Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Daniel Trilling, who wrote the definitive book on the BNP’s rise, noted how the East London suburb of Barking “in a short space of time changed from a settled, mainly white community to an ethnic mix that began to resemble the rest of London.” The local Labour Party MP saw the writing on the wall in the late 1990s, warning that ignoring working-class voters to appeal to Middle England would provoke a backlash.34 Tony Blair and his New Labour Party weren’t focused on helping the working class; if anything, they encouraged escaping it.35

  Between 2002 and 2010, the BNP posted impressive scores in local elections, winning thirty-three local council seats across the country in 2006 with an average of 19 percent of the vote. UKIP, a “BNP in blazers,” as some called it, started to steal its thunder after 2010 and by the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016, had all but eclipsed them.36

  The rest of Britain, and perhaps some of the reviewers who panned Collins’s prophetic book, seemed to finally notice in the early hours of the morning on June 24, 2016.

  Brexit should have been the left’s wildest dream—a genuine mass working-class revolt against Westminster elites, except the revolt was directed at an idea that the new left held dear. The problem was that the revolutionary class of Marxist dreams had parted from the vanguard. “In an almost comical reflection of the sacred lefty belief that any worthwhile political movement will necessarily be built around the workers,” the writer John Harris observed, “the foundation of the Brexit coalition is what used to be called the proletariat, … even if some of their loudest complaints are triggering no end of anxiety among bien-pensant types, and causing Labour a great deal of apprehension.”37

  Amid all the shock and disbelief at the Guardian, Harris explained the outcome to a readership that had almost unanimously voted to remain. He described visits to rural Lincolnshire where UKIP leader Nigel Farage “could pitch up and do back-to-back public meetings to rapturous crowds.” People were angry about lack of housing, a lousy labour market, and sanctimonious pitches from politicians at election time—pitches that amounted, in Harris’s view, to the “suggestion that the only thing Westminster can offer working-class people is a specious chance of not being working class anymore.” A poor woman on the fringes of Manchester put it succinctly. “If you’ve got money, you vote in.… If you haven’t got money, you vote out.”38

  UKIP was started as a party with a singular focus on leaving the EU. Yet in an era of populist backlash, it has “almost by accident, stumbled across this potent new social division and given it a voice.” Nigel Farage, the party’s long-serving leader, vowed that one day UKIP would have more ex-Labour supporters than Tories and its post-Brexit leader, Paul Nuttall, made courting the old left his explicit strategy.39

  The media elite, much like those who panned Collins’s book, had missed this entirely. They were so busy denouncing UKIP and the right as reactionaries that they missed the political lesson: it was their former base that had fuelled UKIP’s rise and helped the Leave vote win. The same was true of left-wing parties and media organizations across Europe. By denouncing their own former voters for holding certain unsavory views rather than engaging and seeking to understand their fears, they lost the political battle. “The alienation of the people charged with documenting the national mood from the people who actually define it is one of the ruptures that has led to this moment.… The press and television are the focus of as much resentment as politics,” wrote Harris in the pages of a paper that was as guilty as any.40

  Harris couldn’t believe Labour MPs’ shock; “How did they not know?” he marveled. Well-paid media and finance professionals in London were immune from competition from Polish plumbers, but for most voters in Sunderland and Essex, that wasn’t the case. There was no doubt a heavy dose of outright xenophobia and bigotry behind the vote, as the heinous attacks on Poles and other immigrants in the weeks after Brexit proved, but there was also a rational economic protest. Even if the referendum was more about giving the political establishment a black eye, the numbers should have been a warning. During the 1990s and just after 2000, about 60,000 migrants came to Britain from Europe each year. Between 2004 and 2012, it was 170,000 per year. By 2011, there were 654,000 Poles living in the UK.41

  There was also an element of the old and angry outvoting the young and optimistic—and taking a momentous decision that would shape a world many of them would not live to see. Youth resentment peaked the week after the vote, and, for Harris, their complaint echoed Orwell’s description of Britain as “a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.” But the fact is there were many such forgotten distant relatives hiding in the countryside.42

  It was those who left for the suburbs of Essex and Kent who helped Brexit prevail, the last group “that the chattering classes are happy to hear mocked and attacked.” They now live in “those suburbs where the fluttered folk of the white flight settled,” amid bungalows with “half-finished walls and slabs of stacked paving, awaiting the DIY mood of the next Bank Holiday.” Even among the young who can’t remember where their families came from, nostalgia reigns. Collins finds young men “searching for an identity or clinging to a past they never knew,” who speak with an exaggerated cockney. These are people who fear the crime of the city might reach their suburbs. They don’t want asylum-seekers, and they are united in “a desire to protect themselves from further disruption.”43

  As Harris argued the week before the referendum was held, “for millions of people, the word ‘immigration’ is reducible to yet another seismic change no one thought to ask them about, or even explain.” As with the Dutch and Danish voters who flocked to the far-right, there was a sense that massive change was under way without any sort of consultation.

