Class and panic in British immigration

Introduction

In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall (et al. 1978) wrote about artificial crises and the role of moral entrepreneurs (politicians, journalists, and others) in constructing these in ways that justify legislation that suits particular agendas, and appear to resolve a social problem. Policing the Crisis focuses on the term ‘mugging’ as a signifier for ungovernable inner cities and anxieties around immigration, and for the introduction of externally imposed short-term crises seen to require iron rule from the ‘law-and-order state’ (1978: 322). This is conducted by a politically liberal (on paper, at least) clamping down on the problems or people seen to have created this crisis, wherein a state gives itself the right to ‘move swiftly, to stamp fast and hard, to listen in, discreetly survey, saturate and swamp, charge or hold without charge, act on suspicion, hustle and shoulder, to keep society on the straight and narrow’ (1978).

In the years leading up to Hall’s death, many argued that there was a need to revisit Hall’s work in order to understand potential emancipatory strategies (White 2010; Worth 2013), while others have drawn similarities with the emergence of the new right in Britain in the late-1970s by illustrating the emergence of neoliberalism in other countries (Devine and Purdy 2011). Here, we argue that reactions to immigrant groups in Britain can be seen in a similar manner to that pinpointed by Hall and his co-authors. The same ‘moral’ panic invectives, illustrated brilliantly in Policing the Crisis and developed in Hall’s later accounts of the ‘authoritarian populism’ of Thatcher (1988), provide us with an important legacy of his work in terms of contemporary forms of class division.

As part of the moral panic invective explored here, moral entrepreneurs have attempted to remove any possibility of class identity from people who have settled into a new life, by reducing them to a peasant or servant category, as has been attempted by such public figures as Frank Field (2014). In the 18th Brumaire, Marx notes that smallholding peasants have no ‘national bond, and no political organisation among them [and so] do not constitute a class (Marx and Engels Collected Works XI 1979: 187-188) Indeed, the moral entrepreneurs in the series of public orations we identify in this paper place a moral supremacy on British work, and on its working class. They distinctly confuse the issue through forgetting that immigrant labour is a very real, legal and frankly beneficial force for the economy (or if they acknowledge this, they claim that it is bad for society). Our position is that immigrant groups are as entitled to class status as any other workers, but that emerging reactionary far-right-wing elite groups consciously intend to declassify immigrant workers. In this way, their work becomes a type of unfree labour ¹ in that people are not represented, and their rights to class status are removed. Indeed, Marx’s idea was that the working class should supply a framework to organise and to support unseen and unrepresented workers. Solidarity between the British working class and immigrant workers would be an intimidation too great to bear, or so it would seem in the ideological project we outline here.

Mugging

Written in 1978, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order took as a starting point the importation of the term ‘mugging’ into British media discourse from US media, and the way it was used to channel anxieties and resentments about immigration and 1960s counterculture. The term was first used to describe an incident in which a white man was attacked by two mixed-race youths outside a Birmingham pub. Hall developed this research during his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies with a body of postgraduate students, which at the time included Chris Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. They explored how, in the US context, the term was used to characterise ungovernable inner-city areas that had been abandoned by middle-class residents through ‘white flight’. The term was more broadly associated with the backlash against the civil rights movement and its white liberal allies, and figures such as Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, who pitted liberals against ‘decent white folks’ and the ‘silent majority’. In the British context, it was used to express anxieties about immigration, integration and the presence of ethnic minority communities (1978: 28).

In Policing the Crisis, Hall and his collaborators explored the ‘calculus of work’ (141) and the familiar trope around portraying certain categories of people (students, benefits claimants, anti-war protesters, and Black and Asian people) as taking advantage of the majority, often with very little or no evidence. The concept of work became abstracted so that it was longer about employment, since some of the people seen to be taking advantage of the system are actually very much working, but more about conformity with certain norms and social conventions. In other words, not to fit into these conventions became equivalent to being a ‘skiver’ (142).

