The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomiting and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later.

The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.

According to the American academic Matthew Lockwood’s calculation in this vividly told, panoramic history of 1,000 years of Britain as the ‘asylum capital of the world’ (an early 19th-century soundbite, intended at the time as a great compliment), there was an ‘ invasion’ of more than 115,000 Huguenot refugees, when Britain’s population was around 4.5 million. Lockwood has a keen eye for irony and the moral dilemmas of history. Who would have thought there was a Huguenot problem here for the last 350 years?

In the interests of full disclosure I will declare that I am a refugee. My family came to Britain from Hungary after the failed revolution against the Soviets in 1956, when I was an infant, along with around 40,000 others. Naturally I have a personal interest in this story and something of an axe to grind. But this really is a brilliant book – topical, profound, deeply researched and in places beautifully written. For anyone who wants a broad historical perspective on today’s great ethical/ political/ environmental question, this is as good a place as any to start.

Lockwood is neither a kneejerk liberal, nor a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. His main point, obvious but often overlooked, is that we have been here before in Britain many times and there is no new argument in the debate. Most people welcomed the Huguenots and showed enormous generosity. Yet in 1592 – when half the families in Sandwich were Flemish refugees – the locals rioted and all the ‘alien strangers’ were forcibly expelled because, as one protestor said: ‘They leave us no homes or employ.’ This was about ten miles from the Dover port that regularly sees huge anti-immigration protests more than four centuries later.

Through stories about American slaves who managed to reach freedom in Britain – many more than I had realised – to the 120,000 fugitives who arrived after the French Revolution, the reaction has been the same: first the welcome mat, then some politician or other voicing the ‘people’s concerns’. In 1792, at the height of the Terror, the influx of refugees to Britain prompted the foreign secretary Lord Grenville to say: ‘The majority of these people are of a suspicious description… and very likely to do mischief themselves or be fit tools of those who may be desirous of creating confusion.’

Lockwood is excellent at finding powerful and entertaining characters to make his points, from a wonderfully drawn portrait of the American slave Frederick Douglass, who fled from the US in the 1840s, to Freddie Mercury, whose parents escaped from Zanzibar in the 1960s, via the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, Sir Tom Stoppard, a Czech refugee, and the erstwhile Bugandan King Freddie Mutesa, thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin in the 1970s.

One brilliant chapter, about the arrival of Russian Jews escaping the pogroms after 1880, shows how the usual pattern was followed. At first great generosity and an outpouring of hatred against the brutal Tsarist regime. Then, when more Yiddish-speaking, alien-looking immigrants arrived – well over 100,000 by 1900 – a tub-thumping demagogue emerged, the MP for Stepney Major William Evans-Gordon, who tapped into popular xenophobia and launched the British Brothers’ League. ‘Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders,’ he said (often). The government ran scared and in 1903 proposed an Aliens Bill that would bypass existing laws and send vast numbers of East End Jews to remote parts of the Empire.

One of the main opponents of the Bill, Lockwood notes, was a young MP who said he would represent traditional British values: Winston Churchill. There were several reasons why, in 1904, Churchill ‘crossed the floor’ and left the Tories to join the Liberals, where he remained for 20 years. Free trade was one, but the proximate cause was his loathing of the Aliens Bill. His speech in the Commons against it, which, again in a very British way, was later substantially watered down, makes interesting reading today:

The whole Bill looks like an attempt by the government to gratify a small but noisy section of their own supporters and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.