Crossing the Race Line:“No Polish, No Blacks, No Dogs” in Brexit Britain? or, The Great British Brexit Swindle

In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilising force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The article focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain’s post-colonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbours. In successfully racialising, lumping together and re-labelling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious re-casting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell, and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the post-national principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multi-national, cosmopolitan, or human rights-based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. The article unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multi-ethnic societies.