by Jeremy Black
This trend of moving abroad accentuated the geographical spread of many families, creating problems for support within them. The spread was mirrored by rural youth depopulation in Wales and England. As a result of these and other trends, the old support network which the extended family provided ceased to exist. The family home is now less and less likely to contain grandparents, as well as parents and their children. Instead, with grandparents banished to care homes, the nuclear family unit became increasingly the norm in post-1945 Britain. The construction of new, out-of-town, housing estates reinforced this trend by making it more difficult for families to keep in regular contact. Instead, they began to spend less time together, and this affected all levels of society. As a result, the family as a means of transmitting behaviour patterns became less significant.
Immigration
Immigration played a major role in population changes, and by the 2000s was the dominant factor pushing growth. Until the 1950s, immigration was largely from elsewhere in Europe, although fresh restrictions on immigration in 1914 and 1919 had led to a decline in the 1920s and 1930s. Immigration was not then a major social or political issue, although there was a widespread low-level racism and anti-Semitism that could at times lead to violence, but which was more commonly a matter of social assumptions and institutional practices. Disapproval of inter-racial sexuality and marriage was an aspect of the social conservatism of the 1930s, a conservatism that was displayed across the political spectrum and by all social groups.
As with much else, the disruption of the Second World War altered the situation, providing large numbers of refugees, and also created new demands for labour within Britain; demands that in part reflected the fact that many men were occupied in military service well into the post-war period. Large numbers of Poles, mostly political refugees from communism, arrived after the war, or stayed on having reached Britain during the war, and the 1951 census recorded 162,376 people as Polish-born. Opposition to them was voiced at the TUC’s annual congress in 1946, as well as by the Fascist Union Movement of Sir Oswald Mosley, who had backed Hitler in the 1930s and who continued to agitate, albeit with scant success, after the war. Immigration was also encouraged in order to cope with labour shortages: Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians arrived as European Volunteer Workers. Until Italian economic growth became more marked from the 1960s, the Italians were an important immigrant community, underlining the need to remember the extent of white immigration after 1945.
The Irish were the largest group of immigrants. There was a major peak in Irish immigration during and after the Second World War, with labour actively recruited to help with wartime needs, while post-war reconstruction led to more immigration. Even after Ireland left the Commonwealth in 1949, Irish citizens enjoyed free access to the British labour market, as well as the right to vote, a measure that greatly benefited the Labour Party, and until 1971 the largest immigrant minority in Britain came from the Republic of Ireland. That year, those born in Eire (the Republic of Ireland, formerly the Irish Free State) were 1.1 per cent of the British population. Whereas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish immigrants had focused on Lancashire and Scotland, from the 1940s they switched to the Midlands and the south east, especially London, Birmingham and Coventry, reflecting opportunities in the labour market.
Immigration from the empire brought in Hong Kong Chinese and Cypriots, and from the 1950s there was also large-scale immigration from the New Commonwealth, principally the West Indies, first, and South Asia, subsequently, although many of the immigrants intended only a limited stay. A temporary labour shortage in unattractive spheres of employment, such as transport (especially the buses), foundry work and nursing, led to an active sponsorship of immigration that accorded with Commonwealth idealism. The overwhelming majority of the West Indian immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and early 1960s planned to save money in order to buy land in the West Indies and return; but they gained only low-paid jobs and never earned enough.
By the 1971 census, those born outside Britain amounted to 6.6 per cent of the total population, although, increasingly, this statistic ceased to be a measure of the long-term impact on society, because the children of immigrants, born in Britain, had never known any other country. In the 1971 census, 707,110 people were recorded as New Commonwealth: they were concentrated in London, the West Midlands and south Yorkshire, including 7.1 per cent of the population of Bradford and 6.7 per cent of Birmingham, and, within these areas, there were further marked concentrations, for example in Balsall Heath in Birmingham and Brixton and Tower Hamlets in London. In contrast, relatively few New Commonwealth immigrants went to Scotland, North or central Wales, Northern Ireland, and rural or north-east England: the percentage for Newcastle was only 1.3. Economic opportunity played a role in these differences, but it was only partly responsible for them.
By then, concern about the scale of immigration, and growing racial tension, especially over jobs and public housing, had led to a redefinition of nationality. The British Nationality Act of 1948 had guaranteed freedom of entry from the Commonwealth and colonies, clearly differentiating immigration from both from that from elsewhere in the world, but this situation was changed by successive legislation of 1962, 1968, 1971, 1981 and 1988. For example, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 deprived East African Asians with British passports of the automatic right of entry which they had been promised when Kenya won independence in 1963. This legislation became of particular importance when Idi Amin (c. 1925–2003), the dictator of Uganda, expelled the Asian population of the country in 1972.
