“What do you think of England?”
“The best,” she replied. “Everything is free. The best when it comes to benefits.”
So said a Filipina woman I stopped on the streets of Whitechapel, in east London. Wearing a burqa, NHS lanyard and a wide smile, she explained how she gets “free” surgeries, bus and rail travel. A recent Muslim convert, she volunteered that Whitechapel was a “Muslim area” and all the better for it.
And the British state? “I don’t care with the government as long as I’m receiving already the benefits.”
She works at Queen Mary’s hospital and has been in the country for more than two decades. That is what makes her answer so damning. After a lifetime here, she didn’t talk about belonging, or history, or loyalty. She talked (in broken English) about the welfare state.
That is what Britain has become for millions: not a nation, but a service.
When I released the clip, all hell broke loose. The Philippine Embassy in London put out a statement responding to a “video clip concerning immigration in the United Kingdom”. The communiqué complained about portrayals of Filipinos and assured us that “isolated expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment are not representative of the wider British society”. A Filipino newspaper described it as an “ambush”.
