There was a candour in what Powell was saying, however sickening to contemporary ears, in marked contrast to the secret racism that lay behind two decades of immigration policy. Mainstream politicians moved to occupy the moral high ground in the furore that followed the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, but principles were in short supply.
Only weeks earlier the Labour government had rushed through emergency immigration laws that the Commonwealth Secretary George Thomson had argued in Cabinet were ‘wrong in principle, clearly discriminatory on grounds of colour, and contrary to everything that we stand for’. That legislation, the Commonwealth Immigration Act, was a response to concerns that tens of thousands of Kenyan Asians with British passports might flee persecution in East Africa and come to the UK. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was told by his Home Secretary, James Callaghan, that on the one hand Britain had moral and legal obligations to the refugees, but on the other hand the Trade Union movement was already kicking up over plans to outlaw racial discrimination, and ‘this would become more serious if the numbers of coloured immigrants entering the country were allowed to rise.’
By inserting a clause exempting those whose grandparents were born in Britain, the law was designed to affect Asians from East Africa, not white settlers. The Attorney General Sir Elwyn Jones admitted that the proposals almost certainly breached the European Convention on Human Rights. Fortunately, he was able to tell the Cabinet, ‘although we have signed this Protocol we have not yet ratified it.’
Callaghan later admitted privately that the problem was not the impact of new arrivals upon public services but the impact of brown skin on the public. Despite assurances to Parliament and Labour’s public commitment to eradicate racial discrimination, the government had forced through legislation specifically designed to deprive citizens of their rights on the basis of skin colour.
Wind the clock forwards once more to a Saturday afternoon in 2004. It was May Day and a bus bearing foreign plates had just pulled into Victoria coach station after a twelve-hour journey. Disembarking was the bleary- eyed vanguard of an unexpected and unprecedented invasion of Britain. These were the pioneers of an extraordinary exodus that would be felt in every corner of the country, transforming the politics of immigration once again.
Eight new nations in Central and Eastern Europe had just been granted membership of the European Union. At the stroke of midnight, 75 million citizens from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia had gained the right to live and work in any member state. Except, actually, they hadn’t. Britain was almost alone in not imposing a temporary quota on migrants from the eight accession countries, and so it was that every aircraft and every bus bound for London from the new EU states had been booked up for weeks. Immigration officers were warned that coaches would be arriving from Eastern Europe at an unprecedented level, with the likelihood of chaotic disruption and delay for normal Bank Holiday travellers. The vast majority of the buses and bulging baby Fiats came from Poland, their occupants prepared to seek out work wherever their wheels might take them.
Previous government predictions as to how many Eastern Europeans would settle in the UK were based on the false assumption that most would head for Germany. Ministers had blithely talked about 5,000 a year. But, unlike Britain, the Germans had applied a quota and, in the first twelve months following accession, 70,000 of the new EU citizens made their way to the UK. As significant as the number of new arrivals was
There was not a postcode in the land that remained unaffected: from the tip of Cornwall to the most northerly parts of Shetland, Poles and Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians became part of the local scene. What it meant was that millions of people in communities previously untouched by immigration overheard conversations at the bus stop conducted in a foreign tongue or saw strange brands of beer, called ‘Zywiec’ or ‘Tyskie’, in the local supermarket. It certainly wasn’t Theakston’s Old Peculiar.
Although these new migrants were white Europeans, their arrival proved quite unsettling for many voters and the issue of immigration shot up the political agenda. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Michael Howard asked during the 2005 election campaign. ‘It’s not racist to talk about immigration,’ he said. ‘It’s not racist to want to limit the numbers.’
Anxiety about foreign migrants had shifted from colour to scale. ‘Over a hundred and fifty thousand people are now settling in the UK every year — that’s the equivalent of a city the size of Peterborough,’ the Conservative leader claimed. Bizarrely, Howard’s opponents accused him of dog-whistling to racists. Actually, in comparison to most political discussion about immigration, he could hardly have been more open. Howard was right: for the first time since Enoch Powell’s speech, mainstream politicians could openly raise fears about immigration without being accused of racism. But the political debate was no less dishonest than that which had gone before.
Labour had been so timid about discussing immigration that it almost forgot to mention how its open door policy had seen the number of foreigners coming to live in the UK more than double since it took office: from 224,000 in 1996 to 494,000 in 2004. Later, government insider Andrew Neather would claim that there had been a political purpose in using mass immigration to make the UK multicultural. An advisor to the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, Neather let slip how ministers understood the conservatism of their core voters and, while they might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, ‘it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’
Labour’s reluctance to talk about the record levels of immigration into Britain meant there was little public discussion about the impact the new arrivals were having on communities and resources. Having spent much of the twentieth century encouraging the often false perception that foreign migrants were putting a strain on public services, now that they really were pressurising parts of the system, ministers didn’t want to talk about it.
In 2008, I made a report for the BBC’s national television news, which revealed how maternity units in London and the South East had had to turn away pregnant mothers because they had not been properly resourced for the wave of immigration. When I rang the health department for comment, one official suggested my enquiries were racist. Another report I filed demonstrated how public services were spending more than ?100 million on translation services, often undermining immigrants’ attempts to integrate. Once again, when I called for a government response, a horrified press officer said she thought I worked for the BBC, not the far-right BNP.
The arrival of the Poles and other Eastern Europeans exposed some troubling truths about British society. Young, willing and able, they grabbed at the chance to fill many of the low-paid jobs that unemployed locals turned down as too much like hard work. Tourism, care of the elderly, and the building and agricultural sectors quickly came to depend on the foreign arrivals — not just filling existing jobs but creating new ones. Businesses started up or expanded because they had access to a new supply of enthusiastic labour. I remember going to Pitlochry, a Victorian tourist resort set amid the beautiful rolling countryside of central Scotland, and discovering how recent rapid growth of the local economy had been entirely down to what were called new workers. ‘Your contribution to our communities is greatly valued and we wish you a safe and enjoyable time during your stay in Perth and Kinross,’ the council said in a leaflet aimed at Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians and other foreign arrivals. A local hotel manager told me he was desperately worried the Eastern Europeans might go home at some point, depriving him of the cooks and chambermaids that kept his business going. Local farmers, shopkeepers, even the whisky distillery were reliant on immigrants.
Politically, success built upon foreign labour appeared to demonstrate a domestic failure. Why were these British jobs not going to British workers? The answer, in large part, was to be found in the shortcomings of policies on welfare, education, training and employment in the UK. Successive governments had failed to provide the skills and inspire the motivation needed for the local unemployed to compete with the new arrivals. But decades of disingenuous political rhetoric had encouraged people to see the issue in terms of illegal migrants, bogus asylum seekers or swarthy foreign infiltration. Politicians knew the reality was much more complicated, but in the run-up to the 2010 election, to engage with the detail was to risk appearing soft when every party needed to sound tough.
