Thanks for the opportunity to review this book. Refugee movements to Britain is one of my subject areas in professional academic research so I was excited to have the chance to read through this book. I thought that it was an OK read, with some bias perhaps in some areas, but overall an engaging and accessible attempt to cover a very broad and complicated history of migration.

The author of this book used to manage Refugee Action in Plymouth, an organisation which was funded by the Home Office until 2010. It may be that this statement is sufficient to tell the reader what to expect from this very odd book. It is mainly a chronicle of how waves of displaced European peoples subject to persecution across this intolerant and bellicose continent came to live in the UK. It is also partly a personal history and parts of it read like a funding application.

There are some interesting stories in its pages, including, for example why Norwich City FC are called the Canaries, but it’s is a painfully white and selective perspective on the history of refugees in this country, even if you accept, which I don’t, that there is a valid distinction to be made between those fleeing persecution and those fleeing the proceeds of colonial oppression. You will find them in the same perilous boats in the Channel.

And, in fact, the author does find economic migrants with the 66 Poles on board the Windrush. Naturally, she follows the stories of the Poles, as she has done the Huguenots, the Jews, the Belgians, the Protestants of Germany, the Basques, the Dutch and the Hungarians. We learn a little bit about the Ugandan Asians, including the owner of Veggie Perrins, called William in Plymouth although his name is Vallabhdas or Valam for short. There is a little bit on Chileans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Kosovans and Syrians. But we must wait for the Afterword for a mention, or should I say, a list of Kurds, Rwandans, Congolese, Iranians, Sierra Leoneans, Afghans, Sudanese, Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians.

How much easier it has been for people here to welcome traumatised white people for a while because of the dastardly acts of other foreigners and how very fortunate we have been to reap the benefit of their economic activity.