Matthew Cole draws attention to a moralising discourse that ‘shapes work’:

If work is an individual and a social good, then those for whom work is more important are in some sense implicitly ‘better’. This is indicative of one of the key problems of policies and discourses that teleologically prescribe desired behavioural outcomes – they invite judgement, and therefore equal regard, as to how close to or far from the ideal individuals get. (Cole 2008: 31)

The moralising discourse of work as a moral duty, also as connected to citizenship, underpins debates on immigration. Work, for British citizens, is a moral duty; but for migrants it is seen as morally wrong to come to the UK and work, and indeed, immigrant workers are seen to be depriving British citizens of a moral duty to work. Central to this is the linking of class, and particularly of working-class people, to citizenship, national identity and place: work as producing shared (national) identity and belonging. Within this context, working conditions are overlooked as politicians and reporters, or ‘moral entrepreneurs’, vacillate between labeling immigrants as the lumpenproletariat, paupers and servants. Any attempted removal of class identity is a dangerous defence of the unfreedoms seen in an increasing range of working environments today, from prisons to gangs to forced sex work.

Stuart Hall and Phil Scraton wrote in 1981 about ‘law, class and control’, showing that the poor are demoralised, criminalised and scapegoated in much the same way as other marginalised groups, such as immigrant workers. Hall and Scraton (1981) look at the power dynamics of who has the power to label who, and also at the class dimensions of how crime is explained by criminologists, which gives us some insight into the moral panic thesis, which as Hall continuously emphasises, is a result of structural factors and a crisis of capitalism leading to a rise in state authoritarianism, rather than just symptomatic of inevitable social change. The state maintains order and stability through maintaining social relations of production that favour capitalist accumulation and secure its own position. In the theory Hall outlines, class depiction is part of the way the state maintains dominance as well as leadership along the different variants on state and law.

For Poulantzas, ‘the state and the law are gigantic machineries of representation, which reach down into a society composed of antagonistic class relations, fragments classes into individuals, and recomposes them as citizens with equal and political legal rights’ (cited in Hall and Scraton 1981: 477). Thus this is a case of ‘mediation of class relationships by way of mystifying exploitation that generalizes and disorganizes class interests, and works to diminish class character’. This is referred to as the ‘isolation effect’, as people are broken down into individual units of legal entities. But migrant workers are not even seen to hold the right to enjoy citizenship, much less identify class interests. Gramsci’s work is influenced by Poulantzas, and of course is very much a part of Stuart Hall’s legacy. The state, in Gramsci’s work, functions to ‘master a field of struggle in the attempt to bring society into line with the structural tendencies set by the economy’ (1981). It is in this framework that moral panics and mugging occur.

Pitting the classes against one another

When looking at this in terms of contemporary forms of immigration, what is apparent is that there is an emerging populist media consensus which has become an apparently indisputable truth, despite the lack of evidence: that working-class people are not only anti-immigration, but also that immigration is fundamentally bad for working-class people. This also reflects a narrative John Grayson (2013) describes as the construction of a racist electorate: the idea that xenophobic ideas and values are spontaneously, intrinsically held by voters, disavowing the responsibility of politicians, the media and commentators such as Goodhart himself in encouraging these ideas. Conversely, anyone who makes a pro-immigration argument is dismissed as belonging to an out-of-touch metropolitan elite who typically benefit from immigration policy because they employ foreign domestic workers, again, evoking servants.

This narrative assumes that all working-class people are white and British (as in the increasingly prevalent term ‘white working class’), but also, more fundamentally, helpless and passive – an idea connected to both a melancholic narrative about deindustrialisation, and about underachievement at school. An example of this can be seen in The British Dream (2013), written by director of the DEMOS think tank David Goodhart. He says: ‘One of the challenges to our immigration story is how to allow older poorer white people a safe space in which to express a sense of loss, and homesickness for the past, without this mood becoming destructively pessimistic or spilling over into racism’ (2013: 256). There are several assertions being made here: that changes to communities are entirely a result of immigration, rather than through factory closures, gentrification or other social and economic processes; and that ‘older, poorer white people’ (who are taken as representative of the working class) have a completely negative response to these changes.

