Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  ‘If I thought this was woolly and insubstantial and candyfloss-like, I would not be bothering to talk to you about it on a Thursday morning when I have got lots of other things to do,’ he replied.

  But would he, for instance, change his politics if the well-being measure suggested he should? ‘What I believe this will do is help to provide evidence to create a debate that may encourage us to change our minds about some things we have been rather stubborn about,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘It could throw up things that might challenge politicians’ views about equality or taxation, but that is all for the good. We should never be frightened of having a debate.’

  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 Lady Armstrong was tying up at West India Dock and 2,000 frantic men literally fought each other to be among the first ranks of labourers when contractors selected the men for work. The elation of those picked out turned to rage, though, when it emerged that the dock’s manager had cut their so-called ‘plus’ money, the few extra pennies’ bonus they were due when a large vessel was unloaded.

  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 Daily Record and Mail in Glasgow ran the headline ‘Alien Danger: Immigrants Infected with Loathsome Disease’. In the House of Commons, one Tory MP likened Jewish immigration to the entry of infected cattle.

  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 classe
s.

  Roll the clock forward forty years and another ship from the West Indies was tying up on the Thames. The cargo of the SS Empire Windrush was not sugar but workers, however — around 500 black passengers, mostly from Jamaica, encouraged to take the month-long voyage from Kingston by the prospect of employment. Barely had the passengers stepped off the boat when eleven Labour MPs penned a furious letter to Prime Minister Clement Attlee. The missive explained they were concerned for the racial character of the English people and warned that ‘an influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.’

  ‘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.’

  The arrival of the Empire Windrush became the symbolic starting point for mass migration of Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom, but it also fundamentally changed the politics of immigration. From the moment those nervous but eager Jamaicans stepped ashore, the alien threat — privately at least — became less about economics and more about the colour of people’s skin.

  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 diffic
ulty, 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.