WE ARE ALL POLICE NOW RESISTING EVERYDAY BORDERING AND THE HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT Arianne Shahvisi
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or a month in the late summer of 2013, large, unsightly vans were driven around six London boroughs chosen for their significant immigrant populations. In block text, they paraded the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’, which was also displayed in shop windows, health facilities, and places of worship.50 The name of the pilot was ‘Operation Vaken’, whose possible Nazi undertones have been noted.51 The scheme was a flop: there was widespread criticism, almost nobody ‘volunteered’ to go home, and the costs were ultimately deemed to outweigh the benefits.52 Despite their uselessness, the ‘Go home’ vans, as they came to be known, were a sign of the times. Not only had hostility towards migrants reached an alarming new fever pitch that would pave the way to the Brexit referendum three years later, but the government’s tactics had become indistinguishable from those of the tabloid newspapers they had always fed. Operation Vaken was like a giant mobile Daily Mail headline
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