The arrival of the
Front of house, post-war Britain was anxious to appear honourable, generous and loyal. The uplifting narrative was of a nation that had defeated the vile racism of Nazi Germany by occupying the moral high ground. Even as it licked its wounds, Britain promised to stand foursquare with those to whom it owed a debt of gratitude, the people of the wider Commonwealth whose citizens had joined in the fight against fascism. The newspapers were happy to endorse the idea of a multinational group hug and there was little open opposition to the 1948 Nationality Act reaffirming the right of free access to the United Kingdom for all 800 million subjects of the King around the world.
Behind the scenes, however, secret Cabinet documents reveal a tale of racism and duplicity. The government was doing everything it could to ensure only the right sort of immigrants came to help rebuild Britain’s battered economy. The Colonial Office admitted to using ‘devious little devices’ to discourage and restrict black and Asian migration to Britain — covert administrative measures of questionable legality.
Just two years after asserting the rights of British subjects of whatever race or colour, Clement Attlee told his Cabinet he wanted more ideas for how ‘to check the immigration into this country of coloured people’. The Home Secretary James Chuter-Ede pointed out to him that politically ‘it would be difficult to justify… if no comparable restrictions were imposed on persons who are citizens of other Commonwealth countries.’ The government didn’t want to discourage workers from the white Commonwealth or the Irish Republic, and the Home Secretary explained that ‘an apparent or concealed colour test would be so invidious as to make it impossible of adoption.’ Chuter-Ede suggested, however, that such a step was also unnecessary because ‘the use of any powers taken to restrict the free entry of British subjects to this country would, as a general rule, be more or less confined to coloured persons.’
When the Tories came to power in 1951, the major policy challenge was dealing with continuing labour shortages, but like Labour before it, the Conservative government was keen to find crafty ways of stopping black and Asian citizens from filling the jobs. Confidential Cabinet papers reveal how ministers told officials to discourage the immigration of ‘coloured people’. They made it more difficult for black and Asian migrants to obtain travel documents, and advertisements were placed in colonial newspapers warning that jobs and accommodation were hard to find in the UK.
The public position was still that Britain welcomed all Commonwealth citizens, but privately the government was discussing even more drastic measures to keep out ‘coloured’ immigrants. Shorthand notes of conversations between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe reveal the latter saying there was ‘a case on merits for excludg. riff-raff’ but ‘Wd. have to admit in Parlt. tht. purpose of legn. was to control [admission] of coloured.’
Churchill decided that, before taking such a political risk, the government needed an economic or social justification for discriminating on the basis of skin colour. A working party was charged with assembling evidence from police reports and departmental surveys. Questionnaires were circulated in labour exchanges, asking: ‘Is it true that coloured people, or certain classes of coloured people, are work shy?’ and ‘Is it true that they are unsuited by temperament to the kind of work available?’ When the results came back, the Home Secretary was obliged to concede that the working party had found ‘no such evil consequences of this immigration’ to justify a policy of racial discrimination.
The search for excuses to keep out black and Asian immigrants continued, but again and again the enquiries came up with the wrong answers. A report presented to the Cabinet in 1957 found most black and Asian immigrants to be law-abiding and a useful addition to the country’s labour force. If there was a problem, ministers were advised, it came from a white population becoming increasingly hostile and resentful. The Cabinet was told about clashes with Teddy Boys and warned that ‘the tolerant attitude of the white people will last only so long as the coloured people do not encroach on the interests of the rest of the community.’
A year later, with a dreary predictability, racial violence spilled onto the streets of Notting Hill in London. A lynch mob of 300–400 white youths, many of them Teddy Boys, attacked the houses of West Indian residents with petrol bombs and missiles, in rioting that lasted five nights over the August bank holiday. Police reported how, at one point, crowds several thousand strong roamed the district, breaking into homes and attacking any West Indian they could find. There was open defiance to the police; one officer was told: ‘Mind your own business, coppers. Keep out of it. We will settle these n*****s our way. We’ll murder the bastards.’
Some black youths attempted to fight back: one large group of West Indian men was seen shouting threats and abuse, and openly displaying various offensive weapons. But the true story of what became known as the Notting Hill riots was very different from the official police report, which dismissed it as simply ‘ruffians, both coloured and white, who seized on this opportunity to indulge in hooliganism’.
Six months later, and with public hostility against the arrival of immigrants enflamed by disturbances in a number of British cities, David Maxwell Fyfe — now Lord Chancellor — addressed the Cabinet in Downing Street. ‘Although the real problem is in the numbers of colonial immigrants who arrive in this country,’ he advised, ‘public opinion tends to focus attention on the criminal activities of a small minority.’ The Lord Chancellor admitted that this issue was ‘undoubtedly inflated out of all proportion’ but his advice to Cabinet was to respond to misguided prejudice. ‘It would be better for the government to take the initiative and introduce legislation,’ he said. ‘Failure to take action might react unfavourably on the government’s popularity.’
The link between discriminatory immigration control and party political expediency could hardly have been expressed more clearly. The Lord Chancellor proposed tough new laws for deporting ‘undesirable immigrants’. The problem, as always, was that the legislation could not openly discriminate between white and ‘coloured’ migrants. ‘For presentational reasons,’ he told ministerial colleagues, ‘we recommend that citizens of the Irish Republic should be liable under the Bill… but we recognise in practice, although they could be deported without difficulty, it would be impossible to prevent their re-entry.’ It wasn’t the white Irish immigrants the proposals were targeting.
The secret Cabinet discussions eventually led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, one of the most counterproductive pieces of legislation ever passed. Until that point, Caribbean and Asian immigrants had tended to be single people, often skilled workers who planned to take advantage of labour shortages in Britain before returning home. When proposals for the new law were announced, immigration of ‘coloured Colonials’ shot up six- fold.
It had been widely but mistakenly rumoured that the legislation would see the UK permanently close its doors to non-white migrants, including the families of those already living here. To beat the ban, a record 125,000 people from black and Asian Commonwealth countries arrived in Britain in 1961, an influx for which the government was totally unprepared. The Act itself was intended to stem the flow by requiring new immigrants to have a work voucher but, by also enshrining the right of migrant workers to be joined by their dependents, it positively encouraged the permanent settlement of families. Those migrants who might have planned to return to their homeland now didn’t dare leave.
Muddled and unprincipled politics had contrived to achieve the one thing they were designed to avoid; the ethnic character of many British cities was altered forever. For the white working classes, the cultural transformation seemed alarming and as unemployment rose during the mid-1960s, so did racial tension. Fewer Commonwealth migrants were granted permission to enter the UK — in fact, many more people were leaving the country than arriving during this period — but in the poor neighbourhoods where black and Asian families had set up home, they became scapegoats for all the stresses associated with rapid social change.
At 2.30 on the afternoon of Saturday, 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell rose to speak in a meeting room on the first floor of the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. He talked of the deep unease of his white constituents in nearby Wolverhampton, their anxiety at the rapid shift in the ethnic make-up of their neighbourhood. ‘For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country,’ Powell said.
The Conservative MP did not believe the answer to racial discord was anti-discrimination laws, as the Labour government was proposing. Instead, Powell argued, the immigrants should be encouraged to pack up and leave, because it was their very presence that threatened the stability of the nation. ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”,’ he said.
