Gus John | Beryl and Keir Starmer’s Change agenda

Even as we prepared for the political hurricane the polls were announcing and the predicted wipe-out of the Conservative party, we were alerted that Beryl was coming with frightening force to welcome Keir Starmer as the UK’s next prime minister.

But what does Beryl have to do with Starmer or with the nation state of Britain? How does she become our business?

Just shy of 60 years ago, I arrived at Heathrow Airport from Grenada, a former British colony, two months before the 1964 general election. Immigration and race dominated that election, with Peter Griffiths, the Conservative candidate in Smethwick in the West Midlands, declaring: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” Griffiths won his seat with a 7.5 per cent swing from Labour.

Sixty years later, less than a week before this general election, campaigners for the Reform party were calling the outgoing prime minister “an effing Paki” and proclaiming that Britain could solve the problem of migrants coming to these shores in small boats by having the British army shoot refugees. Reform went on to win five seats, coming second to Labour in a number of constituencies, thus emboldening their leader, Nigel Farage, to make the jingoistic claim “We’re coming for Labour”.

In the intervening 60 years since 1964, we witnessed police casually announcing to their colleagues “We’re going ‘nigger hunting’”, the National Front, Column 88, the British National Party, Britain First, and other neo-fascists terrorising communities and murdering people from South Asia by ‘Paki-bashing’, with none of those heinous crimes being treated by the state as human rights violations or as acts of domestic terrorism.

The Black and Global Majority’s demands that those far right groups be proscribed as terrorist organisations were roundly dismissed. No one required them to show evidence that they subscribed to fundamental British values; none was required to pass citizenship tests, even when they sought election to local councils or to parliament. The likelihood is that perpetrators of such human-rights atrocities are now sitting in the British parliament as Reform MPs.

INIQUITOUS LEGISLATION

By the time Nigel Farage became leader of the far right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 2006, there had been a growing presence of Black and Global Majority (BGM) people from Britain’s former colonies since 1945, a majority of whom had served in the British armed forces. Yet, precisely because successive governments had failed to affirm the rights of those citizens of the United Kingdom and its colonies to be in Britain, but rather had encouraged the view that the nation’s economic woes, levels of unemployment, and other social ills were a result of immigration, the white population made no distinction between people from the black Commonwealth and those who were coming in increasing numbers from across Europe.

The Eurosceptic UKIP, therefore, exploited the growing unrest among the white population, especially depressed and dispossessed working-class communities, whipping up discontent about the European Union’s Schengen Treaty and the freedom of movement across the EU that it allowed and amplifying calls for Britain to leave the EU.

By 2013, against that background, Theresa May had vans running around London with billboards screaming ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’. In that same year, she began to draft what would become the 2014 Immigration Act, an act that placed a duty on landlords, including local councils, to ensure that those to whom they were letting properties could provide evidence of their right of residence in Britain. It also made it easier for the Government to remove those who could not produce documents to confirm their right to be here. That marked the beginning of the State’s persecution of citizens who had entered and settled in Britain as former colonial subjects from the black Commonwealth. It also formed the architecture of what would later be dubbed the ‘Windrush scandal’, as if that iniquitous legislation applied only to people who had come from the Caribbean.

The Conservative government turned the screw much more tightly with the 2016 Immigration Act, which prevented those who could not show evidence of being in the UK legally, from working and from access to health services, benefits, freedom passes, driving licences, etc.

In January this year, the Government admitted that 54 Windrush scandal victims had died while awaiting compensation for wrongful identification of them as illegal.

LOOMING EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

And what of Beryl?

Beryl got tired of hearing Keir Starmer trumpet on about Change, Change, Change. So she dropped by to bring a message to leaders of state in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the rest of colonial Europe. The wealth provided by the small nation states colonised by Europe laid the foundations for the rapid and unfettered expansion of western capitalism.

One consequence of this has been the cumulative destruction of the world’s ecology and disastrous climate events – hurricanes, tornadoes, sea surges, floods, and droughts - that are fast becoming the new normal for various regions of the world.

Beryl dropped in unusually early. Over the last three decades or so, her siblings - Gilbert, David, Ivan, Irma, and Maria - did their worst and moved on during the period we had come to expect, i.e., September to November. But we are warned that there may be as many as 40 more tempestuous events of lesser or greater intensity still to come this year.

The diaspora in Britain and elsewhere cannot be expected to fundraise and/or increase their remittances in order to help the governments of those nations respond to disasters on such a scale and with such frequency. Many of those island states are facing a looming existential crisis.

This means, therefore, that the British state must take the lead in righting the wrongs of the past and abandon its pretend amnesia about that past.

Keir Starmer, in a rebuff to Nigel Farage about his tardy response to the Reform campaigner’s racist slur towards Rishi Sunak, told the BBC that ‘“leaders set the tone and standards for their parties. That’s what leadership is about, and that’s why I set about changing the Labour Party four and a half years ago”.

So let us see evidence of change in the British government’s attitude to dealing with the legacy of slavery and of colonialism; in leading the call for debt cancellation for the nation states most impacted by climate change; in making sure that the British-born BGM population does not continue to be ‘othered’, discriminated against, and marginalised as this government indulges in appeasing the ‘keep Britain white’, ‘give us our country back’ section of the population in order to be guaranteed their vote.

Let change begin with Keir Starmer’s unambiguous statement of his vision of a future multiethnic Britain.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary Fellow and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.