  Both Collins’s book and Harris’s Guardian articles had accurately foreseen the result. Much like the American punditocracy living inside its Washington, DC, Beltway bubble that dismissed Trump’s chances of winning the primaries, most of the British media elite (apart from Brexit cheerleaders at the Telegraph) were not looking far beyond the M25. Those who had been watching carefully from beyond the capitals were well aware that both Brexit and a Trump nomination were likely.

  One exception was David Goodhart writing in the Financial Times, who saw the referendum as “an early-21st-century ‘Peasants’ Revolt.’”44 of those left behind. It was also a clash between the millennial identity of achievers and those clinging to a more nostalgic identity, like Collins’s old mates from Southwark who felt they had been written out of history, people who still live a few miles from where they were born, for whom identity is more tribal and geographic.

  Resentment of new arrivals and the perception that they must compete with outsiders for their paltry share of diminishing benefits was angering the British working class. More social benefits, but for us, not them, has become a rallying cry for the welfare nationalists of Denmark, France and Britain—and far beyond Europe, too.

  14

  XENOPHOBIA BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE

  Mary Louw isn’t your typical xenophobe. She volunteers at a school in a poor neighborhood where the children are varying shades of brown; she’s openly lesbian, was once a member of the Young Communist League, and quotes liberally from Marxist-Leninist doctrine. She doesn’t hate Muslims, and she isn’t white; she isn’t even European.

  Xenophobia is not just a matter of wealthy white Europeans slamming their doors in the face of poor brown Muslims fleeing war and tyranny; it is a universal phenomenon that can arise anywhere where economic angst, frustrated expectations, and the need for a convenient scapegoat converge. And in South Africa, a young constitutional democracy modeled on the liberal laws of Canada and Germany, the situation has become acute. South Africa’s pattern of resentful native-born citizens mobilizing against fellow Africans from neighbouring countries is almost identical to what is happening in Europe, but it tends to go unnoticed in the international press because it is
far away—and both the victims and the perpetrators are black.

  The grievances of South African blacks angry about immigration today are remarkably similar to those among working-class Europeans. Poor London East Enders after World War II voiced the same discontent. As David Goodhart recounts, “No sooner had the working class there come into its inheritance after the sacrifice of the war years than it was snatched away by the arrival of people who had had little to do with that story.” After years of being kept below stairs and laying down their lives for Queen and country, there was a sense that the downtrodden working class had finally been accepted as full members of society and were owed a debt. To them, the arrival of immigrants—and the competition they brought to the lower end of the labour market—amounted to the state taking back the gift it had granted.1

  For South Africa’s majority, finally granted freedom after decades of oppression, the influx of better-educated foreigners was a similar shock. The native-born had an understandable sense of entitlement to redress from the state after forty-six years of apartheid rule and many more of colonialism before. For newly arrived skilled immigrants from countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, there was no such expectation, and they were willing to work or sell goods for far less than native South Africans would. Like the East Enders of the 1950s, black South Africans—at last recognized as full citizens of their own country—felt that their hard-fought inheritance was being snatched away.

  After the democratic transition in 1994, “I was one of the people who was very much optimistic about the change in the country,” Louw recalls. It was a moment of hope, “knowing that apartheid will come to an end. We will be free as black people,” she tells me, perched on a plastic chair in a primary school car park as trains rattle past a nearby station and the smell of barbecued meat wafts from the platform. Two decades later, she is outraged by the foreigners in her midst, and she blames South Africa’s most revered icon, Nelson Mandela, for opening the doors.

  Today, Louw’s priority is kicking foreigners out of her neighborhood. She blames them for all of inner-city Johannesburg’s crime. “They are everywhere,” complains Louw. She claims they steal cell phones and citizens’ identity cards. “There is no proper control over them, and that leads to the anger.… We feel they should rather leave,” she tells me. “We are slaves of this democracy, not recipients,” she wrote in a recent message to a WhatsApp group of similarly minded friends.2 South African citizens are “sweating day and night for the future of our own children, yet the foreign rapists of our freedom and economy seems to be the only beneficiaries,” she thundered.

  Louw comes from a political family. When she was in high school, she started a student league of the South African Communist Party, “trying to educate and teach my fellow students about Marxist and Leninist theory. Just in-depth knowledge on Karl Marx and Che Guevara,” she tells me matter-of-factly.3

  These days, she remains active in local politics. She lives in Hillbrow, once a student neighborhood and now known mostly for its soaring crime rate, and is part of the local leadership of the SACP. The frustrations of South Africans like Louw who expected great things only to find themselves politically free but economically trapped are widespread. Politicians made promises of homes and jobs that went unfulfilled; instead, they found themselves living surrounded by foreigners from elsewhere in Africa.

  South Africa tends to remain off the radar when it comes to debates about refugees and immigration. It shouldn’t be.

  For the past decade, it has had one of the highest rates of asylum applicants in the world. Migration is not a new phenomenon in South Africa; it has been a cornerstone of the economy for over a century. During the apartheid era, migration was widespread, but it was strictly regulated and used as a means of bringing cheap labour to the gold, diamond, and platinum mines. Thousands of workers from neighbouring countries came south to toil underground.

  Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the Rainbow Nation has become a destination for refugees fleeing wars across the continent or seeking a better life. With genocide in Rwanda, war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the deterioration of neighbour Zimbabwe, South Africa received a flood of refugees and migrants from across the continent. As was the case in Britain when EU freedom of movement went into effect, the country received far more people than it had ever expected. Many of them are better educated than South Africans and quickly find jobs as teachers, waiters, and engineers. Car guards, who hustle for loose change in exchange for keeping an eye on parked cars, often hold advanced degrees from universities in war-torn nations like Congo or Somalia.

  In 1996, South Africa produced a startlingly liberal constitution that entitled foreigners and their children to almost all the same rights enjoyed by citizens, apart from voting and running for political office. But there was a countervailing force in immigration policy. In the immediate aftermath of the 1994 transition to democracy, Nelson Mandela appointed his rival Mangosuthu Buthelezi as the head of the Home Affairs department.4

  In 1999, Buthelezi called on “good patriots” to report illegal immigrants to the authorities and argued publicly that the much-touted post-apartheid reconstruction and development plan would be a failure if scarce resources had to be shared with foreigners.5 It was a sign of things to come.

  South Africa was a beacon for both refugees and economic migrants across the continent due to its comparatively healthy economy and newfound stability, but the new immigration policy didn’t provide economic migrants with a legal route to work. As a result, “lesser-skilled economic migrants turned to the asylum system alongside genuine asylum-seekers, capitalizing on the minimal barriers to entry and the work entitlement granted to asylum applicants while their claims are being processed.” The surge in applications overwhelmed the bureaucracy and had the perverse effect of denying the claims of genuine refugees, who were classified as economic migrants by officials struggling to disqualify people as fast as they could.6

  South Africa is unique among African countries in that it doesn’t require refugees to live in camps; it allows them to move into communities, work, and send their children to school. Setting up the processing of claims is expensive but far cheaper than building camps and providing for their residents. Like European governments in the early days of guest workers, South Africa never anticipated the challenges of integrating large numbers of foreigners who would be living and working alongside locals.7

  Then the numbers began to balloon. While the government’s data is often incomplete, it is clear that between 2006 and 2011, South Africa received more asylum applications than almost any country in the world. In 2008, there were more than 200,000 requests, and in 2009, it peaked at over 340,000 filed claims.8 By 2015, South Africa was second to only Germany—after the massive influx of Syrians—in the number of unresolved claims.9

  Part of the reason was the implosion of neighbour Zimbabwe. After years of mismanagement and cronyism under president-for-life Robert Mugabe, the economy had by 2006 spiraled into hyperinflation and the finance ministry was racing to add zeros to the banknotes. As Mugabe’s government began to crack down harder on the political opposition, inflation exceeded 6,000 percent annually. The denominations ascended to the absurd—bills worth $100 trillion were printed—before citizens reverted to using US dollars and South African rands.10 Several million Zimbabweans fled south to their wealthier neighbour. The strain on South Africa was palpable.

  In the 2009 Oscar-nominated sci-fi film District 9, local residents go to war against giant armored alien prawns who descend upon South Africa’s cities. American audiences ate up the human-versus-alien violence and the high-tech weaponry on display. Some reviewers looking for a political message saw the heavily armed police vehicles fighting the aliens as an allegory for apartheid. It wasn’t; it was quite literal.

  The scenes at the beginning of the film featuring poor local residents who advocate killing “them,” burning their businesses, and kicking them out
were based on actual footage from the year before in which real people rather than actors were talking about the immigrants in their communities—not extraterrestrial crustaceans.

  The film came out one year after mobs of South Africans went on the rampage, torching shops owned by immigrants, burning one man alive. Sixty people were killed, one hundred thousand were displaced, and thirty thousand homes were destroyed.11 The violence did not let up; in 2010, a string of murders of Somali and Ethiopian shopkeepers—often preceded by threatening letters—forced many to close down or leave town. In Khayelitsha, the sprawling shantytown outside of Cape Town, twenty-two Somalis were murdered in just three months. In 2013, a Mozambican taxi driver died after being tied and dragged behind a police van. And in Port Elizabeth, cell phone footage emerged of a twenty-five-year-old Somali being stoned to death while trying to protect the goods in his looted shop. That year, the Somali Community Board estimated that one thousand of their countrymen had been murdered in South Africa since 2004.12

  The award-winning South African writer Jonny Steinberg devoted an entire book to the life story of a Somali refugee, Asad Abdullahi, who had fled war in Mogadishu as a child and made his way on a treacherous journey through the Horn of Africa to Kenya and, eventually, after thirteen years on the move, to Cape Town. After nine years in South Africa and the killing of several of his friends and family members, he found himself applying for asylum again—in the United States—on the grounds that South Africa was too dangerous.13 The story is all too common, but most are not as lucky as Abdullahi; they are not able to flee to safety a second time.