White Emigration, the Missing Link
Some names have been changed.
‘We are here because you were there’ stated the late A. Sivanandan, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who became one of the most eloquent, radical-left British thinkers and writers of the 20th Century. That pithy observation linking immigration to Britain’s historical global adventures and ambitions became an aphorism. In 2008, he updated it: ‘We are here because you are there.’ More than 75 million people across the world have British ancestry, greater than the population of the UK itself. UN figures show that the current British diaspora of over 4.7 million people, is bigger than that of any EU country and largest eighth largest in the world. A poll in 2006 found that the majority of British residents (53%) would consider emigrating. Australia has the largest number of these migrants, followed by the US, Canada, EU nations and New Zealand.
All those Britons who get frightfully vexed about immigration, remain intensely relaxed about emigration. It’s an entitlement they’ve long taken for granted.
One of those is Conrad, a foppish, fellow post-grad at Oxford in 1972 who was ferociously opposed to us Ugandan Asians, exiled by Idi Amin, being allowed into the UK. The ‘influx’, he bewailed, would overburden this small isle and sully its national character. Since inheriting a fortune, Conrad has been living the dream in Andalusia, surrounded by other flash and flush British migrants, designated ‘ex-pats’, meaning white settlers. He declined to be interviewed for this article, said the subject was ‘boring’. The layered identity of the UK has been shaped and reshaped by incomers as well as outgoers. Yet, most British nationals are seemingly apathetic or blasé about the latter.
Humans move. The push and pull factors are what they’ve always been- economic privation or opportunities, escape from disasters or persecution, enforced exile, love, aspiration, restlessness, desire to go buccaneering or adventuring. For over four hundred years, the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish have been forced, lured, or impelled by circumstances to leave their birthlands.
At London’s Migration Museum, Departures, an immersive exhibition imaginatively retells that epic story. In one poignant section, animator Kate Anderson, brings to life old paintings and etchings of those leaving and those left behind. Podcasts by broadcaster Mukti Jain Campion are packed with information and emotion. Artist Dawn Parsonage exhibits portraits of contemporary Britons taken just before they fly off to new lands. Their eyes are bright with hope yet shadowed with uncertainty. But unlike most other migrants, with their British passports and English language these leavers can go where they please. It is the dividend of Empire. That explains why so few Brits learn foreign languages and why some behave so badly abroad. (Some, not all.) Dr Michaela Benson, an emigration expert affirms that: ‘Anglophone dominance means doors open, people cross the world with ease. It isn’t a thing of the past; it’s a thing of the present.’
In 1562, buccaneers John Hawkins and Francis Drake got into the lucrative slave trade and soon after were aggressively claiming territories overseas. In 1607, a group of English settlers arrived in what became Jamestown, America. They did not fare well. In 1620 The Pilgrim Fathers, aggrieved, religious puritans, crossed a vast ocean to get away from the established Church of England, established a colony in the ‘new world’ and created an abiding myth of plucky white folk discovering unpeopled or barbaric lands, doing what good Christians and capitalists were meant by God to do. Between 1640 and 1660, two thirds of those who sailed westwards, ended up in Barbados. As the British empire grew, the outflux swelled. The indigenous peoples of North America, Australia and New Zealand were crushed and decimated; fertile lands in Kenya, Rhodesia, named after the fanatic imperialist, Cecil Rhodes (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), South Africa, Burma, Assam and elsewhere were stolen.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the UK was the biggest ever exporter ever of people. Convicts were transported – some for stealing a kerchief or rabbit. Orphans and illegitimate children were packed off, and the ‘surplus’ poor. The enclosure acts legitimising land larceny had driven out smallholders and peasants. They drifted to urban areas, there to be exploited to death by industrialists, criminalised or deported. Churches and charitable organisations backed the social cleansing. Countless wretched souls, dreamers, gold prospectors and strivers voluntarily migrated.
Did you know about doughty Cornish ‘married widows’, left behind by Cornish men who went off to seek work abroad? Or that Sylvia Pankhurst Sylvia Pankhurst relocated to Ethiopia and died there? Or that in 1865, 150 folk left Wales for Patagonia and created a Welsh speaking enclave? Fifty thousand Patagonians have this heritage. Seductive government posters encouraged Brits to move to the colonies. They could get a special £10 ticket to Australia. ( Before Covid, Brits could still get cheap special fares to migrate there. Meanwhile, this country keeps asylum seekers on remote islands where they are wasting away.)
