Caribbean to staff the country’s trains, buses and municipal services, the figures were not especially striking. In the 1951 census there were 15,000 people from the West Indies (mostly Barbados) resident in the UK: 4,000 of them in London. By 1959 West Indian immigration to the UK was running at around 16,000 people per year. Immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth was even smaller—in 1959 there were just 3,000 immigrant arrivals from India and Pakistan. The numbers would increase in later years—notably when the British government reluctantly agreed to admit the East African Asians expelled by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin—but as late as 1976 there were still only 1.85 million ‘non-whites’ in the UK population, 3 percent of the total. And 40 percent of these had been born there.
What made the difference, of course, was that these people were brown or black—and, being Commonwealth citizens, had a presumptive right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the imperial metropole. Already in 1958, race riots in west London alerted the government to the perceived risk of permitting ‘too many’ immigrants to enter a historically white society. And so, even though the economic case for unskilled immigrants remained strong and the overall totals insignificant, the UK brought in the first of many controls on non-European immigration. The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 introduced ‘employment vouchers’ for the first time, and placed rigorous controls on non-white immigration to the UK. A successor Act of 1968 tightened these still further, restricting UK citizenship to persons with at least one British parent; and in 1971 a further Act, overtly directed at non-whites, severely restricted the admission of the dependents of immigrants already in Britain.[128]
The net effect of these laws was to end non-European immigration into Britain less than twenty years after it had begun. Henceforth, the growing share of non-whites in the UK population would be a function of high African, Caribbean and South Asian birth rates within the UK. On the other hand, these drastic restrictions on the right of blacks and Asians to enter the UK were accompanied, in due course, by a considerable improvement in their life chances once there. A Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public places, introduced remedies for job discrimination, and set out penalties for incitement to race hatred. A successor Act eleven years later finally outlawed
In northern Europe the situation of foreign labourers and other residents was kept deliberately precarious. The Dutch government encouraged workers from Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy (and later Turkey, Morocco and Surinam), to come and take up jobs in textiles, mines and shipbuilding. But when the old industries shut down, it was these workers who lost their jobs, often without any insurance or social safety net to cushion the impact on them and their families. In West Germany a Foreigners’ Law of 1965 incorporated within its text ‘Police Regulations for Foreigners’ first promulgated by the Nazis in 1938. Foreign workers were described and treated as a temporary presence, at the mercy of the authorities. By 1974, however, when the European economy had slowed to a crawl and many of the immigrant workers were no longer required, they had become permanent residents. In that year, 17.3 percent of all children born in West Germany were the children of ‘foreigners’.
The net impact of these movements of people is hard to overestimate. Taken all in all, they amounted to some forty million people in transit, moving within countries, between countries and into Europe from overseas. Without cheap and abundant labour in this vulnerable and mostly unorganized form, the European boom would not have been possible. The post-war European states—and private employers—benefited greatly from a steady flow of docile, low-paid workers for whom they frequently avoided paying the full social cost. When the boom ended and it came time to lay off excess labour, the immigrant and migrant workforce was the first to suffer.
Like everyone else, the new workers not only made things; they bought them. This was something quite new. Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe—as elsewhere in the world—had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew. Industrialization in the course of the nineteenth century had transformed the world of town- and city-dwellers; but in many parts of rural Europe the traditional economy operated largely unchanged up to and even beyond the Second World War.
By far the largest expense in a traditional household budget was food and clothing, which together with housing took up much of a family’s earnings. Most people did not shop or ‘consume’ in the modern sense; they subsisted. For the overwhelming majority of the European population up to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘disposable income’ was a contradiction in terms. As recently as 1950, the average
In the next generation, all this was to change. In the two decades after 1953, real wages almost tripled in West Germany and the Benelux countries. In Italy the rate of income growth was higher still. Even in Britain the purchasing power of the average citizen nearly doubled in these years. By 1965, food and clothing absorbed just 31 percent of consumer spending in Britain; by 1980 the average for northern and western Europe as a whole was less than one quarter.
People had money to spare and they were spending it. In 1950, West German retailers sold just 900,000 pairs of ladies’ nylon stockings (the emblematic ‘luxury’ item of the immediate post-war years). Four years later, in 1953, they moved 58 million pairs. In more traditional commodities the major impact of this revolution in spending came in the way goods were packaged and the scale on which they were sold. Supermarkets began to appear, notably in the 1960s, the decade when the impact of the increase in purchasing power was felt most dramatically. In the Netherlands, which boasted just seven supermarkets in 1961, there were 520 ten years later. In the same decade, the number of supermarkets in neighboring Belgium rose from 19 to 456; in France from 49 to 1,833.[129]
The rationale for supermarkets was that shoppers (housewives for the most part) would spend more in any one shopping trip if most of what they wanted—or could be tempted into wanting—was conveniently available in one place. But this in turn presumed that women had somewhere to put their food when they got it home; and that implied, increasingly, the presence of a fridge. In 1957 most west European households still did not possess a fridge (the figure ranging from 12 percent in West Germany to less than 2 percent in Italy). The reason was not so much technical (by the mid-1950s virtually all of western Europe had full electricity service, with the exception of parts of rural Norway and southern and upland regions of Italy) as logistic: until housewives could afford to buy a lot of perishable food at one outing, and could transport it home, there was not much point in spending large sums of money on a fridge.[130]
It is thus symptomatic of many other related changes that, by 1974, the absence of a fridge in most places would have been remarked upon: in Belgium and the UK, 82 percent of households had one; in France, 88 percent; in the Netherlands and West Germany, 93 percent. Most remarkable of all, 94 percent of Italian households now owned a fridge, the highest ratio in Europe. Indeed, Italy had become Europe’s largest manufacturer of refrigerators and other ‘white goods’. In 1951 Italian factories made just 18,500 fridges; two decades later Italy was producing 5,247,000 a year—almost as many as the USA, and more than the rest of Europe put together.
Like the domestic fridge, the washing machine made its appearance in these years. It too was aimed at easing the work of the newly affluent housewife and encouraging her to extend her range of purchases. The washing machine, however, took longer to catch on than the fridge—partly because in the mid-1950s running water had still not arrived in more than half of all households in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Spain and many parts of France and Scandinavia, partly because the electricity grid in many places could not support two large appliances in a single residence.[131] Even in 1972, by which time most west Europeans lived in homes equipped with indoor toilets and full plumbing, only two households in three owned a washing machine, a ratio that increased steadily but slowly with each decade. Washing machines remained for many years beyond the reach of the poor, especially large families that had greatest need of them. Partly for this reason, the washing machine—like dishwashers after the mid-1970s—remained associated in commercial imagery with the domestic accoutrements of the affluent middle class.
