Description
The first Hansard-recorded reference to ‘small boats’ in the House of Commons was made in an 1822 debate on ‘Piracy in the West Indies’. Liverpool merchants complained of attacks by pirates who ‘were all either Spaniards or Portuguese’ and whom the merchant, MP and enslaver Joseph Marryat characterised as ‘enemies of the human race’ (Hansard, 1822). Over the next two centuries, ‘small boats’ garnered occasional parliamentary remarks – usually fewer than 10 in a year – mostly in relation to naval and fisheries issues. But in recent years there has been an explosion in references to small boats in parliamentary debates, including 103 in 2021, 233 in 2022, and 375 (at time of writing) in 2023. There has been a corresponding preponderance of ‘small boats’-themed news media headlines, and even a government initiative promoted as ‘small boats week’. Concrete policy responses to the so-called ‘small boats crisis’ have included the 2022 UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership, and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. A distinctive political discourse on small boats has emerged, again casting their passengers as an existential threat, if not to humanity then to national identity and security. Tracing and analysing this discourse, this paper shows how UK politicians and media outlets increasingly rely upon – and offer ‘culture war’ framings of – international migration, as a means of parsing the ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze, 2022) without resorting to progressive political-economic transformation. The paper also shows how the small boats discourse and its Australian and European antecedents are embedded in a ‘global libidinal economy’ (Kapoor et al., 2023) of racist migration policy and practice. Elite white nationalist political projects fight ‘culture wars’ on migration to protect or restore civilisational fantasy narratives of ‘the West’ and to stave off its ‘great variety of morbid symptoms’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276).