A disproportionate number of talented, rich and famous individuals have descended from British emigrants. South African Elon Musk, is one of them, so too Kenyan born evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Rhodesian born journalist Matthew Parris, Joanna Lumley, her father and grandfather, all born in India during the Raj. In our times, Brits go off in search of the idyllic life or to grab opportunities in foreign countries. Adam, a Brummie doctor, fell in love with a Kiwi and is living blissfully in New Zealand. Amanda, my artist friend who has a house by the sea in Cape Town, says ‘love it, don’t miss dingy England one bit’.
Movement to the EU was part of this unending saga. Postcards from some of these emigres are hung on a wall in the exhibition. In 2000, Barbara retired and migrated to Spain for the sunshine. Emmelina, got divorced in 2012 and found herself in a small French village. ‘I now have a French husband, two stepsons and a family that accepts me for who I am, for the first time in my life’. Free movement went both ways. An estimated 1.2 million Britons dwell in EU countries.
Jane Golding, settled in Berlin, is rightly exasperated by the prevailing caricatures of the diaspora. They not all jingoistic pensioner sun seekers or disreputable tax dodgers: ‘In fact nearly 80% were or are a working age. There are bilingual, binational families- 30% of British nationals, for example are married to Germans’. Benson’s research shows they occupy different strata of the European and local labour market, from precarious seasonal work in the hospitality sector to top jobs in multinationals. A lot of them are socially and economically integrated.
Brexit has strained their loyalties and made their lives unimaginably more complicated. Bitterness sluices in the chasm between Remainer and Brexiter migrants. A vast number of them were denied the vote in the referendum. Dual national families returning to the UK become second class citizens. John and Jude Carey, both 35, teach English in the south of France. They have severed links with their families in Lancashire because ‘of their now naked anti-foreign prejudices. We are not them. We don’t want our kids to know them. Our birthplace feels unsafe ’Golding is also disenchanted and intensely worried. She has no automatic right to return and her mother is 84.
Spain’s migrant Brits include some bullish Brexiters. In 2019, Steve Dunn, 67, for example, told Olive Press, an English language newspaper: ‘I voted for the good of our nation. I am patriotic English, not Spanish’. Divorcee Donna, since 2010, a resident of Fuengirola wrote to me to explain why she voted out: ‘The UK is flooded with too many fucking immigrants. They keep on coming’.
Serena, 48, who had a great job in Belgium, has returned, heartbroken ‘Suddenly I was no longer one of them. People were really angry about the way the EU was disrespected. I felt shunned. And ashamed too. I don’t recognise Britain. I feel like a lost soul.’ Maybe others feel the same. Post-Brexit, more Britons than ever have moved into EU nations. OECD and Eurozone data shows a rise in the number applying for member state passports.
Daniel Tetlow’s wife is German and, like many such families in the EU and the UK, their children are binational. They, like Golding, live in Berlin. Tetlow, co-author of a study, Brexit, Uncertainty and Migration Decisions, sounds upbeat and determined but I sense that he too feels discombobulated. Brits like him now have no automatic rights and have to fulfil complicated bureaucratic requirements. Without the right documents they can be deported. Worse still, there isn’t a single set of EU rules. How do Berliners treat Brits now? ‘ There’s no schadenfreude, just sympathy, sorrow. They’ve been so kind’. In 2020, there was a 2,300% increase in applications for German citizenship. A potentially serious brain drain likely in the coming years. He and others are now collectively defending the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU: ‘We were never organised and now we are. We should not allow this decision to determine our lives’. He hope to initiate an apprenticeship scheme to get young Britons to learn vocational skills in Germany.
This united front is one of the more positive developments of Brexit. The other is empathy. Benson describes a new awareness of ‘bordering’, an everyday experience for non-white people trying to get into ‘Fortress Europe’ and now being felt by Britons of all ethnicities: They rarely scrutinised or questioned these rules. Now they are. They have to go to language classes with other migrants and asylum seekers, pass tests.’
Serena’s son is at uni in Canada and her daughter is about to marry a Greek businessman: ‘ I’m trapped in this small island. But they will never be small islanders. That makes them truly, madly deeply British’. Indeed. Wanderlust is in the nation’s bloodstream. It pulses on.
An edited version appeared in the I newspaper July 2021