Brexit as heredity redux: Imperialism, biomedicine and the NHS in Britain

Des Fitzgerald,John Narayan,Amy Hinterberger,Ros Williams

doi:10.1177/0038026120914177

Abstract

What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’ in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society.

Highlights

On 11 May 2016, ‘Vote Leave’, the official campaign for Britain to leave the EU, revealed its referendum ‘battle bus’ – a newly-painted vehicle that was to ‘[tour] the country drumming up support for leaving the European Union’ (ITV News, 2016)
We argue that Brexit offers a moment to observe and account for a renewed and revitalised cultural politics of heredity, which foregrounds the intertwinement of biology and law within a new era of ethno-nationalist state projects
Our proposal for a cultural politics of heredity builds on sociological work showing how racism generated by the referendum is linked to wider histories of empire, decolonisation and British welfare capitalism (Bhambra, 2017a; Virdee & McGeever, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

On 11 May 2016, ‘Vote Leave’, the official campaign for Britain to leave the EU, revealed its referendum ‘battle bus’ – a newly-painted vehicle that was to ‘[tour] the country drumming up support for leaving the European Union’ (ITV News, 2016). It allows us to show how the figurative centrality of the NHS in the Leave campaign marks a vital meeting-point between, on the one hand, the gradual restructuring of health and biomedicine in Britain around genetic logics of ancestry and heredity, and, on the other, an image of the state and its welfare system that relies on imperial tropes of national and racial inheritance.

Results

Conclusion