Perhaps not. But if we are really going to see an accepted measure of well-being being used to shape our policy and politics, that prospect will prove frightening for many. Old orthodoxies and ideologies will come up against uncomfortable challenges. Having emerged from Whitehall’s shadows, Britain’s new utilitarians are likely to face ridicule and attack. There will be some unhappy times ahead in the pursuit of happiness. I fear, too, that my hopes of everlasting gobstoppers and flying cars are as far away as ever.
I is for Immigration
Conjurors call it ‘misdirection’, encouraging an audience to look over there when the sleight of hand is taking place over here. Soldiers use feints or diversionary tactics to fool the enemy into believing the action is in one place when it is really in another. Governments have similar tricks, exploiting external threats to distract attention from their own domestic faults and failures.
Natural xenophobia, our primal fear of the foreign or unfamiliar, is an easy trait to manipulate. History is filled with examples of leaders feeding common prejudices to court popularity in tough times, blaming and then punishing the outsider for every social ill. Even today, Britain’s tabloid press is ready to accuse ‘foreigners’ of being responsible for crime waves, unemployment, housing shortages, stretched public services and welfare scrounging.
Politicians argue that they are responding to some tangible social crisis when they talk up their latest immigration plan. There are complex and genuine social, financial and political concerns that flow from the movement of large numbers of people in an age of globalisation, but sometimes it is hard to see how the rules and restrictions proposed are anything more than a distraction from more stubborn problems afflicting twenty-first- century Britain.
It was forever thus. When Edward I sailed back to England from his duchy in Gascony in 1289, he found that a succession of wars, rebellions and foreign escapades had left him deeply in debt. The taxes required to fund his battles were, of course, highly unpopular but the king urgently required more cash. So he exploited a three-letter word that had become almost as despised as ‘tax’: Jew.
England’s Jewish population was an easy target: the foreign moneylenders, financiers and bankers were blamed by commoners and clergy alike for extortionate interest rates and anything else that came to mind. Wild accusations of ritual murder and torture were commonplace: myths about Jews hunting for children as sacrifices before Passover spread easily and widely in medieval England.
In the summer of 1290, Edward called his knights together. He needed their help to replenish the royal coffers and offered a deal. The king announced that every Jew in England would be thrown out of the country if his knights agreed to collect the new tax. The Edict of Expulsion was hugely popular and successfully distracted attention away from the extra taxation. It wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last time that ‘immigration control’ was used to buy political advantage.
Wind the clock forward almost exactly six hundred years to the nineteenth century, and the story was repeated. Britain was facing a financial crisis, as the boom years of imperial expansion could no longer be sustained. Rising unemployment had forced hundreds of thousands of labourers and their families into abject poverty and conditions for those lucky enough to find work were not much better: long hours, dangerous conditions, little security and low pay.
In London’s East End and around the docks, there was rising desperation and simmering anger. No family was protected from the workhouse or starvation. In early August 1889, news broke that the cargo ship
The London Dock Strike followed, quickly spreading across wharf and quay. A month later and the employers gave in: a famous victory for trade union solidarity, a milestone in the development of the British labour movement, but a clanging warning bell to the Establishment. It was time to play the race card.
The leader of the Dockers union, Ben Tillett, had revealed something of the common street prejudice of the time when he told migrant workers who had backed the strike: ‘Yes, you are our brothers, and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come.’ A Glasgow steel worker, addressing the 1892 TUC congress, said: ‘The door must be shut against the enormous immigration of destitute aliens into this country.’ The ‘aliens’ were largely Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, many of them heading through the UK on their way to the United States. The TUC duly voted for a motion demanding a complete halt to immigration.
For some ambitious politicians, the Jewish refugees represented the ideal scapegoat for many of the social ills afflicting the working classes. In 1900, Major Sir William Evans-Gordon won the East End constituency of Stepney for the Conservatives on an anti-immigrant platform. He reflected many of his voters’ anxieties when he proclaimed that ‘not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders. The rates are burdened with the education of thousands of foreign children.’
Then, as now, the arguments were that housing and public services were being put under strain, not because of lack of government investment or planning, but by the arrival of foreigners. Rich newspaper owners were more than happy for their publications to stoke up anti-Semitism: the
Emboldened by such public displays of intolerance, in January 1902 at the People’s Palace in London’s Mile End, Major Evans-Gordon chaired a ‘Great Public Demonstration’, ‘Under the Auspices of The British Brothers League’. The league, campaigning for restricted immigration under the slogan ‘England for the English’, was attempting to organise along paramilitary lines.
Far from challenging popular prejudice, denouncing racist rhetoric and accepting responsibility for the plight of London’s poorest neighbourhoods, the government set up a Royal Commission on Aliens to investigate the effect of immigrants upon housing, unemployment, public health and morals. One of the six members appointed to the commission was Major Evans-Gordon.
The committee’s report, however, failed to provide the newspapers with the headlines they might have expected. It concluded that the aliens were not responsible for disease or a surge in crime, were not a burden upon the welfare system and there was no evidence that they posed any threat to jobs or the working conditions of the British labourer. The only ‘charge’ upheld was that they were partly responsible for overcrowded housing conditions in a few parts of London.
It must have been deeply irritating for the beleaguered Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. His administration was on the verge of being crushed in a Liberal landslide and had been relying on the handpicked commission to justify a populist attack upon immigrants. The evidence didn’t stack up, but Balfour went ahead anyway. Parliament was persuaded to introduce the Aliens Act 1905, legislation that gave institutional legitimacy to the idea that foreigners were to blame for the problems of the white working classes.
Roll the clock forward forty years and another ship from the West Indies was tying up on the Thames. The cargo of the SS
‘I note what you say,’ Attlee replied, ‘but I think it would be a great mistake to take the emigration of this Jamaican party to the United Kingdom too seriously.’ For the Prime Minister, the arrival of a few hundred Commonwealth citizens at Tilbury docks was a small part of a greater effort to encourage tens of thousands of immigrants into Britain to help rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. ‘It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom,’ Attlee continued. ‘That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.’
