The events of 2016 caused a state of shell shock for progressives across the western world. It began with Britain voting to leave the European Union – a symbol of continental unity – in June 2016, and ended with the election of an unqualified, unpredictable opportunist, Donald Trump, in November of that year. Among progressive circles, it felt like we spent the beginning of 2017 agonising over Trump and Brexit. If we weren’t agonising, we were using these electoral gains as a reason to organise, a point to stand against. Because these seemingly unexpected political gains happened in both Britain and America, they dominated conversation. But they were part of a political trend that was totally encompassing Europe – a lurch to the far right. We should have seen it coming.
Almost a decade on from the global financial crisis, during which the vast majority of people had been living with prolonged financial insecurity, an old kind of politics emerged. Brutal, punitive strong man values were back on the agenda. The resurgence of the fascist, violently anti-immigrant group Golden Dawn in Greece, a country hit hard by the financial crash, was testament to this; by 2015, Golden Dawn had become the country’s third largest political party, with far reaching tentacles in the judiciary and police force. Late 2015 saw Switzerland's anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party win the biggest share of vote in the federal election. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far right Party for Freedom topped political opinion polls in 2016. The same year saw Sweden’s white nationalist Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazism, become the country’s third biggest political party. In France’s 2016 presidential election, Marine Le Pen and her far right party Front National were so successful that they made it into the final round of a two candidate race, losing with a 34 per cent share of the vote. The unstoppable tide of European far right electoral gains also took place in Cyprus, Denmark, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Italy, Greece and Hungary. Their archaic, regressive values were demonstrated in the success of Finland’s Finns Party, who won second place in the 2015 election. According to the BBC, their 2011 manifesto suggested that young white Finnish women turn away from education to concentrate on providing the next generation of Finnish workers – thereby circumventing any need for immigrant labour.1 In the white nationalist revolution, a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
These politicians grasped at public opinion amid the backdrop of the catastrophic migrant crisis, reaching its worst in 2015. A vicious civil war in Syria saw almost five and a half million of the country’s population registering abroad as refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency. But across Europe, governments were largely ambivalent to their needs. Some helped. Germany took in a million refugees in 2015. Other countries were less giving. Rather than extending an arm of compassion, in 2016, Hungary’s government published a booklet suggesting that allowing migrants to settle would endanger the country’s culture and traditions.2 Angela Merkel was harshly criticised for her compassion by far right political party Alternative for Germany, and their berating of her helped them climb in the polls.
It felt like everywhere, public opinion was veering towards hostility. The drawbridges came up and the atmosphere turned sharp. Every country was full, and every country had to look after their own. The world had turned inward. Politics had become punitive, rather than empathetic and generous. Refugees were dying in capsized dinghy boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and populist politics told us not only to look away, but somehow that people fleeing war and poverty did not need our help. We were too stretched. And how desperate could they really be if some of them had mobile phones?
Racism has always been on my mind, but I recognise that that’s not always been the case for other people of colour in Britain. That changed after the Brexit vote. British citizens were told to ‘go home’, while visitors on visas were told by sneering ill-wishers that their time here was up. Nigel Farage of UKIP seemed to be on the television constantly, pretending to be representative of the average Brit while clutching a pint in a pub, or standing in front of a campaign bus declaring Britain had reached breaking point because of migration. In the United States, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement had gone global, with the new technology of smartphones shining a harsh light on long running injustices inflicted by law enforcement onto black communities, the blurry footage posted on social media, igniting the righteous rage of a new generation of activists. America was barely impacted by the refugee crisis, but it didn’t stop Donald Trump describing Mexicans as the creeping ‘black threat’ I’d discussed in chapter 4, using his presidential campaign to call for building a wall to keep them out (the infamous quote: ‘They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’3). Meanwhile, fringe hate website Breitbart settled into the heart of global power when Trump appointed executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist shortly after Trump was elected president. Nigel Farage boasted about meeting with Trump4, and Marine Le Pen was spotted in Trump Tower5. Not only was the malignant political force of the far right – considered defeated after World War Two – making a triumphant comeback, but it appeared to be forming allegiances.
The whole thing was a horror show. The same ideologies I had taken to task in the book were happening in real life. White genocide theory, inherent to the ideology of the far right, was back. Every far right electoral gain was paired with ethno-nationalism and accusations that migrants and refugees were threats to national unity. In chapter 4, I’d written about fear of a black planet and the inherent misogyny of white nationalism – then Finland’s far right swept into power with their eyes on white women’s wombs. I’d written about multiculturalism becoming a dirty word, of scaremongering and white victimhood – and suddenly these political strategies were all a part of our politics, enveloping our everyday chat. Brexit and Trump were two electoral blows to progressive politics that loosely sandwiched two years of despair.
In chapter 6, I had analysed how a council in north east London had de-prioritised the needs of social housing tenants as an example of how race and class were intricately linked. Just two weeks after the publication of this book, I, and the rest of the country, watched in hopelessness and mourning as seventy-one residents of Grenfell Tower were incinerated in their own homes. Survivors of the fire lost family members and everything they owned. It was a sickening case study of some of the most marginalised people in Britain: working class people, immigrant families, white pensioners with disabilities, foreigners, school children, recent migrants, people who had made England their home for decades. The death toll took so long to determine that the country identified the victims from the makeshift missing person posters plastered across west London. Transfixed by 24-hour rolling news, I wondered how local government could have failed these people so catastrophically. It was eerie to have made an analysis of race, class and social housing so close to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to watch the de-prioritising of human lives that I identified in the book play out on television in a burning high rise building. I feel guilty even now drawing links to it, an overtly political tragedy that I want to be wary of politicising lest I trample insensitively over heartbreak.