DIRTY PRETTY LONDON: THE GLOBAL STORY

On 26 July 2013, journalist Zoe Williams wrote a story in The Guardian about a little known campaign, spearheaded by the British Home Office, that involved vans being driven around certain areas of London upon which anti-immigration billboards were displayed. So clandestine was this pilot campaign that local councils as well as the police professed to know nothing of its existence. Slogans on these billboards included: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, followed by a number one could text if instigating deportation happened to land on someone's “to do list”. When Williams asked the Home Office when this campaign might lose its pilot status, the response was that its success needed to be assessed on several levels. The ludicrous nature of this reply was hardly lost on Williams, who asked whether or not the success of the campaign would be based on just how many migrants voluntarily chose to return to their nation of origin. On 3 August 2013, a second immigration-related controversy broke in The Guardian, this time concerning random spot checks that were being conducted by Home Office officials and the police across railway stations in Britain, under the aegis of Home Secretary Theresa May.

These news stories are a stark reminder of the way in which immigration to Britain is continually narrated as a social problem that needs to be solved, taking us back to Margaret Thatcher's anti-immigration policies and even further back to the treatment of migrants arriving from former colonies after the end of empire, who slowly but surely lost their rights to British citizenship. Enoch Powell's infamous “rivers of blood” speech as well as Thatcher's slightly more subdued articulation of the anxieties generated from feeling as though “one's culture is begin overtaken by another” are carried through to this latest wave of anti-immigration sentiment. The tragic London bombings of 5 July 2005, addressed in Rachid Bouchareb's London River (2009), is one fairly recent event that can be pulled out of this long history that leads to the vilification of refugees and asylum seekers in particular, culminating in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian migrant, in Stockwell Tube station.