For this week’s New Statesman I wrote the cover story, in which I interpreted what the new right’s plans for mass deportation really mean, via Kipling, Powell, Kureishi and a vigilante cycle repairist from Eritrea. I have to admit this essay reflects my growing pessimism about the future of ethnic minorities in Britain, and the hundreds of racist messages I have received in response to the article only serve to prove the point it is ruefully making.
A few years ago, as I cycled through my home stretch of north-east London, my tyre punctured. I got off my bike and locked it on a residential street. Returning a few hours later, I was shocked. A wheel was missing. I stood there exclaiming curses – on our delinquent nation, our low-trust society, our crime-ridden streets. Then a door opened behind me. “Don’t worry,” said the man standing in the doorway with a smile. There it was in his hand: my front wheel.
He then reassembled my bike. The tyre was now firm, its puncture repaired. My benefactor turned out to be an asylum seeker holed up in a Home Office property in Ilford. Barred from work, he had time on his hands and he spent it fixing bicycles – for which his hometown in Eritrea was famous. The money I offered was refused, even when government policy would suggest he lived off a mere £5 a day. He’d mended my bike, he said, as “a gift”.
I feel compelled to share this story because, increasingly, every illegal migrant seeking asylum here is portrayed as a budding rapist, to be expelled for the safety of our womenfolk, or for the sake of social cohesion. We deny the existence of individuals like this gentleman, whose acts of kindness are doing more for our fraying social fabric than today’s calls to deport people like him en masse.
Practically skilled, self-reliant, generous, this vigilante cycle repairist is the sort of person Britain should be keeping, not turning out. We need his skills, his youth, his communal spiritedness. He has his own needs, too – for a home, for refuge from a state that enslaves men as forced labour (the reason why tiny Eritrea is the second most common source of illegal arrivals, after Afghanistan). Among refugees, exemplary characters like this are legion. I have met them, while volunteering, reporting, worshipping. They far outnumber the criminals whose cases are provocatively trumpeted before the public.
No asylum seeker should be allowed to remain, according to Nigel Farage, who will likely be the next prime minister. Shelving the laws that allow migrants fleeing war and persecution to make Britain their home after arriving illegally, he would deport them. Reform proposes in its first term to remove 600,000 people, about one in every hundred, from our streets. By comparison, Keir Starmer’s government (not unwilling to banish illegal migrants) has managed only 24,000 deportations since last year’s election. Reform’s planned expulsions would be historically unprecedented – as unprecedented as the migrant influx in recent years has been huge.
And that is the point. Our desire to eject asylum seekers today is really the barely concealed expression of an enveloping disillusionment with immigration generally, even of the legal kind. It is propelling us out of an age of migration and into something altogether new: an age of deportation. This exodus will mark Britain for what remains of the 21st century. Its legacy could be as profound as the coming together on these isles of diverse groups of people in centuries past – an age that has now surely been and gone. The haven that Britain once was is being dismantled. In its place a fortress rises.
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Deportation had long been a dirty word linked to fascism. In countries where mass deportations are better remembered – such as France and Germany – the populist right has had to invent a less noxious synonym: remigration. In Britain, however, deportation is a concept now politely intoned by politicians, and not just by those who may have a kink for jackboots. “Don’t underestimate the progress we’ve made,” the hard-right MP Rupert Lowe posted recently on X. “The two best words in the English language, now adopted across Westminster: Detain. Deport.”
He’s right to sound triumphant. Years from now, this Gloucestershire farmer may very well be remembered as an architect of Britain’s age of deportation. Incensed by grooming gangs in the north of England, Lowe advocated for the mass deportation of members of the Pakistani community linked to these crimes while he was a Reform MP (he now sits as an independent). Even if they were born here or held British citizenship, British-Pakistanis were, in Lowe’s eyes, essentially foreigners with another nationality, who could legitimately be deported “back” to their true homes in Pakistan. At the height of public fury over the sexual abuse of children, Lowe made the deportation of a British ethnic minority a global cause célèbre.
It’s a sign of how rapidly the Overton window of acceptable policy has shifted that barely a year has passed since Lowe was forced out of his former party for proposing these mass deportations. Reform at that time sought to moderate its image. “It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people,” Farage insisted in September 2024, with an acerbity that even Labour would not summon today. “We simply can’t do it.”
