The Use of Political Narratives to Legitimise Domination and Exclusion: A Critical Analysis Relating to Asylum Seekers in post-Brexit United Kingdom

Domination, as both an idea and a process, is constantly changing. With regard to state actions, domination was once considered only in terms of violent acts of control. However, domination also emerges through more covert forms of state-induced power and control. One particular tactic of domination relates to the management and exclusion of certain groups that state agencies determine to be unwanted or threatening. In the face of perceived ‘existential threats’, states have begun to create, reinforce and rationalise exclusion through narratives of state protectionism. Exclusionary policies and practices are even determined as necessary under the language of human rights, a point that diminishes the impact and understanding of rights as inclusionary principles for all.

This thesis considers domination in relation to UK political responses to asylum seekers, in the wake of the ‘Brexit’ deal. Using critical narrative and thematic analysis of parliamentary debates in the post-Brexit era (2020-2022), the work demonstrates how the Conservative Government set the narrative ground for a raft of policies and institutional reforms aimed at protecting the nation from asylum seekers who embodied a perceived threat to the nation. In doing so, political narratives created, reinforced, and rationalised state domination and protectionism. More specifically, this thesis demonstrates how human rights are used to sustain state-induced exclusion over an already vulnerable group. The result is that human rights, while initially conceived as a way of limiting state power, are now a tool used by dominant powers to control, exclude and harm certain groups who are deemed ‘illegitimate’ on opaque security, bureaucratic, social, economic and morality grounds.