Why Credit's Due: Reclaiming Pride in Boro (Essay)

The summer of 2025, like the summer of 2024 before it, was one of heightened tensions surrounding the issues of race and immigration in the UK. This year, Union Flags and St George’s Crosses have adorned innumerable lamp posts, motorway bridges, roundabouts, and zebra crossings – ostensibly as expressions of national “pride” – following a series of anti-immigration protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, which had been housing asylum seekers. In late July and early August 2024, racist riots erupted in towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland, including in Middlesbrough. The false narratives fuelling this combination of nationalistic fervour and xenophobic violence are that “illegal” immigrants to the UK are luxuriously treated at the expense of the “indigenous” population and that there is only ever an either/or choice between caring for “our own people” and providing basic support to those fleeing war, persecution, and/or starvation overseas. Underpinning these divisive myths is a pervasive logic of scarcity: there is not enough to go round.

This, inevitably, is also a logic of exclusion. If there is not enough for everyone, the only option is to leave some of us out. This, in turn, always means harming those who are already marginalised and perpetuating cycles of violence and disempowerment. Time and again, we are told that the costs of supporting the vulnerable must be met by “the taxpayer” (and note that “the taxpayer” is never themselves imagined to be among the vulnerable). Thus, the logic of scarcity and exclusion rests on a pernicious and demonstrably false understanding of the UK’s money system. Currency-issuing governments, however, create money whenever they spend. As counterintuitive as this may sound when we’re so used to thinking of governments as budgeting just like households, there is such a thing as public money and public money belongs to everyone. Moreover, all money is credit, and credit is due to more people and more places than the present logic of scarcity and exclusion will ever allow.