Via Sepia Mutiny, this gem of an article from Salman Rushdie: The New Empire within Britain. Rushdie, make that Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie as of about a week ago, wrote the piece in 1982. Here are two snippets on institutional racism and the abolition of jus soli.

A friend of mine, an Indian, was deported recently for the technical offense known as ‘overstaying’. This means that after a dozen or so years of living here, he was found to be a couple of days late sending in the forms applying for an extension to his stay. Now neither he nor his family had ever claimed a penny in welfare, or, I suppose I should say, been in trouble with the police. He and wife financed themselves by running a clothes stall, and gave all their spare time and effort to voluntary work helping their community. My friend was chairman of his local traders’ association. So when the deportation order was made, this association, all three of his borough MI’s and about fifty other MI’s of all parties pleaded with the Home Office for clemency. None was forthcoming. My friend’s son had a rare disease, and a doctor’s report was produced stating that the child’s health would be endangered if he was sent to India. The Home Office replied that it considered there were no compassionate grounds for reversing its decision. In the end, my friend offered to leave voluntarily-he had been offered sanctuary in Germany-and he asked to be allowed to go freely, to avoid the stigma of having a deportation order stamped into his passport. The Home Office refused him this last scrap of his self-respect, and threw him out. As the Fascist John Kingsley Read once said, one down, a million to go.

The combination of this sort of institutional racism and the willed ignorance of the public was clearly in evidence during the passage through Parliament of the Nationality Act of 1981. This already notorious piece of legislation, expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of their citizenship rights, went through in spite of some, mainly non- white, protests. And because it didn’t really affect the position of the whites, you probably didn’t even realize that one of your most ancient rights, a right you had possessed for nine hundred years, was being stolen from you. This was the right to citizenship by virtue of birth, the ius soli, or right of the soil. For nine centuries any child born on British soil was British. Automatically. By right. Not by permission of the State. The Nationality Act abolished the ius soli. From now on citizenship is the gift of government. You were blind, because you believed the Act was aimed at the blacks; and so you sat back and did nothing as Mrs. Thatcher stole the birthright of every one of us, black and white, and of our children and grandchildren for ever.

This is an example of how racism harms everyone.