Racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death’.
(Mbembe, 2003: 17)
A year after the devastating fire at Grenfell
As the UK government designs the compensation scheme for victims of the Windrush scandal, we look at the toxic combination of factors that caused the scandal in the first place.
Many migration decisions are wrong - but since legal aid for such cases was scrapped by the LASPO Act 2012, few migrants have the money to challenge them. Meanwhile, an ongoing review drags on.
As well as newfound sympathy for the Windrush generation, we should remember that ‘illegal immigrants’ are our kin, especially if we are to challenge the racism of the ‘hostile environment’.
Britain has an ignoble history of exploiting Caribbean people when they were ‘useful’, then casting them aside as insufficiently ‘British’ when they were not.
