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This book is the first comprehensive study of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. It uses the county of Wiltshire as a case study, and assesses both local authority policies and strategies, and Muslim communities’ personal experiences of migration and integration. It draws upon previously unexplored archival material and oral histories, and addresses a range of topics and themes, including entrepreneurship, housing, education, multiculturalism, social cohesion, and religious identities, needs and practices. It challenges the long-held assumption that local authorities in more rural areas have been inactive, and even disinterested, in devising and implementing migration, integration and diversity policies, and it sheds light on small and dispersed Muslim communities that have traditionally been written out of Britain’s immigration history. It reveals what is a clear, and often complex, relationship between rurality and integration, and shows how both local authority policies and Muslim migrants’ experiences have long been rooted in, and shaped by, their rural settings and the prevalence of small ethnic minority communities and Muslim populations in particular. The study’s findings and conclusions build upon research on migration and integration at the rural level, as well as local-level migrant policies, experiences and integration, and uncover what has long been a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.
When Britain left the European Union in January 2021, it set out on a new journey. Shorn of empire and now the EU too, Britain’s economy is as national as it has ever been. A decade or so since globalisation seemed inevitable, this is a remarkable reversal. How did this happen?
Britain alone argues that this ‘nationalisation’ – aligning the boundaries of the state with the boundaries of the nation – emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis. The book analyses how austerity and scarcity intensified and created new conflicts over who gets what. This extends to struggle over what the British nation is for, who it represents, and who it values.
Drawing on a range of cultural, economic, and political themes – immigration and the hostile environment, nostalgia and Second World War mythology, race and the ‘left behind’, the clap for carers and furloughing, as well as SuperScrimpers and stand-up comedy – the book traces the complex nationalist path Britain took after the crash, demonstrating how we cannot explain nationalism without reference to the economy, and vice versa.
In analysing the thread that ties the fallout of the crash and austerity, through Brexit, and to the shape of lockdown politics, Britain alone provides an incisive and original history of the last decade of Britain and its relationship to the global economy.
For the last three and a half years, this country has felt trapped, like a lion in a cage. We have all shared the same frustration – like some super-green supercar blocked in the traffic. We can see the way ahead. We know where we want to go – and we know why we are stuck. Boris Johnson, Introduction to 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto, Get Brexit Done: Unleash Britain's Potential
Citizenisation processes are designed to redress the ‘citizenship deficit’ of migrants. However, an overlooked feature of theoretical and policy understandings of citizenisation is how they not only operate as a social intervention, as argued in the previous chapter. It is also how they shape definitions of the nation-state itself. This chapter turns to the history of British citizenship and to how the perceived ‘citizenship deficit’ of Britain has long since been the subject of political and scholarly discourse. Cast in this way, histories
-four years. When he was unable to provide documentation to prove his status, Marshall was given a stark choice: either arrange to pay the £55,000 cancer treatment upfront , or forego the treatment. Given that he had no savings, he only really had one option. Some years before, the NHS had treated Marshall for blood cancer lymphoma, and that was legitimate. His immigration status had remained consistent since then. So what had changed? The difference is that the British state had stopped providing free healthcare to ‘overseas patients’. A ‘health
Kingdom. We have come out of a sense of duty to God [and] to our country – one united, close-knit, Protestant family. Scotland must remain within the United Kingdom! Let me remind you in this, the 100 th anniversary of the supposed ‘War to end all wars’, that side by side, as one nation, as one people, we fought, we suffered, we bled and died, as the red poppy of Flanders fields so poignantly reminds us. Have these poor nationalists – who are obsessed only with separation – learned nothing from the massacre of one million British soldiers, nothing about
3 British communists and Palestine Despite its relatively small membership in relation to the Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain took a leading role in anti-colonial campaigns. While the Labour Party between the wars put forward policies to reform the Empire through economic development and administrative training in the colonies, the international communist movement advised communist parties to support nationalist struggles seeking to throw off imperial rule. There were subsequently fluctuations in the communist movement’s position on the role
How did the end of empire affect the projection of British identities overseas? British decolonisation is conventionally understood in terms of the liquidation of the colonial empire in the decades after the Second World War. But it also entailed simultaneous transformations to the self-representation of peoples and cultures all over the world, variously described as British, symbolised by the eclipse of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’. Originally coined by Charles Dilke’s 1868 travelogue of the same name, Greater Britain enjoyed widespread currency throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before falling into disuse from the 1930s. But Greater British modes of thought, feeling and action persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, becoming embroiled in the global upheavals of imperial decline. Over a remarkably short time span, the ideas, assumptions and networks that had sustained an uneven and imperfectly imagined British world dissolved under the weight of the empire’s precipitate demise. Although these patterns and perspectives have been explored across a range of specific local and national contexts, this collection is the first to examine the wider mesh of interlocking British subjectivities that unravelled at empire’s end.
Britain and Ireland, but Ireland was never a settled or satisfied region of the UK. The “Irish question” bedevilled British politics in the nineteenth century as demands for Home Rule gathered pace driven by modern Irish nationalism. Irish opposition to British rule unfailingly followed a dual track of both constitutional and armed struggle that proved potent enough to take much of Ireland out of the UK
Introduction The next two chapters explore the consequences of the Conservative Party’s growing interest in the legal reform of trade unions and industrial relations as a response to what was commonly referred to as ‘the British disease’ (Taylor 1999 , 151–186). This period embraces the Wilson Governments (1964–70), the Heath Government (1970