Abstract
In recent years, particularly since EU enlargement in 2005 and the start of the economic and financial crisis in 2008, immigration has increasingly become a main source of concern within the wider population and a political cleavage. It was the second most important concern for voters in the 2010 general election, after the economy but above unemployment, and a key point in the Brexit referendum, while in the 2017 election, it featured high in the electoral debates. Similarly, immigration is a key topic in right-wing nationalist parties, contributing to the framing of their political agenda and their success. These parties prioritize immigration as a pressing political issue, regarding it as a cause of economic competition and a threat to national identity and security. Based on 36 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with female members and supporters of UKIP, the BNP, and the EDL carried out between September 2013 and December 2014, this chapter examines how women on the nationalist right frame migration and turn it into a political issue. In particular, it looks at the perception of migration in terms of “mass migration”; the perception of its impact on the labour market and the welfare state; and how migration is linked to the EU. These dimensions are examined with an emphasis on the gender perspective, that is, on the ways nationalist women activists assess the implications of migration for women in these three areas.
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Notes
- 1.
The 1962 act restricting entry from Commonwealth countries was passed following concerns from the Home Office that unrestricted migration would lead to social unrest. Anti-migration feeling led the Labour government in 1964 to introduce stricter immigration rules, which were consolidated in the 1968 and 1971 Immigration Acts. The new conservative era was also marked by the increasing importance of migration in the political debate, with immigration and asylum being issues in the 1992 national and 1994 European elections (Spencer 2011).
- 2.
The British Brothers’ League, active in East London in the early years of the twentieth century, is one of the most prominent examples of anti-migrant movements organized in the UK.
- 3.
The interviews were part of the research project Women in nationalist movements in the UK, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme, aiming to explore the nature and quality of women’s support for the nationalist right in the UK, comparing women supporters of three variably positioned representatives of the nationalist right, which were the main groups in the UK at the time of the project: the United Kingdom Independence Party, the British National Party, and the English Defence League. The project was carried out by a research team based in the Department of Criminology and Sociology, School of Law, Middlesex University, London, that involved Dr. Jon Mulholland , Dr. Nicola Montagna , and Dr. Erin Sanders-McDonagh.
- 4.
See, for example, the “12 questions and answers” on migration on the EDL official website: http://www.englishdefenceleague.org.uk/12-questions-and-answers/ (accessed on 25 September 2017).
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Montagna, N. (2018). The British Nationalist Right and the Gendering of Anti-migration Politics. In: Mulholland, J., Montagna, N., Sanders-McDonagh, E. (eds) Gendering Nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76699-7_15
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