The regulatory regime helped limit immigration, and in the 1970s and 1980s the UK was a net country of emigration, especially to North America and Australasia. Indeed, for 1980–5, there was an average annual net outflow of 50,000. Moreover, in the 1980s and early 1990s, primary immigration from the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) was limited, although admission for marriage and family reunion continued at about 25,000–30,000 each year. Nevertheless, by 1991 over 10 per cent of the population of six of London’s boroughs – Hounslow, Ealing, Brent, Harrow, Redbridge and Newham – were of Indian background, while over 10 per cent of that of Tower Hamlets were Bangladeshi.
The situation totally changed in the 2000s, as the Labour government lost control of immigration and seemed unwilling to translate talk about action into action that was more than talk. Net immigration, the difference between those entering and leaving the UK, rose from 55,000 in 1996 to 237,000 in 2007, by when about a tenth of the population was foreign-born. In the 2000s, there were new strands of immigration from the Middle East, Somalia, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. By the end of 2006, a total of 580,000 people from the eight former Communist states that joined the EU had registered to work in the UK, 375,000 from Poland alone; although the true figure was seen as much greater. At the same time, earlier strands of immigration continued. In 2000, 50,000 people arrived from the Indian subcontinent, and 100,000 in 2006, in part due to a rise in the number of work permits and in part to a marked increase in the number of spouses and fiancé/es admitted. The total number of immigrants arriving from outside the EU with work permits rose from about 20,000 a year in the early 1990s to 145,000 in 2006.
The extent of additional illegal immigration adds a further complication, not least because it leads to uncertainty about total immigrant figures. Illegal immigration also linked with concerns about terrorism and this encouraged government interest in the 2000s in the idea of identity cards.
The religious balance changed greatly as a result of immigration. Whereas, in 1970, there were about 375,000 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs combined in Britain, by 1993 the figure was about 1,620,000, with the rise in the number of Muslims particularly pronounced. Having been 250,000 strong in 1970 and 400,000 in 1975, the number of Muslims in the country doubled between 1980 and 1995, rising to 1.2 million.
The Muslims also became more active politically, not le
ast as the notion of immigration leading to assimilation changed to the idea of multiculturalism. The alleged blasphemy of Salman Rushdie’s (1947–) novel The Satanic Verses (1988) created a major controversy in 1989 because Islamic figures were outraged that Christianity, but not Islam, enjoyed protection under the blasphemy laws; not, though, that the Churches had much recourse to them. There were numerous demonstrations against the book in 1989, and in 1992 the controversy led to the first meeting of the (self-selected) Muslim Parliament of Great Britain.
Immigration pushed up the birth rate in Britain in the 2000s, because it added to the number of women of childbearing age. The average number of children born to each woman rose from 1.63 in 2001 to 1.96 in 2008, the highest fertility rate since 1973. In the year mid-2007 to mid-2008, a quarter of all babies had at least one foreign-born parent, and the fertility rate of mothers born outside the UK was 2.51 compared to 1.84 among UK-born women. As a consequence, the population rose 0.7 per cent in one year, to reach 61.4 million in mid-2008, a rate of increase that would lead, if extrapolated, to a figure of 76,676,688 by 2060, a figure that will lead to changes in most aspects of national life. The percentage of new births to mothers born outside the UK was particularly high in areas with concentrations of immigrants, such as Brent in London.
Health
While the ethnic composition of the British changed, their health was also transformed. New discoveries and their dissemination played a role, as did developments in the public provision of health and welfare, as well as more general improvements in housing and engineering, notably in the supply of clean piped mains water. A key discovery was that of penicillin. Bacterial infections of one kind or another were a very common cause of death in the first half of the century. Large numbers of children died then, the UK infant mortality rate being 58 per 1,000 in 1937, while the rate for Newcastle, where overcrowding remained very serious, rose to 91 per 1,000.
British scientists, notably Alexander Fleming (1881–1955), the discoverer of penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928, played a major role in the development of antibiotics in the early 1940s. After extensive use in the Second World War, penicillin was made available in 1946 as a prescription-only drug. It proved an effective weapon against post-operative infections, septicaemia, pneumonia, meningitis and endocarditis. Still serious in the 1930s, especially among the urban poor, tuberculosis was conquered from the mid-1950s thanks to the use of an American antibiotic, streptomycin, as well as to better diet, mass radiography, earlier diagnosis and the programme of mass BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccinations of children. Antibiotics also helped with other bacterial infections, such as some venereal diseases and urinary infections.
The common childhood diseases that caused high mortality and high morbidity in children in the early part of the century, such as measles, whooping cough and diphtheria, had been declining since the First World War, but were further reduced by the post-1945 introduction of immunization programmes for the entire child population. The BCG injection scar on the upper left arm marked out a generational change and an aspect of a determined attempt to improve public health by securing the health and welfare of children. Despite controversy, the MMR vaccine, introduced in the UK in 1988, proved successful in tackling mumps, measles and rubella, although foolish refusals to take the vaccine increased the danger that these would reappear. From the 1970s, there was the introduction of limited population screening for the early detection and treatment of other diseases, such as breast and cervical cancer.
