In a Country Boasting a Welfare State, Do Black Lives Matter Less?

ABSTRACT

The chapter traces how British politicians and institutions used and abused visibly distinguishable ‘strangers’ to fill labour shortages and maintain a low labour cost welfare state while simultaneously tolerating or encouraging racialising ideologies that justified their subordination. The result was a two-tone class-divided society in which xenophobia constitutes common sense for around half the population and led to a nationalistic majority voting for Brexit while ethnic minorities and other identifiable foreigners experience direct and indirect discriminatory penalties the ultimate of which, higher levels of mortality, has been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.