Sadiq Khan, one of the few BAME voices in the referendum/Policy Exchange
One of the things that really perplexed me was how the issue of immigration really began to take hold of the campaign. I wrote at length about this from a black perspective before the Referendum vote. Why and how did this happen? Two very different if related questions. The “why”? The leave campaign needed to win and needed to tap into something dark and profound in order to light the flame of populist nationalism. The “how”? The elite managed to whip up fears by resorting to dog whistle politics to exploit the insecurities of mainly white working class voters, who, as we are told, are disenfranchised and increasingly voiceless. This is, of course, the narrative we were fed by mainstream commentators. Rather key in all of this, was that we did not hear very much from ‘immigrants’ at all in this debate, we only heard from them, briefly, when they resigned after discovering the not-so-hidden underpinning racism and xenophobia of their respective campaigns. But other than the elections of the Mayors of London and Bristol we did not really hear arguments about the referendum from an immigrant or BAME perspective and in this context Gisela Stuart doesn’t count. Yet immigration was the defining issue of the campaign on both sides.
What did this omission say about us as a nation? For me as person of colour, this rather signalled that my stake in the UK’s future was not taken seriously at all. In fact, by not seeking out a BAME or immigrant perspective, which I admit are separate issues that were purposely elided in the campaign,[1] it almost became an underlying assumption that I did not have a natural stake in the UK psyche. At no point did I hear anything that acknowledged the contribution of my fellow BAME citizens to the cultural memory of the UK. In the LEAVE side’s slogan “taking back control”, there did not seem to be any room for any thought about the historically multicultural nature of the Empire that has led to today’s diverse United Kingdom. What was presented to us was, as Paul Gilroy calls it, a “melancholic attachment” to a recollection of Great Britain that never was, a distorted memory of conquest and mastery, which ruthlessly holds everything within the cold gaze of Britannia.[2] So without a national conversation about our colonial past and how its multiculturalism fashioned our collective heritage as Britons, we never really peered through the looking glass to meet our historical prejudices head on. This unquestioned, unexamined distorted view of our past allowed large swathes of our population to be manipulated into thinking that their patriotism and its accompanying prejudices were part of a legitimate political and democratic discourse. We have just witnessed how this cynical promotion of a cultural amnesia of our true multicultural heritage[3] became twisted into political tools that actually undermined the democratic process of the referendum. Here, I specifically mean undermined in the sense that the now evident lies that were fed to the populous about the NHS and levels of immigration were interwoven with this unexamined and distorted recollection of our idealised self.