As with the issue of ‘crime’ in the 1970s, the centre-left has not only accepted this situation, but also added to the discourse. In a 2012 speech entitled, ‘A country with an economy that works for working people’, delivered to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Labour leader Ed Miliband alluded to a moral difference between peacetime and wartime immigration, insinuating a skills and class discrepancy between the kinds of immigrants who would be welcome and under what circumstances – this despite, again, the absolute legitimacy of all EU states’ citizens’ living and work in the UK. Miliband’s speech drew on received ideas about the nature of class, so that rather than being based on a shared set of economic conditions – such as the condition of working for an employer, or earning a certain income – class was framed in terms of cultural identity: as a shared set of experiences, cultural references and values. Specifically, the right kind of working-class consciousness is framed in relation to British national identity, and even ethnicity and place, in a socially conservative nostalgia. Anti-immigration rhetoric, such as the speech by Miliband or other politicians, justifies the tightening of immigration rules as a duty of care towards the (supposedly powerless and helpless) white working class.

In another speech, the Birmingham MP Jonathan Walker noted that British history should be borne in mind when thinking about reparatory policies for schools in Birmingham with underachieving white working-class children. Burden states that it is ‘well documented’ that not enough had been made of the culture and ‘identity of white communities in some areas’, proposing that white students should have more opportunities to express their own culture. This ignores the diversity within whiteness itself – Walker assumes that none of these pupils would come from Polish or Irish backgrounds, for example, despite these being long-established immigrant communities in Birmingham. He also fails to note a possible recognition of cross-racial oppression that might bind class (rather than racial identity). This type of rhetoric pits the white working class against migrants and non-white working-class people – whose experiences are ignored, and for whom class is not permitted – in competition for low-paid, precarious jobs.

As Hall reminds us in his work, class is often framed within the terms of shared cultural experience, and specifically, national identity; so it follows that immigration threatens to erode it, since migrants do not only steal jobs, but also supposedly change communities beyond recognition. This shared cultural experience is seen to be intrinsically static, so that change can only mean loss as a melancholic narrative about deindustrialisation, which becomes conflated with another decline narrative about immigration. In a 2014 speech reported by the Evening Standard, Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead and a former government adviser on poverty, characterises immigrant labour as a new ‘servant class’ benefiting the elite. In a tone of ambivalence, he first speaks highly of the emerging ‘servant class’, stating that the ‘eagerness to work of many immigrants puts some of us to shame’. Using an anecdote from a friend’s experience hiring people to work in his business in London, Field quotes the business owner as saying, ‘one English person came in to ask for work. But she didn’t last long. Unlike the eager new arrivals, our local Brit, while charming, was unreliable. She could never be relied on to turn up every day’ (Field 2014).

It did not take long for moral judgements to return to a discussion of what governments should and should not be doing in these circumstances. House prices have skyrocketed, Field complains, and schools cannot accommodate the increase in population apparently resulting directly from immigration. In May 2013, the Daily Mail reported that planning minister Nick Boles, who was previously sympathetic, had ‘changed his mind about immigration after seeing how the arrival of 2 million new immigrants over the last decade has left Britain short of houses’ (Shipman 2013). The proposal to build more houses is, in fact, a suitable one in a country like the UK, with a rising population and a ‘booming birth rate’, which in 2011 was the highest it had been since 1971 (BBC News 2013), and Field’s unambiguous blaming of immigrant workers is unsubstantiated and unqualified. There is no increase in house building, Field (2014) notes, and ‘to build on the scale needed we’d have to be taxing the rich at 95 per cent or more’. Clearly, this would never work, Field goes on to say, as the lengthening NHS queues and lack of school places are just too expensive to fathom. He states, ‘there simply isn’t going to be the money to provide public services on a scale that’s needed to take account of the ever-increasing numbers coming here. The losers have been, and will continue to be, poor Brits’ (2014), despite public services, and the albeit rapidly waning ethos of social democracy which paved the way for the NHS’s existence, benefiting all classes.

