Precarity of welcome: review of Becky Taylor's Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain
At the start of the twenty-first century a poll showed that alongside Gypsies and Travellers, refugees were the social group the British public was most likely to admit to prejudice towards. The poll found that these groups were also the ones that respondents were least likely to have had personal interactions with, their perceptions instead shaped by what Becky Taylor diplomatically calls the ‘intemperate language’ of the mainstream media.
In her book, Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, Taylor carefully explores the reception, experiences and significance of refugees in Britain across the twentieth century. Time and time again, she demonstrates how closely bound up the refugees’ lives have been with the British public’s own experiences of changing political and social factors, whether these two groups come face to face or not, and however much of a gulf the media may lead people to believe exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Making sense of a huge range and diversity of sources, the book beautifully demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of British society, and the many ways refugees encountered these complexities.
Through the experiences of refugees fleeing Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s and communism in the 1950s, Taylor evokes the changing role of the voluntary sector and the development after the war of the welfare state. The central role of voluntary organisations in 1930s refugee resettlement illustrates the state’s reluctance to act, both in terms of official resettlement programmes and in providing financial support to those refugees already in the country. (It also challenges the myth that Britain warmly welcomed Jewish refugees.) By the 1950s Britain was a changed, and changing, place. The early years of the NHS, the ongoing work of building a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state, and the boom of a new and dynamic British youth culture formed the background to the arrival of 21,000 Hungarian refugees in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
The developing Cold War made the mobilisation of political and community support for the Hungarians easier because of what they represented: opposition to communism. Despite this, their reception was fraught, particularly in the early days, stemming from local hostility, inadequate camp accommodation and difficulties entering the labour market. Taylor draws a fascinating comparison between violence which broke out in 1957 between Hungarians and locals in County Durham and the following year’s white race riots in Notting Hill. In contrast to the 1930s and 40s, when the alien-ness of foreigners was a given, by the late 50s it was assumed that white Europeans would face less hostility than people racialised differently. And yet, while experiences of racism would clearly differ between a white Hungarian refugee and a Black Commonwealth citizen from Jamaica, these moments of hostility and violence demonstrate an unwillingness by the settled population to accommodate and receive outsiders, whether Black or white. Taylor stresses the need to understand the actions of locals towards refugees as emblematic of wider social changes which were not always welcomed, and to ‘take seriously the role of the British in creating a climate of hostility towards the newcomers’ (147). The same framework helps us understand the experiences of the next group of new arrivals, the Ugandan Asians.
After being expelled by Idi Amin in 1972, the Ugandan Asians would ‘become rapidly entangled in some of the most contentious threads of British life’ (150). One of them was the ongoing debate around immigration and Britishness. Racism and intolerance were by no means unique to the early 1970s and should not merely be ascribed to the actions of far-right organisations like the National Front. They can also be seen in policy and legislation, and—implicitly—in the way that Ugandan Asians were constructed as middle-class in order to make them more palatable and ‘override’ their race. As UK passport holders, Ugandan Asians were entitled to the same welfare provisions as the settled population. But their experiences showed cracks beginning to form in the postwar welfare state for refugee and non-refugee alike: ‘in fighting for the needs of the Ugandan Asians, anti-poverty and housing campaigners laid bare the living conditions of Britain’s poorest, and paid testament to the vitality of its civil society.’ (153)
While Ugandan Asian reception and resettlement in the early 70s was coordinated at a national level and received state support, the approach to Vietnamese refugees at the end of the decade changed to more closely resemble the models of the 1930s and 40s, with the voluntary sector and local government playing a far greater role. Between 1979 and 1988, 19,000 Vietnamese refugees arrived in a Britain suffering deep economic recession. In their experiences, we can see the severe challenge posed by dispersal of refugees, often to isolated or economically deprived areas. Many moved to bigger centres of population as soon as they were able. This movement coincided with the rise of multiculturalism as a framing concept for policy, particularly at local government level, working towards an increased acceptance of ethnic minorities in Britain. Despite this, it was often existing family or community-based networks which were the most successful routes for Vietnamese refugees to build a decent life in Britain.
The last decades of the twentieth century saw fewer nationality-based resettlement programmes and a huge increase in claims for asylum submitted by individuals. This shift took place alongside changing British laws and EU policy which increased freedom of movement for some. But it was accompanied by the rise of terminology like ‘bogus asylum seeker’, and the intensification of what would later be known as the hostile environment. These ideological changes mirror the hollowing out of the welfare state, as refugees became ‘part of the broader political project concerned with hardening the line between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ recipients of welfare’ (279). And, as in the past, shared experiences did not serve as the basis for solidarity between refugees and other affected groups but was rather used to drive a wedge between them.
A great strength of this book is its demonstration of the connections between refugees and Britain even before their arrival, be it though histories of colonialism, ideological sympathies or the work of cross-border voluntary organisations. The book describes how, on arrival, refugees continue to be active participants in a society with its own ways of making sense of race, immigration and its changing place in the world. Taylor’s use of contemporary novels to illustrate popular sentiment towards refugees, and their social relations with the settled population, is a particular highlight. This works both ways, with poetry published in a Vietnamese resettlement camp newsletter providing a snapshot of the intense emotions of exile felt by the writers. Alongside fictional accounts are the voices of real people, often drawn from the Mass Observation Archive’s vast resources on everyday life. These voices, fictional and actual, provide sparks of individual experience among the dryer language of local authority documents and policy reports.
At the launch event for this book, Becky Taylor spoke about the importance of accepting people in all their complexities. She said, ‘It is okay that things are difficult and complex because people are difficult and complex’. Thanks to the outstanding scholarship of Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, the beautiful difficulty and complexity of things and people is a little easier to understand.