Now, though, no one is shy about deportations. The same Conservative Party that, in government, jacked immigration up to outlandish heights, today pledges to be more hardline than Reform. Kemi Badenoch could not wait to accuse Farage of lenience, after he suggested men alone were his targets. Under the Tories, Badenoch boasted, even women and children would be deported. This could see them dispatched to live under the Taliban. Meanwhile, Labour is where Reform was a year ago: claiming proposals are merely unworkable, rather than unfair. “What Enoch Powell says today the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after,” the novelist Ambalavaner Sivanandan once quipped. The same is proving true of Lowe and Farage. Both mainstream parties have now vacated the high ground, allowing the politics of mass deportation to become the driving force of future UK governments.
The consensus around mass deportation has emerged alongside an outburst of English nationalism, its supporters weaponising the St George’s Cross. The flag is now displayed across the country, often in acts of public vandalism or racial provocation. This is no coincidence. Flags and deportations go hand in hand, defining and articulating nationhood. On Good Morning Britain, Reform’s Zia Yusuf accordingly insisted that there was no political alternative to mass deportations: “Otherwise we have no borders. We have no borders, we have no sovereignty: we don’t have a country.” No deportation, no nation.
This is new. For the Labour government, moderate levels of deportation (within an internationally recognised legal framework) remains a simple matter of public policy, a pragmatic and legitimate means to resolve a thorny issue. Such a measure of deportation can be reasonably debated. But this technocratic understanding of the use of deportation is now being overwhelmed by an enormity of far greater symbolic power and menace.
In the age of deportation, future governments shall exhibit through mass deportation their authority to decide who gets to be English at all, who gets to belong – a vicious pageant of national self-determination, reminiscent of the vengeful expulsions that characterised the birth of so many postcolonial nation states in the 20th century. It’s intended to undo the multicultural pageantry of our expiring age of migration, where we so visibly pronounced to the world that everyone was welcome, that Britain could be a home to all races and cultures. The approaching spectacle of a dark-skinned multitude evacuating our island is calculated as a rebuke to what the right sees as decades of Benetton-coded multiculti propaganda, which for them amounted to a rupture with the country’s past.
“Tell us what it is that binds us together,” Enoch Powell – the prophet of the coming age – once demanded in a fantastical recital of English history: “Show us the clue that leads through a thousand years… the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained… the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities.”
Powell’s fantasy was never right. The multiculturalism of today’s England arose out of a history genuinely rooted and centuries old. From its inception, Britishness was a composite identity, formed in the aftermath of the union of England and Scotland, capable of absorbing both nations, alongside the Welsh, the Irish and the myriad nationalities that would be absorbed (and invented) by the British empire: Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and, crucially, Indians. South Asians were ingested by the colonial maw within a half-century of the 1707 Act of Union (that is to say, Scots are only more British than Indians by a mere 50 years).
Its empire fated Britain to become a multicultural society, moulded by generations of intercontinental free movement that would catapult Englishmen like Powell abroad and, in turn, people of diverse origins to Britain – hence the arrival under a common citizenship of the Windrush generation of West Indians, and families like mine from South Asia. Empire, as the historian John Robert Seeley defined it, was the “extension of the English nationality into new lands”. It primed Britain’s primary home nation to be, for a while at least, remarkably cosmopolitan. Englishness would become, in the words of Robert JC Young, “a global identity into which others could always translate themselves”.
This has been the story of our national culture in its age of migration: a roll-call of progressively vibrant acts of translation that have brought exuberance and brilliance to everything from the England football team to our national literature of Naipauls and Achebes and Rushdies. It’s this capacious sense of Englishness that made possible the memorable opening lines of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990): “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost” – an identification steeped in what the novel calls “old histories”. I, too, would not be possible, would not be English, without those old histories, which the right now seeks to bury beneath the footsteps of deported masses.
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“What should they know of England who only England know?”: the famous question of another almost Englishman, the Indian-born poet Rudyard Kipling. England means nothing without the world encompassing it. The populist right has no feeling for Kipling’s England, or mine – the England we have known by being simultaneously from here and not from here, the England whose history is not that of a little island, but a grand confluence.