Thus those enjoying the benefits of the emerging immigrant ‘servant class’, Field notes, do not understand that the Edwardian monied classes let servants live in their own homes, whereas the immigrant class of today needs roads to drive on, houses to live in and schools and healthcare for their children. According to his reasoning, the elites need to realise that this is having a detrimental impact on the British working class, and will have a detrimental impact on wealthier homes as well, because of the cost of needing to keep an entire class intact. The moral dimensions, then, are that although immigrant workers are seen to have a work ethic that is not matched by the British working poor, this work ethic is still not enough to consider using British people’s hard-earned taxes to pay for their livelihoods. It is not acknowledged that migrants pay taxes as well. Migrants become de-proletarianised because of rigid class links to nativist conceptions of place and citizenship, and are therefore rendered classless and placeless; or specifically, are part of a certain kind of lumpenproletariat. The term ‘servant class’ can be interpreted with these terms as well.

No other politician embodies this contemporary form of authoritarian populism like Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). In his keynote speech to the party conference in Torquay, Farage claimed that parts of the country had become like a ‘foreign land’, specifically mentioning a commuter train journey through South-East London, in which he claimed not to have heard English spoken in the train until he had reached the outer suburbs, which made him feel ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘awkward’. He said:

It’s ordinary folk, it’s ordinary families that are paying the financial price. But what about the social price of this? The fact that in scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable. (Hope 2014)

The term ‘ordinary folk’ is conspicuous for those it excludes: it is assumed that those who speak a language other than English do not belong to the category of ‘ordinary folk’, which is possibly code for ‘working class’, but that they are brought together through a sense of being aggrieved at immigration.

The Conservatives have been quick to pick up on this populism. Stephen Barclay, Tory MP for North-East Cambridgeshire, has suggested that politicians are ‘too middle class’ and out of touch with the rest of society. Quoted in the Evening Standard (2014), and presumably responding to public frustrations with the professionalisation of politics, the fact that MPs have been spared many of the effects of austerity and so on, he said, ‘it’s stating the obvious to say the middle classes dominate in positions of authority’. But then, those frustrations are framed within an anti-immigration lens. Barclay goes on:

the people in positions of authority have the financial means to mitigate the negative impacts of immigration on their own situation, they may even personally benefit from it … It doesn’t affect their wages, it doesn’t affect their private medical cover or impact on their children’s schooling. So getting problems addressed can be difficult. (2014)

The speech contains many assertions that, again, working-class people’s wages are affected (although, again, this is debatable), and that migrants cause unsustainable pressures on both healthcare and schooling. But it is about mobilising resentment and preventing solidarity.

No evidence and continuing contradictions

There is little evidence to show that migrants in general drive down wages, particularly since non-EU work visas have a £20,000 minimum income threshold. Basing wages on nationality is in fact illegal, since it contravenes equality and employment legislation. There is a slight downward pressure on the most casualised, low-skilled jobs, such as in the building industry for example (IPPR 2009). However, as with the issue of the increase of mugging in the 1970s, this downward pressure is amplified in the media, provoking a tendency to talk about all migrant work (including most work in which one would be an employee of a company or organisation, and in which wage-levels were attached to the job, not to the individual employee) as though it were exclusively in low-paid, low-skilled areas of the economy, and as if humans were individual contractors inherently competing with each other. Discourses about morality as linked with work and class depictions serve to enforce ideologies through a process of essentialising, and through mystified antagonism and class fragmentation that can work to prevent solidarity between, in this case, legal working people.

