Anti-Polish Migrant Moral Panic in the UK: A Response

The contribution of Sean Hier details for us the evolution of understanding with regard to moral panics, including highlighting its recent formulation into a panics-as-regulation research framework. Central to this emerging panics-as-regulation framework are contemporary moral regulation and individual risk management studies. Therefore, our contribution has demonstrated how this conceptual framework is capable of emphasising the contradictions of the contemporary British neo-liberal market. These contradictions, as we have argued, found their embodiment in anti-Polish migrant societal reactions in the UK. Given that, our argument can be seen as parallel with that of Hier’s intervention. Thus we will mainly concern ourselves with Slač álek’s call for a re-discovery of the concept of hegemony for the study of panics in complex contemporary societies. Before turning to this theoretical research agenda and its implications for the sociology of moral panics, it is worth detailing what we believe to be the key economic and political considerations underlying our contribution, which justifi ed using a ‘Canadian turn’ perspective. First, we should of course re-emphasise the complexity of contemporary moral panics and the diffi culty this poses for instrumental control originating either from above or below. So whilst we can detect three distinct patterns with regard to UK state responses to Polish migration, these are of course underpinned by volatile market considerations that are ever more driven by the differing dimensions of global labour and capital markets. With regard to our three patterns, our fi rst one can be described as one of almost calm. This was evident following the May 2004 accession of Poland to the EU. Here governments were supportive of Polish migration and went to some lengths to identify that Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrants were positive for the UK economy (see the Home Of-