Emboldened by Trump, the ‘liberal' UK is giving free rein to its colonial impulses

The Guardian

21-04-2025

As Donald Trump rains chaos down upon the US – dismantling the rule of law trading in rage-fuelled nationalism and bullying the rest of the world – his ideology is now being eagerly imitated not just by the expected rogues of global politics, but by supposed bastions of democracy.
These democracies now wear only a mask of civility over that old colonial impulses: control, divide, exploit.
Most disturbing is the UK's quiet complicity, sneaking its own brand of institutional cruelty. Like seasoned illusionists, they use chaos abroad to obscure injustice at home, to legitimise morally indefensible immigration policies.
It is as though the UK and the US exchanged a sly nod across the Atlantic, and said: 'Let's see just how far we can go.'
The US is now overseeing the deportation of thousands. Not illegal migrants. Legal. Some have lived in the country for decades, built families, contributed to society, paid taxes. As detention centre doors slams, dreams are extinguished in real time.
Caribbean nation's citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programmes, including Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Kitts & Nevis, and Saint Lucia, are now under investigation by the US due to perceived security concerns, potentially facing travel restrictions. So, too, Africans are facing bans and visa cancellations.
Not to be outdone, the UK has begun tightening visa restrictions on African and Caribbean nations under the thinnest of pretexts. To us, the message is clear: if you are the wrong colour and hail from a former colony, you're not welcome. Of course, you're more than welcome if you are Ukrainian or bringing money or minerals.
A report on the roots of the Windrush scandal posted on the UK government's website summarises, 'major immigration legislation in 1962, 1968 and 1971 was designed to reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.' Sixty years later, the UK still engages this socio-political ideology.
Take the absurd treatment of Trinidad and Tobago. British authorities last month slapped exorbitant visa fees on Trinidadians, similar to Jamaica and Dominica. The justification? A spike in asylum claims – from an average of 49 a year between 2015 and 2019 to 439 in 2023.
In the year ending June 2024, the UK's net immigration was 728,000, a 20% decrease from 2023's peak of 906,000. Yet 439 Trinidadians cause a 'crisis'? This is political theatre staged for a frothing few with empire nostalgia and immigrant paranoia.
But the Trinbagonian government cannot be let off the hook. For over a decade, gang violence triggered by smuggled guns from the US, the drug trade from South America and the influx of gang members from Venezuela has worsened under an impuissant minister of security and a government in paralysis.
This new UK immigration policy for Trinidad and Tobago isn't policy, its punishment. It's the empire rearing its head again – this time in the guise of 'immigration control'. If the UK was truly concerned, it could have picked up the phone and spoken to the high commissioner to the UK or even the Prime Minister to find a proportionate solution – as fellow Commonwealth members. But what does the Commonwealth mean any more? A glorified nostalgia club presided over by a monarch few in the Caribbean have ever seen.
The Commonwealth is a relic. An expensive, hollow monument to a colonial past Britain refuses to apologise for and the Caribbean refuses to walk away from. Common means subservience, and wealth flows only one way. For example, the judicial committee of the privy council remains the highest court for many Caribbean nations – a colonial backdoor that ensures British influence remains after the union jack has been lowered.
Why does the Caribbean still genuflect before a throne that sees it as a holiday destination at best and an aid burden at worst? Why do African nations tolerate the condescension of aid when their stolen minerals fuel the west's riches? As Bob Marley demanded, we must 'emancipate ourselves from mental slavery'?
The truth is: the west cannot function without us. It feeds off our resources, our oil and minerals, our intellect. Yet it treats us like pests at the door: unworthy of entry, let alone equality.
Why are we still playing this rigged game? Why are we still begging for visas, pleading for asylum, when our presence build these nations in the first place?
It's time we stopped asking for permission, withdrew our labour, our brilliance, ourselves – and left them to stew in their nostalgia, mistaking walls for strength and xenophobia for sovereignty. We'll build something better.
Trump's sledgehammer approach to diplomacy has torched relationships with Canada, Panama, Greenland, South Africa and the broader African continent. The Caribbean is not spared, least of all that US favourite: Cuba.
This time, he unleashed his bulldog secretary of state, Marco Rubio,on Cuba's quiet but powerful diplomatic engine: its doctors. For decades, Cuban medical professionals have travelled the world, from rural outposts in Africa to hurricane-ravaged villages in Haiti, treating the sick and delivering babies, with the soft diplomacy the US abandoned around the time it thought regime change was a sustainable foreign policy model.
Cuban doctors have long symbolised international solidarity, emerging from a nation routinely vilified – because nothing terrifies Washington more than socialism in brown skin. But rather than acknowledge this medical diplomacy for what it is – a humanitarian gift – Rubio has instead accused Caribbean nations of exploiting these doctors, underpaying them and 'trafficking' them. The audacity is breathtaking.
Rubio threatened to revoke US visas from government officials and their immediate family members in any Caribbean country that accepts Cuban medical workers. Because America now exports moral lectures it no longer even pretends to live by.
But this time, the Caribbean didn't flinch. Leaders across the region responded with collective eye-rolling and a resounding: 'Come take your visa.'
These are independent nations, not subsidiaries of the US. Caribbean leaders made it clear: Cuban doctors are paid on a par with local medical professionals, they are not coerced, and are free to leave at any time. They are crucial to the region's healthcare systems.
Rubio's daring to speak on behalf of doctors who have done more good across the global south than the aid-slashing US state department has in decades, is an insult not just to the Caribbean but to common sense.
What we are witnessing here is a petulance from a fading empire that has replaced its moral compass with paranoia, and outsourced its diplomacy to the whisperings of an erratic billionaire, delusional oligarchs and baby-faced thinktanks addicted to colonial cosplay
America's diplomacy had died, been cremated and scattered over Mar-a-Lago.
So while Washington plays imperial hardball with nations trying to provide healthcare to their citizens, the rest of us are left wondering, again, why we allow ourselves to be bullied by a country that cannot keep its own citizens out of medical bankruptcy.
At some point, the Caribbean – and the wider global south – must draw a red line. Not just rhetorically, but structurally. We need new alliances, new trading currencies, new friends, new models of cooperation rooted not in colonial debt but mutual respect.
Because it is increasingly clear that the US is not interested in partnerships – it wants puppets. Preferably black or brown-skinned, desperate and pliable.