
anticolonial, 145-7
Black nationalist movements, 145-6
economic, 122-5
green nationalism, 13, 21-2,
140-41, 161
national consciousness, 146
progressive, 12-13, 114-16, 122-34
socialism, 21-2, 122-34
National Health Service, 5
National Insurance Act (1911), 5
neo-imperialism, 3-4, 7-8, 12, 21,
26-7, 63-4, 86, 116-8, 121,
126-8, 131, 139-41, 150-54,
160-61
neoliberalism, 21-2, 56-7, 114-16,
122-7
cybernetic markets, 118-20
decimating labour power, 36-7,
128-30
and deindustrialisation, 36-9
distributed risk, 125-7
as economisation, 26-7, 125-7
as explanatory framework, 13,
116-22
global commons, 118-20, 120-22,
126-7, 151-2
and natural order, 115-19, 134
as neo-imperial dependency
119-20, 127-30
and the state, 116-19, 122
and supposed crisis in democracy,
21, 114-15, 143-4
Nightingale, Carl, 27, 30
Nijjar, Jasbinder, 57, 75, 95, 111
Nixon, Rob, 18, 121
Northam, Gary, 67-70
paramilitarisation, 20-1, 70-71, 86
Parizot, Cédric, 112
pathologisation, 30, 33-4, 50, 70-1,
98-9, 129
contagion, 35
as core to stability of national
belonging, 47, 85-6
hereditary criminalisation, 20,
56-7, 79-80, 96
underclass, 33, 37, 40, 71
of ‘west indian’ families, 33, 61
Paul, Kathleen, 6
perpetual other, 20-1, 51-2, 63-4,
70-71
Pitcher, Ben, 88
platform capitalism, 129-33
global gig economy, 126, 128, 130
platform Keynesianism, 130-34,
154
precarious contracts, 130
state monopoly, 132-4, 160-61
policing, 50-81, 86, 88-9, 93-5,
101-4, 105-7, 110-11
Association of Chief Police
Officers, 67-8
by all citizens, 12-13, 81, 110-11,
143-4
as colonial war, 75-6, 86, 93, 95-8
as containment, 64, 66, 79
as converging across colonies, 64-7
criminal justice system, 56, 61, 64,
79, 88, 96
Criminal Tribes Act, 57-60, 73, 101
in Ireland, 66, 93-4
militarisation, 64-73, 79
as modes of life, 79-80
paramilitary form, 67-70, 86
as police-craft, 73-4, 80
public order, 64-5, 67-8
as social order, 62, 79-80, 103, 111
surveillance, 73-5, 79, 96, 102-6
territorial support group, 68-72
Ponsot, Marie, 23
post-colonial cut, 19-21, 81, 83-87,
112, 117-8, 143, 145, 153-4,
156-7, 160
poverty, 10, 45-6, 48-9, 78-9, 82, 123
explained by cultural difference,
32-4, 37, 91
Powell, Enoch, 4, 32, 61, 63, 81, 83-8,
93, 99, 153
Powellian nativism, 58-9, 81, 85-8,
104-5, 111-13
Powellism, 83-6, 92-3
enemy within, 61, 73, 80, 93
miscegenation, 100, 104
racial demography, 81, 85-6
white genocide, 104
precarity, 6, 21, 37, 41, 46, 92-3,
107-8, 116, 128-37, 141-2
pre-criminal space, 101-2, 110-11
progressive left, 122-34
Corbynism, 122-23
nationalism, 122-5, 130-34
property regimes, 19, 30, 53-4, 122,
141, 160-61
confiscation of Irish land, 24-5
Locke and North America, 24-6
and waste (as matter out of place),
24-32, 35, 39-40, 46-8
Puar, Jasbir, 104
Punjab, 4
Quijano, Anibal, 14
race, 11-15, 32, 60-4, 69-73, 86-91,
98-105, 158
as colonialism speaking, 13-15
differential racism, 89-90, 102
technology of colonialism, 14,
39-40, 74-6, 142, 158
as underclass, 33, 37-40, 71
Race Relations Act (1965), 29-30,
62-3, 87-9
racial capitalism, 14-15, 46-7, 78
as corrective to universalising view,
14-15
differential limits, 140-41
hyper-exploitation, 46-7, 78
labour arbitrage, 39-40, 126-7, 130
neo-imperialism, 46-7
unequal exchange, 38, 127, 129,
133-4, 142-3, 150, 160
Razack, Sherene, 28, 49
referendum, European Union (2016),
124, 131-2
riot, 58-9, 67-9, 70-73, 88-89
anti-normative, 72-3
as supposedly inimical to politics,
71-2
INDEX < 203
Robinson, Cedric, 15
see also racial capitalism
Rodney, Walter, 8
Roediger, David, 18, 154
Sabir, Rizwaan, 96-7, 104
see also Miller, David
Samudzi, Zoé, 111
see also Anderson, William
Scarman Report (1981), 59-62,
68-70, 90
Schwarz, Bill, 84-5
securitisation, 86, 107-8, 116-17,
140-41
Selvon, Sam, 29-30, 48
Shilliam, Robbie, 5, 85, 131
Shire, Warsan, 1
Simone, AbdouMaligq, 16, 144, 156
Sivanandan, Ambalavaner, 31, 38
Slobodian, Quinn, 118, 120
sovereignty, 84—6, 106-7, 114-8,
131-2, 147-8, 153, 156
spatial intimacy, 27-8, 31, 35-6
spectrality, 103, 105-113
aporetic other, 104, 143-4
ghosts of colonialism, 111-13,
152-3
Srnicek, Nick, 123, 129-30, 132
stratification, 11, 14, 89, 133
finance, 43, 46-7
housing, 19, 45-6
labour, 37-9, 135
structural adjustment, 8
surplus populations, 36, 73, 127-30,
137-8
as relative, 132-4
surveillance, 9, 20, 49-50, 57, 65, 68,
73-5, 79, 96, 102-6, 126, 130,
133, 141-3, 156, 160
sus laws, 58-60
Swann Report (1981), 33
Tendayi Achiume, E. 150-1
Thatcher, Margaret, 13, 32-3, 37, 42,
51, 58-9, 62-3
Tomba, Massimiliano, 155, 159-60
204 + THE EMPIRE AT HOME
Trojan Horse affair, 81-3 violence, 5, 12, 27, 50-7, 62, 66-75,
Tuck, Eve, 148 79-80, 140-41, 142-4, 149
see also Yang, Wayne to knowledge, 16-17
Turner, Joe, 7 as slow, 18-19, 47-9
of universalisation, 147, 153-5
underdevelopment, 10-11, 13, 44-7
unequal exchange, 5, 38-9, 126-9, Wadud, Asiya, 81
133-134, 142-3, 150, 160-1 Wagner, Kim, 93-4
universal, 153-60 Walia, Harsha, 107
aporia, 153-4 whiteness, 47-9, 92, 95, 152
the Earth and the world, 160-61 as apophatic, 18, 84-5, 153-4
insurgency, 157-60 as belonging, 17-18, 65, 99, 141
internal rupture, 155-7, 159 Williams, Patrick, 74
the ‘one, 153-4 Wolfe, Patrick, 14-15
universalisation, 153-5 Wynter, Sylvia, 50, 54
universality, 153-7
Yang, Wayne, 148
Verdee, Satnam, 6 see also Tuck, Eve
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