There was also a revolution in the treatment of mental illness, in which Britain played a major role. Knowledge, diagnosis and treatment changed, while the development, from the 1940s, of safe and effective drugs helped with major psychoses and depression, dramatically improving the care rate and improving the opportunities for community as opposed to institutional care. The range of surgical treatments also greatly increased, notably with the development of plastic surgery and of kidney transplants, as well as with a major increase in anaesthetic skills. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the transplanting of human organs was transformed from an experimental, and often fatal, procedure into a routine, and usually highly successful operation, with the first heart transplants in Britain performed in 1980.
Yet, alongside general improvement there were important social and regional dimensions to health and mortality. The Depression of the 1930s had brought a high level of long-term unemployment and poverty to exacerbate the already difficult legacy of nineteenth-century economic change and social pressures. The number of registered unemployed rose from 1.46 million in 1929 to 2.95 million in 1932. The Welsh unemployment rate, which was higher than that in England, increased from 13.4 per cent in December 1925 to 27.2 per cent in July 1930, and to a peak of 37.5 per cent in 1932 (with Glamorgan and Monmouthshire having a rate of over 42 per cent); and, despite the recovery of the mid-1930s, was still 22.3 per cent in 1937. As the registered unemployed totally excluded the self-employed, agricultural labourers and most white-collar workers, the actual numbers of people without work was even higher.
Unemployment interacted with poverty to hit living standards. In Newcastle, an investigation into child health and nutrition in 1933 showed that about 36 per cent of working-class children were physically unfit and malnourished. Due to poverty, 33 per cent of the working-class families surveyed could not afford fresh milk.
Throughout the century, mortality rates were correlated with socio-economic indices. Moreover, socio-occupational differentials in mortality widened rather than narrowed. The upper and middle classes benefited more than the working class from a decline in death rates, and the welfare state created in the 1940s did not end this correlation. During the wartime Coalition government, there was planning for a post-war welfare state, notably the 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services drawn up by officials under the chairmanship of Sir William Beveridge (1879–1963). Bearing the imprint of his radical call for a ‘comprehensive policy of social progress’, this report advocated a compulsory national insurance scheme designed to provide state-supported security ‘from the cradle to the grave’, to cover ill-health, unemployment, retirement and family support. Much of this prospectus was based on existing principles, but Beveridge gave them a fresh lease of life and made it appear possible to use comprehensive social planning to overcome the effects of disease, unemployment and poverty. The 1946 National Insurance Act incorporated many of Beveridge’s ideas, although he did not envisage the choice for long-term exclusion from the world of work that the ready availability of social welfare was shown to encourage during the boom years of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In part, class contrasts in mortality rates arose because the social security system offered only minimal standards which were designed to prevent destitution rather than to provide comfort and security. The Black Report of 1980 showed that the working class had not benefited to the same extent from the National Health Service, vaccination programmes and improvements to the housing stock, as the upper and middle classes. Similarly, a British Medical Association report, Growing Up in Britain (1999), drew attention to major differences between the classes in infant mortality, accidental injury, chronic illness, height at birth and subsequently, breast-feeding, and diet. Heart attack rates varied greatly, with Glasgow proving a particular black spot.
These differences ensured significant geographical variations, variations that endured across the twentieth century. Thus, a comparison of data for England and Wales from the 1900s with figures from 2001, published in the British Medical Journal of 19 September 2009, indicated that, although inequalities in mortality had narrowed, the relationship between poverty and mortality remained strong across the whole of England and Wales, with a marked continuity in areas of mortality and deprivation. In the 1900s, the highest rates of deprivation and mortality were found in urban and industrial areas – notably inner London, South Wales, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Sunderland and Hull. Low rates were primarily rura
l, for example most of Northamptonshire. In 2001, the high rates were again concentrated in urban and industrial areas, although they had spread out, especially along the axis from Liverpool to Hull. Some rural areas, however, had become relatively worse off in mortality, as measured by the standardized mortality ratio; for example, much of rural Northumberland. More generally, there was insufficient expenditure by both government and the poor on preventative medicine, such as regular dental and optical check-ups.
The affluent were able to buy or rent better-quality housing, and to live at a lower housing density, than the poor, which lessened their exposure to infectious diseases and also brought psychological benefits. Lower-quality housing could be harder to keep warm and, in particular, dry. Although grants for the installation of basic amenities, such as lavatories, were available from 1959, much housing continued to pose problems for health, a problem exacerbated by the shortage of money for heating. Health was not the sole issue when housing was evaluated. For example, the sales of council houses under the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation of the Thatcher government’s 1980 Housing Act were widespread but skewed. The better housing in the wealthier areas sold, while the public sector increasingly became ‘sink housing’, rented by those who suffered relative deprivation. In desperation, from the mid-1990s, local authorities increasingly demolished such housing, for example that in west Newcastle.