https://jolek78.writeas.com/tag:immigration thoughts from a friendly human being Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:17:10 +0000 https://i.snap.as/DEj7yFm4.png https://jolek78.writeas.com/tag:immigration https://jolek78.writeas.com/easy-with-the-insults-were-scottish?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Saturday, 16 May 2026. Tens of thousands of people march through central London behind Tommy Robinson under the banner Unite the Kingdom. British flags mix with Israeli ones and with the flags of the Iranian monarchists of the Pahlavi movement. Wooden crosses are carried on shoulders as a sign of "militant Christianity". On the heads of middle-aged men, between the flags, the MEGA caps - the English variant of Trump's MAGA - and on a leaflet handed out in the crowd it reads, word for word, "a future for white people". On the stage Katie Hopkins, a reality TV alumna turned anti-Muslim polemicist, alternates with Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy's widow. !--more-- The Metropolitan Police, for the first time in a public-order operation, formally deploys live facial recognition. Cost of the operation: 4.5 million pounds. The British government - "still" Labour, remember - has barred from entry eleven figures of the international far right who were due to speak at the rally: among them Polish PiS politician Dominik Tarczynski, Flemish Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, the Dutch Eva Vlaardingerbroek (a polemicist close to the MAGA scene), and Senate MAGA candidate for Missouri Valentina Gomez, known for declaring publicly that Britain is "under the control of Muslim rapists protected by Premier Starmer". Robinson is not a 2026 improvisation. He founded the English Defence League in 2009 - seventeen years ago. He has been convicted of fraud, violence, and contempt of court. And in recent months he has toured the United States, where he was received at the Department of State, spoke about an "Islamic invasion" at the University of Florida, and appeared on all the major MAGA-right podcasts. Saturday's London march is not an isolated British event. It is a local node of a transatlantic and transcontinental network that has turned the European, American and Iranian-monarchist far right into a single political machine. In short: fascists meeting other fascists. Geography, then But on Saturday I was not in London. I was in Gourock, on Scotland's west coast, twenty-five miles from Glasgow, having a coffee in a café and watching the Clyde estuary and the ferries crossing to Dunoon. The geographical distance between central London and Gourock is roughly 770 kilometres. The political distance is considerably greater. Seen from outside, England and the United Kingdom tend to be used as synonyms. They are not. The UK is not one country but at least two - plausibly four - and the two main pieces are diverging at a speed that will be hard to reabsorb. Scotland did not vote for Brexit (62% Remain, 38% Leave), is not voting for Reform UK, and has just elected, on 7 May, a parliament in which an explicit cordon sanitaire against the far right exists - something that no longer exists at Westminster. To convey what that feels like in daily life, I have to tell you two small episodes, separated by almost a decade, that happened less than an hour by train from each other. --- A handbag in Linlithgow 24 June 2016, the morning after the Brexit referendum. I was living then in Linlithgow, a small town in West Lothian best known as the birthplace of Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) and of Montgomery Scott ("Scotty" of Star Trek), halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. I was queueing at the Tesco checkout with the weekend shopping. The BBC was announcing the final results: 52 to 48 for Leave at the British level, but 62 to 38 for Remain in Scotland. Scotland had voted unequivocally against Brexit and had found itself dragged out of the European Union by the English and Welsh vote. In front of me in the queue, two men in their fifties were sizing me up. One looked at the other, and then, looking me in the eye with a bully's smile, said, out loud: "Adios amigos." I paused a second - the time to register what was happening - and answered him in clean English: "Adios is Spanish. Before you insult someone, you should know what language they speak." Behind me in the queue was an elderly Scottish lady, grey hair, leather handbag under her arm. She had seen everything. She took a step forward, raised the bag with surprising speed, and caught one of the two square in the chest, saying: "Go away, you fud!" (fud = jerk, stupid, asshole, in Scots) Then she turned to me and said: "I'm so sorry. Are you ok? They don't represent us. They don't represent Scotland." I have often retold that scene to friends in the years since. It already seemed to me then a compressed icon of a whole country. Ten years later, it seems something more: a historical document. That morning, in the thirty seconds in front of a supermarket till, the two nations that Brexit had just revealed