Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage

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Peter Paul Schnierer

The challenges and opportunities offered by large-scale immigration are central to Britain’s political discourse in the 21 stcentury. At the time of writing, the coming departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union (‘Brexit’) is dominating the headlines; the process was triggered by, among a range of lesser grievances, a combination of dissatisfaction and hope: dissatisfaction with the perceived loss of control of who enters the country and for how long, and the hope of better times to return once unregulated immigration, from European countries as well as from further abroad, were stopped. The arguments traded between the increasingly entrenched camps do not contain much that is new: in fact, the popular sentiment that led to the narrow victory of the Brexiteers has not changed substantially since 1980, when the punk group The Clash sang

They say the immigrants steal the hubcaps

Of respected gentlemen

They say it would be wine and roses

If England were for Englishmen again (“Something about England”)

Britain, like any other country, has her share of xenophobes and welcoming citizens alike, but the political discourse contains a few elements that are less pronounced elsewhere. The most fundamental of these is the constant influence of Britain’s insular position; there is no need to negotiate joint problems on a daily basis; no roadworks need to be coordinated, no rules for police in hot pursuit across the border have to be set up. What is more: the petty border traffic that generates so much awareness of neighbourhood and similarity in mainland Europe simply does not exist. The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic could have served as an example, and there is much greater fluidity of movement nowadays, but the border is still too burdened down with memories of recent conflict. Most other trips abroad require sea travel or flights, and the one exception, the channel tunnel opened in 1994, only came into being after decades of warnings about the invasion of Britain by French rats and rabid dogs – a fear that is best understood in terms of unwanted immigration and which was seen abroad to embody “British paranoia” (Ipsen). It is easier to cast ‘Johnny Foreigner’ as a dangerous or ludicrous character if you do not regularly get the chance to observe him at home. As a result, using national stereotypes in politics, entertainment and other public discourses requires the speaker to set irony markers, but not to apologise up front or afterwards. Often it is enough to identify the genre to make the cliché acceptable: TV comedy is a good example. A show like ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982–92), set in Nazi-occupied France and employing excruciatingly predictable behaviour patterns for comic effect, may well have attained cult status for that very reason. One of the bestselling books of 2015 was Stephen Clarke’s semi-ironically patriotic history of Anglo-French relations entitled 1000 Years of Annoying the French .