A psychoanalytic investigation of the hostile environment discourse in Britain: A case study of Suella Braverman

Why does the hostile environment, a set of public policies designed to make life more difficult for immigrants, exist in Britain, a country which relies on immigration culturally and economically? Since the official announcement of the hostile environment by Theresa May in 2012, a feedback loop of increasing hostility has taken over the British large group psyche leading to punitive policies such as the recent Rwanda scheme, and more panic about immigration among a large segment of the public. Following an interdisciplinary approach that combines psychoanalysis, political discourse analysis, and colonial studies, I investigate some of the psychological mechanisms that motivate the official hostility towards immigrants and allows for the existence of the hostile environment. I posit that the current official hostility towards immigration is connected to the repression of the violent and coercive sides of the British empire by imperial representatives, the collective meaning and identity vacuums left in the wake of the end of the British Empire, and to the government’s subsequent disavowal of the connection between modern immigration and the British Empire. Since whatever is repressed always returns in the form of symptoms; I conceive of the hostile environment as a symptom of repressed colonial violence, triggered by the multicultural reality of modern Britain, the ’return of the oppressed’, and by the decline in Britain’s politico-economic relevance over the past decades. Finally, for my case study, using Norman and Isabella Fairclough’s framework of political discourse analysis, I analyze a speech made by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. I illustrate what an argument for the hostile environment looks like and provide a reconstruction and evaluation of it and contextualize it within my analysis.