and separated passed in front of me. The Britain of the adios amigos - authorised by seventeen million votes to say out loud what before was said under one's breath. And the Scotland of the handbag - an elderly woman, working-class, who took on herself the responsibility of apologising for them, for us, as if it were her personal business to prevent her nation from being represented by those two. The detail that still moves me is that they don't represent us. She could have disowned the two as compatriots - said "they are not Scottish", washed her hands. She did the opposite. She claimed them as ours in order to disavow them. It is the exact opposite of the gesture the two were making toward me, trying to disown me as a non-compatriot. She was trying to recognise them in order to say: this is not our nature. Two opposing gestures of citizenship, in the same minute, in the same supermarket. --- A whisper at the Edinburgh border Jump forward in time. February 2025. Edinburgh Airport, arrivals hall, returning from a short trip to Italy. I queue in front of the automatic passport gates - the ones that scan your photo and let you through. The machine, for some technical reason, does not recognise mine. I am directed to the manual desk where a Border Force officer is waiting - a woman in her forties, black uniform, neutral service expression. She asks me, in a professional tone: "Are you here for a short visit?" I reply: "No, actually, I'm coming home. I've been living in the UK since 2013." Her face changes slightly. "What do you do?" And me: "I'm a Linux platform engineer. I work for a Scottish public body." And here the thing happens. Her face opens into a real smile - not the service one. She hands me back my passport and says: "Welcome back." As I am putting the passport back in my wallet, she looks at me, lowers her voice slightly, and says: "And fuck Farage." I laugh. I reply: "Yeah. Fuck Farage." She smiles, gives a small nod, and I walk off toward baggage reclaim. I sit on a bench, in disbelief. She was a state officer on duty, in uniform, at her workplace. The people trained for that role are explicitly instructed not to express political opinions to the public - it is considered professionally improper. And at the border, of all places, the border, the exact point where national identity expresses itself as institutional gatekeeping, where the hostile environment policy introduced by Theresa May in 2012 manifests in flesh and blood with the stamp that decides who is in and who is out. Of all places… In that place, she read who she had in front of her - an Italian living here for thirteen years, employed by a Scottish public body, returning from a European trip - and decided that professional protocol could give way to political recognition. She recognised me as one of hers. The difference between 2016 and 2025 is striking. In 2016 I was the object of the defence - the lady was intervening for me. In 2025 I was a participant in the joke - the guard was not defending me, she was sharing with me a joke about a common enemy. It is a complete arc of citizenship, even though legally I have remained Italian with Settled Status, keeping jealously in my pocket my burgundy passport with the eagle on the cover. --- What happened to England, 2012–2025 Between those two episodes a decade passed, and during that decade England did particular things. Some of the chronology will be familiar to British readers; others, even British, may not have connected the points the way the sequence connects them. In 2012 Theresa May - then Home Secretary in the Cameron-Clegg coalition - introduced explicitly what has gone down in history as the hostile environment policy. It is a profound paradigm shift: instead of leaving the control of irregular migrants to the police alone, the British state decides to make it mandatory for employers, landlords, banks, hospitals, schools and universities to verify migration status before delivering any service. The stated idea is to make the lives of irregular migrants so difficult that they "self-deport". It is distributed administrative racism, in which every British citizen is enlisted as a passive border agent. Landlords risking up to five years in prison if they let to someone without the right paperwork. NHS doctors required to bill foreign patients before treating them. Teachers required to flag children whose status they suspect. Six years later, in 2018, the Windrush scandal broke. It emerged that the hostile-environment machine had systematically deported, deprived of work, excluded from medical care, and pushed into poverty thousands of black British citizens of the Caribbean generation who had legally arrived in the country between the 1940s and the 1970s. Their crime was that the British state had destroyed their archival documents in 2010 - and then demanded that they prove themselves British. Stories are told of people in their sixties and seventies, lifelong NHS workers, who find themselves without homes or salaries because they cannot retrieve school records from the Sixties. This is the hostile