Yva Alexandrova - Here to Stay: Eastern Europeans in Britain

Yva Alexandrova excoriates the British media, political elite and even the labour movement over their condescension and hostility to East European migration. She tells the story of what its like to be the target of a wave of nativism that swept through British politics in the last decade, from the lived experience of those around her.

P AUL M ASON , AUTHOR OF H OW TO S TOP F ASCISM : H ISTORY , I DEOLOGY , R ESISTANCE

Provocative and well-informed, Alexandrova gives voice to people who are a vital part of Britains political and social life, yet too often talked about rather than listened to. Pay attention.

D ANIEL T RILLING , AUTHOR OF L IGHTS IN THE D ISTANCE : E XILE AND R EFUGE AT THE B ORDERS OF E UROPE

Published by Repeater Books

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Yva Alexandrova 2021

Yva Alexandrova asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 9781913462369

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462642

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

CONTENTS

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY:

In this book I often refer to the left by this I mean the broad alliance of campaign groups, trade unions, activists and, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, large numbers of that partys members and voters who supported his election and leadership. The left has never been a homogenous group, but the election of Corbyn helped give it coherence and a clear political leadership for a while. I am writing this book from the position of a left-wing activist, and this is my experience of both the left and wider British society in a tumultuous decade.

PREFACE

What today is meant by Eastern Europe is a conceptual term broadly applied to the countries that previously formed part of the Soviet sphere of influence in Europe: from the Czech Republic to Romania, from the Baltics to the Balkans. In Inventing Eastern Europe , anthropologist Larry Wolff argues that Western Europe invented Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century as a complementary other half in shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism.

This bold and prevalent historical imagery was given new life by Winston Churchill in his famous speech at the end of the Second World War, which declared that an an iron curtain has descended across the continent of Europe and divided it once again. Throughout the Cold War, the iron curtain would be envisioned as a barrier, separating the democratic West from the shadow of Eastern communism; but it also possibly served as a justification for not looking too closely at these places and their people.

The Revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989 brought down the communist regimes along with the iron curtain and challenged the Wests model of understanding Eastern Europe. As the wind of change swept across Europe from the Berlin Wall, through the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, to the Eagles Bridge in my home city of Sofia, this was an exhilarating time to grow up. The sense of freedom and unlimited opportunity that was now all of a sudden open to us was palpable, the hope and optimism unparalleled. And the harsh, cold winters the collapse of socialism brought with it were also less depressing because this hope was keeping us warm and giving us faith that there were better times ahead, that the worst was behind us. There was also a sense of return to where we belonged; with the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe was once again a united continent. What remained was for this to happen politically as well, which it did about a decade later when eight Eastern European countries the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia along with Malta and Cyprus, joined the European Union. In this sense, the EU was not only an economic, largely neoliberal project, but a historical project of reconfiguring Europe and re-imagining it as one. The right to free movement was fundamental to this united Europe, a union of people and not just of states. However, behind the political unification of Europe manifested in this enlargement, the shadows persisted. And it was these shadows that were summoned once Eastern Europeans started coming to the West. For behind the political ideal and rhetoric of reunification lurked the unpacked and unprocessed rhetorical forms of the eighteenth century of the civilised versus the barbarians. And this historical image was further reinforced by a powerful contemporary nuance: the West was wealthy and powerful; Eastern Europe poor and largely powerless.

INTRODUCTION

Eastern Europeans and our place and voices in contemporary European society and politics have been and still are conflicted. We ourselves are still struggling with this identity, largely because it is not something we have grown up with, but also because it is to a very large extent negative. I have for a long time introduced myself equally as Bulgarian or a Londoner, never as an Eastern European. But it is an identity that is thrust upon us, and one that we are starting to own and define for ourselves. This book is part of this process of owning an identity that is here to stay, just like Eastern Europeans are here to stay in the UK. To be accepted, we first need to accept ourselves, and also accept that we are part of the UK; we belong here and we have a right to be seen, heard, recognised and respected with all the distinct and heavy accents we have. By telling my story and those of other Eastern Europeans (Bulgarians, Poles, Romanians and Macedonians), incidentally most of us women, I attempt to show the way we see ourselves, our thoughts, expectations and dreams that brought us to the UK, how our experiences in the country aligned or clashed with these expectations, and how each of us has negotiated this in different ways. Through telling these stories, my hope is we can start carving out a space for ourselves in which to be seen and recognised for who we are, and not as some imaginary, indistinguishable and mildly threatening mass. It is not for the Daily Mail to set the tone, not for someone else to explain to us who we are. Instead, we Eastern Europeans are taking our common experiences, weaving our own narratives out of them and into the fabric of contemporary Britain, the place we all call home.

As someone who has worked with migrants and on migration and as a migrant myself I am unashamedly positive about immigration and about the capacity of people to be open, accepting and inclusive and the value this inclusivity brings to our societies in the form of richness, diversity and resilience. Migration helps expand and enrich our understanding of the world around us, our ability to navigate life, which is often contradictory and confusing, to find compassion, depth and connection where we thought none would be possible, to surprise and excite us. But migration, like any other social phenomenon, cannot be left to the laissez-faire forces of the market; it requires a welcoming environment and supportive policies to be in place in order for both migrants and locals to flourish and thrive.