Wow. UKIP bunkering down on the anti-immigration stuff. Awful, awful poster. Just awful. pic.twitter.com/3f781AnVJD
— Ryan Bourne (@MrRBourne) April 20, 2014
According to the Migration Policy Institute, the United Kingdom has seen increased immigration since World War Two. Led by the Labour Party, the UK opened its doors to EU migration since 2002 although it is not a part of Europe’s open-borders Schengen Area. The most notable change that resulted was that Polish immigrants became the UK’s largest immigrant group by 2008, according to MPI. That year also marked the start of a global economic recession, leading to a backlash among many Britons who feared Poles and other economic migrants were taking their jobs.
This tweet shows just one example of billboards for the anti-EU U.K. Independent Party (UKIP). According to the BBC, UKIP’s main position is that the UK should regain total sovereignty, withdraw from the EU, and close its borders to migrants including those from the EU. This tweet shows just one example of a billboard that UKIP used to promote this agenda before May 2014 elections; here are some others.
The “facts” in the poster should obviously not be taken at face value, since they were put forward by a political party with a specific agenda to advance. Still, both the poster and the tweet can give future historians key insights into the state of immigration politics in Britain in the late years of the early-twentieth-century recession, as well as the ways immigration politics intersected with the larger controversy over the UK’s relationship to the EU.
The poster seems to target working-class Britons who might respond to the idea that their economic woes are made worse by immigration. As for the tweet, it targets the twitter followers of Ryan Bourne (a researcher) and the larger twitter audience. The passionate responses agreeing and disagreeing with Bourne’s condemnation of the posters shows just how controversial they were in British society. And whatever the concerns of liberals and academics like Bourne, the posters worked: UKIP enjoyed major gains in the elections of May 2014, according to The Guardian.
-Julie M. Weise (with thanks to former student Glen Ruderman for finding this interesting document)