Across the country, fascists are committing horrendous acts of racist violence in broad daylight. In Rotherham and Tamworth, hotels housing asylum seekers were set on fire; in Burnley, Muslim graves were vandalized. On social media, videos are said to show young people beating those they perceive to be Muslims in the street. In one post from Hull, a man is pulled from his car and physically assaulted by a group of masked men.
These incidents were sparked by the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class. The perpetrator was born in Britain to a Christian family. That hasn’t stopped far-right groups from weaponizing their deaths to further their Islamophobic and anti-immigration agenda.
The violence of the last week has been unusually vicious and frightening, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Fourteen years of Conservative rule have seen minority communities used as a scapegoat for worsening inequality time and time again. The history of institutional racism in Britain goes back much further, but you could begin the most recent version of this story at the introduction of the Hostile Environment, a set of policies that aimed to make Britain feel inhospitable.
This feeling was only meant to be sensed by illegal immigrants, according to its architects David Cameron and Theresa May, but its effects traveled much further. In making it illegal for undocumented migrants to access state support, get jobs, or rent properties, the government created a culture of suspicion around all migrants, and sometimes all people of color. Growing numbers of civil society figures, including doctors and teachers, were tasked with checking individuals’ immigration statuses, a culture of surveillance that perpetuated a false dichotomy of the “good/bad” immigrant. Scandal after scandal followed, revealing the horrific abuse of asylum seekers at the hands of the Home Office, the deportation of many Windrush citizens, and a…
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Auteur: Amelia Morris
