Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  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.

  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.’

  The Times called it ‘probably the most shameful measure that Labour members have ever been asked by their whips to support’. James Callaghan told Parliament: ‘I repudiate emphatically the suggestion that it is racialist in origin or in conception or in the manner in which it is being carried out.’ However, six weeks later, a hint to Callaghan’s true motives was revealed in an internal document. ‘When we decided to legislate to slow down Asian immigration from East Africa we took our stand partly on the ground that a sudden influx of this kind… imposed an intolerable strain on the social services,’ he wrote. But the memo confessed that there was little or no evidence of immigrants burdening schools, health services, housing or the welfare system.

  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 where they went. These migrants didn’t behave like previous waves of foreign arrivals, trying to get a foothold in the poorer districts of big cities. They travelled everywhere.

  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 grabb
ed 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.

  The truth was that immigration controls were irrelevant to the million Eastern Europeans who had settled in Britain — all the Polish plumbers and Latvian labourers were free to come and go as citizens of the European Union. Nevertheless, anxiety driven by EU arrivals, about which the major parties could do nothing, prompted promises to crack down on non-EU immigration, about which a good deal had already been done — it had been the case for a number of years that no unskilled or low-skilled workers could legally come to Britain from beyond the EU, and there was little evidence that significant numbers of illegal migrants were still sneaking into the UK. The only way left to allay the public’s concerns, therefore, was to limit the arrival of those non-EU migrant groups that included people the country arguably needed and wanted — high-skilled workers and fee-paying students.

  An attitudes survey conducted in 2011 for the Migration Observatory at Oxford University found close to two thirds of British people wanted to restrict low-skilled immigration in the UK, but less than a third were concerned about students or high-skilled workers coming. As the accompanying report noted, this has important implications for public policy debates because effectively all low-skilled labour migration to the UK comes from within the EU, over which the government has no control.

  Political debate about immigration has always been about balancing principle and popular prejudice — realpolitik some might say. But history shows us that it has often been the opposite of ‘real’. The way the debate has been framed has sometimes been plain fraudulent, a conjuring trick exploiting our most atavistic fears.

  J is for Justice

  The British suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to crime and justice. No other country counts it, categorises it, debates it and worries about it quite as much as we do. It is not that we are a particularly lawless nation, but rather that the fight against crime has become a channel for anxiety about the state of our society. We probe and poke and pick away at every arcane detail, believing that within the piles of data, painstakingly collected and compiled, are the clues to understanding and solving our community’s ills.

  The figures actually demonstrate that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest level for at least thirty years, and offences have been falling consistently since the mid-1990s. But Britain doesn’t believe it. Most people are convinced the country is becoming a more frightening and dangerous place.

  This unease translates into a demand for the state to ‘do something’ about crime and, typically, the answer from government ministers is to pass yet more laws and promise to get tough. The criminal justice system has come to be regarded as the mechanism for sorting out our social problems. If only police and probation officers, magistrates and judges did their job, we complain, all would be well.

  One could argue that this is a thoroughly un-British attitude. The principles of our liberty and justice were founded upon an accepted community responsibility for keeping ‘The King’s Peace’ that has its origins in Anglo-Saxon days. People didn’t look to the authorities for answers — crime was a matter for local citizens to deal with themselves.

  From the fourteenth century, it was the obligation and privilege of unpaid Justices of the Peace, selected from the local gentry, to direct the parish constables and watchmen in a system dating back to 1285 and the Statute of Winchester. For more than 500 years, the streets and gates of walled British towns were patrolled and guarded by a ‘watch’ of men from a roster of volunteers. Their main role was to arrest strangers when they found cause for suspicion and deliver the accused to the parish constable in the morning.

  If a stranger resisted capture, then a ‘hue and cry’ was made, and the entire town was required to help apprehend the villain. Every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty had to keep in his house ‘harness to keep the peace’. For men of superior rank that meant ‘a hauberke and helm of iron, a sword, a knife and a horse’. The poor were obliged to have bows and arrows to hand. A person accused of stealing would be privately arrested, privately prosecuted and, if found guilty, would pay compensation and the costs of the case. Crimes were local, civil matters to be resolved by local civilians.

  Gradually, over time and in the face of fierce resistance, some offences became ‘crimes against the King’ as English monarchs asserted state power over their subjects. But it was not until the huge social and economic changes that swept across Britain with the Industrial Revolution that security and justice were effectively nationalised and the criminal justice system as we now know it was created.

  Capitalism and urbanisation together changed the dynamics of social behaviour. The ‘watch and ward’ system of security broke down in rapidly expanding cities, and both personal and property crime soared. Activities that were once accepted or tolerated became criminal as the rich and powerful sought to protect their wealth and influence by means of state intervention.

  For example, in the early eighteenth century it was common practice for workers in a range of industries to take the scraps from manufacturing processes. These were the original ‘perks’ or perquisites of the job. However, a series of new laws was introduced criminalising this activity — the Clicking Act of 1723 made it illegal for shoemakers to take scraps of leather; the Worsted Act of 1777 turned mill workers into potential criminals if they took home snipped weft-ends or fragments of yarn. During the eighteenth century, Parliament enacted fourteen statutes relating to fifteen industries which turned previously lawful ‘gleaning’ into unlawful ‘embezzlement’. Some academics have gone so far as to argue that our concept of ‘crime’ dates from this period, a state-fabricated illusion that justified the capitalist exploitation of the lower orders.

  When wealthy Scottish merchant Patrick Colquhoun became anxious about the large amounts of valuable cargo being pinched from the Pool of London in 1795, he published a book entitled A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis designed to convince his readers that the capital needed a regular, organised, paid police force to deal with a mighty tide of immorality, crime and disorder. Colquhoun was an early advocate of what we might now call evidence-based policy and used some suspiciously detailed numbers and tables to make his case.

  He calculated that there were 115,000 people within what he identified as Lon
don’s ‘criminal class’. This population was then divided into twenty-four subgroups beginning with ‘Professed Thieves, Burglars, Highway Robbers, Pick-pockets, & River Pirates’ and concluding with ‘Gin-drinking dissolute Women, & destitute Boys & Girls, wandering & prowling about in the streets & by-places after Chips, Nails, Old Metals, Broken Glass, Paper Twine, etc. etc.’ The cause of the crime wave, he suggested, was that ‘the morals and habits of the lower ranks in society are growing progressively worse’. Broken Britain, he might have said. It is a narrative that persists to this day — the idea of a distinct criminal minority threatening the law-abiding majority and requiring ever more authoritarian controls to protect the virtuous from the sinful. After the English riots in the summer of 2011, the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke wrote of a ‘feral underclass’, which needed to experience the ‘cold, hard accountability of the dock’.

  Colquhoun got his police force. The Thames River Police began operating in 1798 and two years later the Marine Police Bill transformed it from a private to public police agency. The legitimacy of this rapidly evolving criminal justice system — the enforcement of law, the application of justice and the management of sentence — was dependent upon the people. Unless the citizenry accepted the special powers conferred on state police, judges and gaolers, the whole edifice would have collapsed. Enter stage left: the gentlemen of the press.

  The forces of law and order wooed the news media. Reporters were granted special status at trials; unlike those tucked away in the public gallery, they were free to chat to lawyers, to take notes and even ask questions of the judge. The courts were designed with a dedicated area for members of the press. They would get the best seats in the house to ensure that justice was ‘seen to be done’.