Apparently if you’re an immigrant it costs thousands of pounds and a mountain of paperwork to acquire British citizenship these days. – Just for purposes of comparison: when I got my (dual) Swedish citizenship five years ago it cost me around £50, a few questions about my financial situation and how long I had been with Kajsa, a quick police check, and that was it. No language requirement, even – wrongly, I think, but luckily for me. It took a few months for my application to be processed; but then I was Svensk. (Of course I’m white, comfortably off, and professional; all of which will have helped.)
Sweden, like Britain, is about to make its naturalisation process more difficult; but still it looks as though Britain will remain one of the most unwelcoming countries for the foreseeable future. Of course, that’s what our Rightists want; despite all the benefits that immigrants have brought over the past 400 years. (See my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, chapter 4.)
Incidentally: I once happened upon Karl Marx’s application for British citizenship about 150 years ago. The British police reported that as he had been notoriously hostile to his German king, he was unlikely to be loyal to Queen Victoria. But he was still allowed to stay. (He’s still here, of course.)
Porter’s Pensées 
A bit more about Musk’s business interests and his vindictiveness towards the South African government, if you can access it (paywall, apologies):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/02/08/elon-musk-turned-donald-trump-against-south-africa/
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I guess as long as Karl Marx hadn’t applied for outdoor relief, a C19 Kemi Badenoch would have had to allow him to stay.
Meanwhile, a couple of stories in the past 24 hours have made me think about a slightly different aspect of C19 immigration policy: that it was, at least in principle, non-racial (of course there was plenty of popular prejudice against the Irish and later Jewish immigrants).
The culture war surrounding British imperial history has never really been about historiography. Conservative critics are worried about the discussion of violence and racism not so much because it is (in their eyes) bad history as that it is damaging to the West in troubled times. They would like more emphasis on the positive contribution of the West and less on concepts such as “white supremacy”.
Now, since Trump came to office we have seen the scrapping of diversity policies, the gutting of USAID, threats to Panama, the ambition to take over the Gaza Strip and ethnically cleanse Palestinians and threats to South Africa over its (admittedly controversial) land redistribution programme, the last a key priority for Elon Musk who thinks the black majority SA government is waging war against whites, despite the presence of the Democratic Alliance in the governing coalition. To cap it all, yesterday one of Musk’s youthful Doge overlords was forced to resign because of his overtly racist social media posts. Don’t forget that these underqualified dodgy Doge executives were chosen because they enjoy Musk’s confidence.
My thoughts were cristallised by the words of historian Daniel Immerwahr in The Guardian:
“If you were to ask what links the Panama Canal zone, Canada, Greenland, and a Gaza that has been emptied of Palestinians and rendered into a ‘Riviera’, I think you could say that in Trump’s fantasies these places are all symbolically white, or could be symbolically white … either because the Indigenous population seems sparse and there seems to be a lot of land for settlement or other kind of infrastructure projects, or because, in the case of the Panama Canal, that is historically a zone that was controlled by the United States and dominated by [white Americans].”
In these troubled times I am comforted by the words of History Reclaimed’s Robert Tombs. Speaking of the bad reputation of the British Empire he said defensively that “Mistakes were made. Things were done.” That’s what I tell myself now. Mistakes are being made. Things are being done. Just hope they are not done to you.
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