In place of that history, that sweeping universalism left over by imperial hubris, the populist right wishes to impose its fantasies of a pure English nation, the one that existed before the misadventure of empire muddied it with the clay of undesirable peoples. For Powell, whose oracular interventions as long ago as the 1960s first elaborated the call for, and theory behind, mass removals – “voluntary repatriation” – the imperial dream of commingled races and cultures was a “national hallucination”. Expunging “coloured” immigrants and the immigrant-descended population was a useful nation-building tool for England’s recovery.
In his St George’s Day speech in 1961, Powell likened the postcolonial English to Athenians recovering from Persian occupation, as if the English themselves had been colonised by the British empire. “So we today,” he began, “at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.”
The mass deportations of tomorrow will resurrect that vision. It’s becoming disingenuous to say that these simply concern illegal immigrants, when the accompanying rhetoric is embroiled in resurgent Powellite Anglomania. “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul-free,” proclaimed the former MP Douglas Carswell in the exultant days after Reform announced its mass deportation plans – plans resembling, in minute details, those Carswell had outlined in a Telegraph column earlier this year. And the Windrush scandal that for years saw legal black British nationals deported to the Caribbean, which they had left long ago as young children, foretells of how even without explicitly racist intent, the blunt instrument of deportation will inevitably hit minority British nationals hard.
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This age of deportation is a global one. This is a paradox: the brutal reification of national borders through deportation is now a thoroughly globalised phenomenon. Reform’s deportation project is, by its own admission, “Trump 2.0”. That signals where we are going in the short term. But its plans also mirror the pattern of deportations now rife in many of Britain’s former colonies, such as India, which may show the direction of travel in the long term.
The nascent frenzy to expel illegal migrants in England is already in a very advanced state in India. In recent months, hundreds of ethnically Bengali Indian citizens have been apprehended on suspicion of being illegal migrants, and dumped across the border in Bangladesh. In the province of Assam, as many as four million Bengali Indians have been stripped of their citizenship, accused of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, where their ancestors originated generations ago. They linger in lavishly built detention centres, locked in a bureaucratic nightmare.
It’s not fanciful to see in this omens of Britain’s future. The Windrush scandal is already a direct parallel to what has happened to Bengalis in Assam: legitimate citizens with ancestral roots abroad wrongfully detained or deported as illegals. These are populations mired in the same imperial history that saw nation states suddenly grafted on to multi-ethnic populations that had previously shared a transnational British citizenship. By the very mechanism that so many Bengalis found themselves in Assam, my own Bengali family ended up in England. With ethnonationalism on the rise, we risk, in the long term, being removed by the same mechanism too.
Globally, we are seeing civilians rendered stateless on a scale not witnessed since the darker chapters of the 20th century. Deportation of the surviving population of Gaza is being seriously entertained by the world’s power-brokers. While nowhere near as perilous, the proposals by Reform, and some Conservatives, to “disapply” the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and other human rights laws is of a piece with the collapse of the post-World War II rules-based order thanks to Israel’s war. Dismantling international human rights law is therefore not a solution. The answer, if it exists at all, lies in strengthening it, so that fewer people are made stateless or forced to flee illegal wars and persecution. That is the sole way out of this impasse.
I now think how fortuitous it was that my father arrived in Britain when he did, when it was still a haven. Arriving with the right to be here, he never called himself a refugee. It was by chance that I made the discovery that he must have been one. Flicking through the pages of his erstwhile Pakistani passport, I noticed the year he came to Britain: 1971. That was the year an eight-month-long war raged across the land of his birth. Between the time of his departure from his village in the disputed territory of East Bengal and his arrival in a Lancashire milltown, he wasn’t heard from. It was suspected he had not survived the perilous journey, which was made amid what many historians have recognised as the first genocide to take place after the Second World War.
The old laws that facilitated his arrival have long since been dismantled, a fate that awaits the Human Rights Act and much else besides. Today, in the age of deportation, he would never make it.
[See also: How Labour learned to love the flag]
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Fantastic piece - do you have a hunch about why the overton window has recently shifted so heavily towards pro-mass deportation stances? As you mention, Farage thought it was infeasible last year, so he seems like a relative latecomer compared to far-parties abroad?