E P Thompson on Britain, Europe & a history of solidarity with refugees
I was looking through E P Thompson’s Peculiarities of the English for quite other reasons and came across the passage below which has interest in the context of 2025 and Shabana Mahmood’s disgraceful ‘refugees are not welcome here’ policy
It’s an argument about why Britain is not an exception to the rest of Europe (a debate he was having with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn) and why links existed both in the realm of ideas and in practical solidarities of fighting fascism and welcoming refugees.
Certainly a message for our times from European history and yet more British history Keir Starmer would prefer not to think about.
Here is this island, and there, across a few wet miles, are Other Countries. Those waters have, on occasion, been crossed. That city, London, is not in the Antarctic but has been, alongside Paris, Vienna and Prague, a great European capital. In its East End there have been deposit after deposit of refugee and immigrant workers. In the universities there have been deposit after deposit of émigré intellectuals. Across that water there came, in the 1930s, wave after wave of refugees from Fascism; across that water there went, in the early 1940s, wave after wave of troops to assist in the liberation of Southern and Western Europe; and across that water there came, in the later 1940s and 1950s, a further wave of refugees from Eastern Europe.
Peculiarities of the English, 1965
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