environment applied. It is not a theory; it is an administration. In 2024 Labour returned to power with Keir Starmer. We all thought - on the continent - that the pendulum would swing. It has swung, but not in the expected direction. Shabana Mahmood, Labour Home Secretary, presented in 2025 an immigration White Paper which she herself describes as "the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times". The qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain - the British equivalent of permanent residency - is doubled from five years to ten for new arrivals. Refugee status becomes temporary and revocable. The English requirement for ILR goes up from B1 to B2. It is Labour delivering the toughest asylum reform in recent British history. Hard to credit if you read about it from the continental press, but that is how it stands. They are doing it because Reform UK - the party of Nigel Farage, an evolution of the Brexit Party, in turn an evolution of UKIP, fascists in short - has reached first place in national polls. YouGov, September 2025: Reform at 27%, against Labour at 21% and Tories in free fall. Reform's programme is explicit and published on their own site: complete abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain (i.e. transformation of permanent residency into a series of periodic renewals for everybody), mass deportations of all irregulars, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, drastic reduction of naturalisations. Ipsos, August 2025: immigration is the British public's first concern at 48%, ahead of the economy (33%) and the NHS (22%). The Overton window has moved in metres, not in centimetres, and Labour is busy chasing Reform on the terrain of immigration instead of contesting the frame in which Reform has already won the cultural battle. A last piece needs to be added that is essential to understand the present moment. After the Southport riots of August 2024 - when a young British man of Rwandan origin stabbed three little girls at a dance class, triggering a week of anti-Muslim disturbances across the United Kingdom - a unifying slogan emerged that fused Robinson, the Trump administration, JD Vance and Elon Musk into a single rhetorical line: two-tier policing, two-tier Britain. The thesis is that British justice is more severe toward white Christians than toward Muslims and migrants, creating a "two-tier Britain" in which natives are second-class citizens in their own country. The slogan is patently false - the Office for National Statistics figures show the opposite - but it has worked as a mass rhetorical device, and it is the frame through which Saturday's London march publicly justified itself. It is the key conceptual piece of the moment. --- What happened to Scotland Now the comparison. Scotland, until 7 May 2026, was still a political exception protected more by electoral geography than by culture - the SNP in government for nineteen years, a population voting consistently Remain, a robust civil society that mobilises tens of thousands of people in anti-fascist marches, a small but combative independent press. On 7 May the Holyrood elections crystallised a picture that surprised even the most attentive observers. John Swinney's SNP won with 58 seats, losing six on 2021 but remaining by far the biggest party. The Scottish Greens went from 7 to 15 seats, winning constituency seats (the first-past-the-post kind, as opposed to regional list seats) for the first time in their history - at Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Southside. Labour held at 17, down. Reform UK entered the Scottish parliament for the first time with 17 seats - all from the regional list, none won at constituency level. SNP plus Greens makes 73 seats out of 129: the widest pro-independence majority ever at Holyrood since 1999. But the most important figure is not this. Swinney declared at his press conference, the day after, a sentence that is no longer said at Westminster: "I will talk to all other parties, with the exception of Reform". He said it clearly, without euphemism. That sentence defines an explicit cordon sanitaire - the thing that English Labour has not done and probably never will, busy as it is contending with Reform for an electorate it has culturally surrendered to. There is a legal and cultural framing that supports the cordon. In 2024 the Scottish parliament passed the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act - a law that explicitly criminalises incitement to racial and religious hatred, with an application that has been anything but uncontroversial (J.K. Rowling has been a vocal critic) but which exists as a normative baseline that the rest of the United Kingdom lacks. The Scottish government runs a programme called New Scots for refugee integration, explicitly promoted as public policy. The contemporary Scottish identity has been built, from the 1980s onwards, on an active opposition to Thatcherism, to metropolitan imperialism, to the racism of the Daily Mail. So it is not nature - it is recent historical construction, and as such it is fragile, but