The other day a family friend, Gilda, a 66-year-old Italian woman who has lived in this country for nearly 50 years, got chatting to someone in a hospital waiting room. The conversation quickly moved on to the issue of the referendum, and then on to immigration. The other person made clear she wanted to cut the number of migrants, and asked Gilda: “Wouldn’t you prefer to go back to your own country?”
Gilda was shocked: she has run an Italian coffee shop for 18 years, employing three people. “This ismy own country,” she replied.
Gilda is so anglicised I’d barely considered her to be an “immigrant”; but for the other person her accent marked her out as different, not one of us. It’s the first time since the 1970s, Gilda told me, that she has not felt welcome in the UK.
This morning a lot of British ethnic minority people are feeling the same. After an appalling referendum campaign, dominated by daily front-page scare stories regarding immigration, we’re wondering if people will again be questioning if we should be going back to our “own country”.
Yes, the immigration issue has been about numbers coming from eastern Europe, and about people who don’t have English as their first language. But as anyone with a black or brown face knows, our nationality is regularly questioned, even when we’re born here: we are spoken about in phrases such as “immigrant communities”, and immigration stories carried in the media are commonly accompanied by images of black or Asian people, implicitly assuming they arrived from overseas.
If a fully integrated Italian pensioner can be made to feel like an outsider, imagine what they think about us?
I can understand why people voted out. I was born and raised in Hull, a working-class northern city that never really recovered from the Thatcher era of mass unemployment and deindustrialisation. I can understand why people feel they have little to lose, why a Brexit doesn’t seem much of a risk given their current situation (Hull voted leave by 68% to 32%). Across northern England the story was the same.
I can also see that the EU is a remote, unwieldy institution that seems to care little about the impact of its policies on ordinary working people and communities. Clearly, something needs to be done about uncontrolled immigration.
But the leave campaign – from the headlines suggesting Turkey might imminently join the EU, to the notorious “breaking point” poster, with its queue of Middle Eastern migrants, to the claims that Muslim sex pests will flood into the UK – has brought race into the equation, playing on stereotypes about marauding savages.
This morning, knowing these despicable tactics have won over the nation, it feels like a “First they came for the Poles” moment. It seems only a matter of time before the intolerance that has been unleashed, reinforced and normalised, looks for the old, easy targets of people who look different. People like me.
“I want my country back,” the leavers said. Right now, I don’t feel part of that country.
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