Category: UKBA
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The border/national security nexus: Detecting Middle Eastern & North African ‘terrorists’ at the UK border in the 1970s-80s
In May 1980, two terrorist incidents involving Iran and Iranians led to a major overhaul of the UK’s border control system for counter-terrorism purposes, ordered by Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. The below post is how the UK border control system was increasingly used to identify and monitor potential ‘terrorists’ from the Middle East and North…
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‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War
Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall,…
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Removing the barriers to deportation from the UK: Lord Carrington and counter-terrorist efforts in the early 1980s
A story has appeared in The Guardian today that the UK Appeals Court has ruled that it is legal for foreign convicted criminals to be deported without their chance to appeal from the United Kingdom. The right to appeal before deportation was originally enshrined in the Immigrants Appeals Act 1969 and was long considered a…
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Determining the number of ‘virginity testing’ cases within the UK immigration control system
On this day (February 19) in 1979, Labour MP Jo Richardson led the criticism in the House of Commons of the Home Office and the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees over the gynaecological and physical examinations conducted upon South Asian women migrating to the UK, colloquially known as ‘virginity testing’. During this session of parliament, Rees…
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State crime and the migrant experience in the UK
After the coverage of the number of recent deaths of black people at the hands of the police in the United States and the commentary about similar victims of police/prison brutality in the UK and Australia, I thought I would post this excerpt from our book Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control.…
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The Prevention of Terrorism Acts and exclusion orders: 40 years since their introduction
This week it will be forty years since the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Temporary Provisions) 1974, passed quickly in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974. The POTA was a broad piece of counter-terrorism legislation and many of the controversial elements of contemporary legislation concerning counter-terrorism and national security…
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Trends in myths about immigration
Today The Guardian published a very thorough Q&A about European immigration to the UK and addressed some of the routinely asked questions about immigration, particularly as UKIP and the Tories seem to want to make immigration an issue at the next election. As I was reading the article, I was reminded that many of the…
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UK border control has long history of screening for ‘unhealthy’ migrants
High on the excitement of a potential by-election victory this week, UKIP’s Nigel Farage has called for immigration restrictions on people with HIV. This proposal has been roundly criticised as prejudiced against people with HIV, as well as impractical (as argued by The Guardian‘s Sarah Boseley). But Farage’s suggestion taps into a longer history of…
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Anwar Ditta and the discriminatory border control system
The following is based on an excerpt from our book Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination (Palgrave Macmillan). It discusses the case of Anwar Ditta, a British-Pakistani woman who fought the UK immigration control system for four years to get the authorities to allow her three children into the country. Only after…
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The PFLP/RAF terrorist who evaded the UK border control system: Zohair Akache and the ‘German Autumn’
In 1980, Lord Carrington, the new Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, ordered a review of how the UK border control system was utilised in the fight against terrorism, particularly in relation to terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa. The catalyst for this review were two incidents in May 1980 – the siege at…
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