London’s Chinatown. Jonathan Brady/PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.A few days before the UK’s EU referendum, I travelled up to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire. I wanted to visit a friend who had been detained there for five months. She came from a working-class family in southern China, and was a language student here until earlier this year. But under home secretary Theresa May’s tougher crackdown on undocumented migrants, she was arrested while working in a Chinese takeaway in Manchester.
Made increasingly anxious by the living conditions at the detention centre, while waiting to be returned to China, she asked me what the referendum result would do to people from outside of the UK.
Britain contains so many parallel societies. As I lost hope of helping my detained friend, the referendum’s ‘Leave’ result was announced, with voters chanting that they had ‘taken their country back’. The political and media class are eager to tell us that this is a ‘working-class revolt’, which leaves me puzzled. If this is so, who is my detained friend, and the tens of thousands like her who put together their life savings to travel here and improve their families’ livelihoods? Who are those tens of thousands who have chosen to make this country their home, who have settled here, and want to be part of society? And who are those descendants of theirs who were born and bred British, living in inner cities, struggling to make ends meet?
