The Power of Language: Why is it so controversial to say that the UK is ‘colonised’?

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement that the UK is being ‘colonised’ by migrants was provocative, polemical and political, to such an extent that he has apologised for his choice of words. But why was it both so powerful and so controversial?

Associated with the development of empires on which ‘the Sun never sets’, as the saying goes, the concept of ‘colonisation’ seldom leaves people indifferent. At its heart, it implies that there are ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised’ – settlers and indigenous populations in many regions of the world –, and with it a ruling class on the one hand, and the ‘dispossessed’ on the other. In other words, it is bound to stir vivid emotions.

The word itself stems from the Latin ‘colonus’, which refers to a settler or a farmer. In turn, ‘colonus’ comes from the verb ‘colere’, which means ‘to cultivate’. Agriculture being based upon land ownership, the roots of ‘colonisation’ are bound to chime with deep, ancestral feelings: attachment to the land, conceived as a coveted, finite resource, which ought to be conquered or, conversely, defended against intruders committed to monopolising it to the detriment of those who exploit it already.

With land comes power: first agricultural, then monetary, and finally political. Historically, the settler, the one who ‘colonised’, would appropriate the local resources of a specific place. If the new ‘colony’ was uninhabited, as with the Falklands or Réunion Island, the human impact was minimal. In most cases, though, the arrival of the settlers was bad news for the indigenous populations, which were displaced and dominated in the best-case scenario, and sometimes massacred, which was common practice until the early modern period.

As a rule, it was historically more advantageous and more comfortable to be a ‘coloniser’ than to be ‘colonised’. But with the advent of ‘decolonisation’ – also known as ‘the end of empire’ – the whole concept started to have bad press, with a whiff of usurpation and ‘law of the jungle’ logic taken to catastrophic extremes during the Second World War, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima.

In this context, claiming that Britain is being ‘colonised’ by immigrants is a heavily loaded bombshell. The type of power relations it implies contradicts the post-war narratives that all Western democracies have defended: the idea that citizenship is not based on race or religion anymore,  since it led to so many wars, but rather on shared values, including national feelings associated with flag and anthem, yet presented in a context of international cooperation (hence the United Nations). Sir Jim’s statement shakes the very concept of Britishness to its roots by making it implicitly racial and exclusive.

It cannot go down well among formerly colonised populations either. Those who fought for their independence – as in Malaya or in Kenya – will think that it trivialises their experience of being forcibly subjected to alien rule, enforced with military power, on their own ancestral lands. As for those who moved from the colonies to the UK to help rebuild Britain in the post-war period, and have become British since then, there is another consideration. They will wonder how their migration, encouraged by successive British governments, fits into a narrative where they are presented as conquerors, although, historically, they clearly belonged to the conquered group. 

From the Prime Minister’s swift reaction to the media frenzy, the controversy around a fleeting passage in a sentence which appeared in the middle of an interview about an entirely different subject is telling. It inspires three observations which, taken together, are more than the sum of their parts.

Even if the origin of the word is not always foregrounded, the central issue of land ownership and political power makes it a heavily divisive idea. From the tripartite dance between Greenland’s indigenous populations, Danish colonisers and US would-be colonisers, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Ukraine war, access to, and control of, land shapes global politics. With land comes the right to live somewhere, administer the place, ‘cultivate’ it, turn it into a ‘homeland’. In this context, anything that has to do with ‘colonisation’ is bound to be highly emotive, with all its connotations of displacement and disempowerment.

Secondly, in a country which has been traditionally more used to sending out colonisers to build ‘Greater Britain’ overseas, rather than being on the receiving end – the last invasion dates back to the Normans in 1066 – the very idea that there may be a ‘fifth column’ of colonisers in the country is both titillating and revolting. Conveniently, it also overshadows class dynamics within the dominant UK racial groups – after all, where would the ruling classes, with all their privileges exposed most recently by the Epstein scandal, fit in a ‘coloniser/colonised’ dichotomy?

Thirdly, the ‘coloniser’ being ‘colonised’ plays, subconsciously, into the politics of guilt that have marked the memory battles of the post-colonial period. In a world system where being a coloniser has become frowned upon in many circles, shifting the blame away from yesterday’s colonisers – the British – and placing instead the emphasis on the supposed colonisers of today’s UK, is an implicit way of revisiting history, the implied conclusion being that the former colonisers are the new victims – rather than ‘perpetrators’ – now being colonised by their former subjects.

In other words, in the world of the 21st century, using the concept of ‘colonialism’ for anything other than its historical meaning has all the ingredients it takes to stir a ‘perfect storm’. The eternal optimist in me sees in it a proof of the power of language, even if, fundamentally, it belongs more to the language of power.