When I first started the research for this book in 2014, we were in the bitter – and it turned out to be prolonged – winter of austerity. Instead of blaming reckless financial entities for the runaway speculation and short-term selling that had triggered the 2007– 08 financial crisis, the Conservative-led government penalised disabled people, lone parents, public sector workers and the low paid through drastic cuts to the welfare state. These people, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crash, would be compelled to pay for it (Jones, 2020).

The government's ‘Hostile Environment’, introduced in 2012, was already taking hold. This highly racist policy, an unashamed attempt to reduce immigration, tasked the NHS, landlords, banks, employers and many others with enforcing immigration controls. It aimed to make the UK unliveable for undocumented migrants, withdrawing any access to the safety net, and ultimately to push them to leave. The Windrush Scandal, revealed by Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman in 2017, illustrated the true horror of this stigmatising policy (Gentleman, 2019). British citizens, the children of Commonwealth citizens who migrated to Britain between 1948 and 1971, people who had lived, parented and paid tax in the UK for decades, began to receive menacing text messages and threatening letters from the government. The communications told them, contrary to their own understanding, that they were illegal immigrants:

In 2016, the British people voted by a margin to leave the EU. The ‘Yes’ vote, propelled by xenophobic slogans, a particular construction of ‘British’ identity, and the purported threat of an invasion of immigrants on British shores, served as a licence for explicit racism. The leave result was followed by a significant rise in the number of racist and hate crimes reported to the police and other anti-racism organisations.