Politicians in the UK have taken the lead in spinning a story about a utopian economy in which (certain) people who work are also the people who deserve to be part of society. The overtones of these elite moral entrepreneurs’ messages are layered in blame and vindication. ‘A country with an economy that works for working people’ (Miliband 2012) overlooks disabled, underemployed and zero-hours contracted workers. The question ‘What is work?’ underlines the context for labour-process debates about deskilling, worker surveillance and control at work. However, the tendency to place a moral dimension on work means it has been used to attack immigrant workers, as though only white local workers deserved to work, and as though their citizenship provided them with an inherent right to work. When non-citizens are at work, political rhetoric leans toward a blame hypothesis. This can be seen in Ed Miliband’s 2012 speech on immigration, in which, despite factual problems such as the location of a chicken factory that supposedly only employs Polish people, Miliband attempted to defend the moral panic spreading across Britain in the post-New Labour era by reminding researchers that, despite his parents having been wartime immigrants, they managed to become part of the elite through service in the Army and through academia. But now, Miliband went on to say, other parents just like his – which is confusing, since he hasn’t clarified whether ‘other parents across the country’ can justifiably be compared, given class differences – ‘are worried about the future. They want there to be good jobs. They want their communities to grow strong. They worry about immigration. They worry it might make things harder rather than easier for them and their kids.’ These statements become increasingly problematic when he states that the specific industries of agriculture and construction are served by agencies who ‘denigrate the talents of those who are living locally’, which, he says, ‘isn’t right’. The accusing ‘English eye’ casts its gaze upon the marginalised other (Hall 1997: 20).

In order to ‘build our economy so that it works for working people’, Miliband recommends that we offer ‘working [British] people a fair crack of the whip’ (Miliband 2012). In almost the same breath, he states that immigration seems to only benefit immigrants themselves, despite of course, those people also being working people. The implication is that the moral superiority attached to working applies only to British working-class, and probably white people. There are benefits, Miliband begins to say, but then immediately states ‘there are also costs’, and that those costs are ‘related to economic position: class’. But Miliband’s is not a class argument at all. It is one of several elite moral entrepreneurs’ attempts to trigger moral panic, in order to justify reactionary policies that do not serve to address the fundamental questions around rising unemployment in all sectors and at all levels of pay, resulting from neoliberal policies and exacerbated by austerity measures taken as a response to the economic crisis.

Conclusion

Classes are indeed economic categories of people with similar life experience, social position and cultural experiences; but the political speeches we have described effectively pit working classes of varying nationalities against one another, which conflicts with any interpretation of Marx’s discussion of class, and in particular of the transnational class. The British working class apparently has a moral duty and a right to work on British soil, whereas peacetime immigrants seem to have little right to be in the UK, and much less to enjoy class identity. The British working class is also framed as lacking any kind of agency (it is a class ‘in itself’ rather than ‘for itself’), its members largely positioned instead as helpless victims whose resentment threatens to transform into prejudice, and who must be placated by knee-jerk politics and increasingly restrictive immigration policies, as the state becomes increasingly ‘law-and-order’-centric. Both the patronising and reactionary framing of class and the moralisation of work show why Hall’s work on the multi-faceted identity of class is important.

The cultivation of moral panic by journalists and politicians, a group of moral entrepreneurs, needs to be publicly challenged in order to create a politics of solidarity rather than of scapegoating, and of recognition rather than Hall’s metaphorical mugging. Through attempts to deny people the right to class identity, decision-makers take a symbolic stance that contributes to the environment of unfreedoms experienced by immigrant workers. For as we see, the authoritarian populism of the new right Hall analysed in the 1970s and 1980s has re-surfaced in the context of hyper-neoliberalism, with new analogies but old resonance. The task now is to critically expose the moralising dimensions in the gaze of the ‘English eye’, an eye that looks for increasing areas of colonisation: class and panic.