Thread by @WritersofColour

The Nationality and Borders Bill raises uncomfortable questions about our "British" Identity mediadiversified.org/2022/01/10/the…

'The #NationalityandBordersBill 2021 with its proposed laws making it easier to deprive Black and Asian people in particular of British citizenship provides a practical opportunity to confront the comforting lies we tell ourselves about what it means for us to be British,

..and how British lawmakers have always defined our sense of identity and belonging.

How often do we console ourselves that British people wanted our help rebuild this nation after its wartime devastation?

The truth is the British Nationality Act 1948, which created the concept of British citizenship and assigned it to white British subjects, aimed to ease outward white British settlement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand) rather than to allow inward migration.

The fact that 800 million subjects of Empire (and in effect 300 million newly independent Indians and Pakistanis) also became British and moved to the the UK is an unintended and unwanted side effect right from the start.'

'This clearly exposes the arbitrary nature of not only our citizenship, but our sense of identity and belonging. There is the consolation that white British people may have later come to realise they needed our help, but they never wanted it as we were soon to discover.

..Defining ourselves by our contribution is going to be the end of us, expecting humanisation from the transactional process of labour. White British labelled “scroungers” for their imagined dependency on the state, never have to question their Britishness,

in coalition with their state that will never remove it.'

'White-skinned Irish people were racialised as non-white in Britain in living memory. The infamous “No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs.” public notices (‘Black’ then included south Asians, without political blackness making us Black) were very real but also short lived.

The side effect of British Caribbean and British south Asian immigration following the British Nationality Act, also began transitioning white-skinned Irish to white, with ongoing British colonial extraction also forcing many of them to leave their own to care for the Coloniser

..under their National Health Service.

Black and south Asian people generously offered white British people somebody more other to hate. White Irish writer and musician Angela Moran honestly describes this solidarity’s passing nature in her BBC film ‘A Very British History: Birmingham Irish I Am’.

'White British MPs only deprived us of automatic citizenship in 1962 when our numbers in England’s large cities began to terrify them. The freedom to be more ourselves means they can no longer as easily assimilate us into a national identity designed in their image.

Scotland and Wales, with their more progressive governments describe their 94%+ white nations as “welcoming and diverse” shows a high level of white comfort, when much larger in population London is likely to be white minority. Especially with a selective historical literacy,

which is a function of all western nationalisms, assuming this welcome remains as our numbers increase.

(To their credit, the Scottish National Party honestly state they need greater inward migration for economic sustainability with Scotland’s decreasing, in opposition to England’s increasing, population).

In George Orwell’s essay Notes on Nationalism, which was written during the final stages of Word War II he ruminates about Britain’s shared pathology with other Western nations, saying ,’By ‘patriotism’

I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.’

His essay is summed up well surprisingly well here. ‘Orwell compares Nazism with other forms of nationalistic ideologies to generate an overall argument and questions the function of nationalism.’

⤴️