With immigration looking set to be an election issue next year, I want to do a few blogs on how successive British governments have dealt with immigration, asylum and race since the Second World War. With UKIP and the Tories trying to outflank each other in keeping xenophobia and racism alive, anti-racists eager to get rid of the Tories must demand that Labour does not play that game from now on. As my blogs will show, Labour has consistently and disgracefully played the race card in the past and the result has been policymaking indistinguishable from that of the Tories. A quick look at history may give us a timely warning of what to expect if Labour does it again.

We’ll start in 1945 and the end of the Second World War, when the need for workers to reconstruct Britain was urgent and the country was almost bankrupt.

A plan to reconstruct

The task of reconstruction in the UK after the Second World War was massive and daunting: many workers had been killed in the fighting and much of the country’s infrastructure and industry had been destroyed in the bombing. Moreover, the government was committed to social change, for the people had demanded not just victory but a better world. The politicians remembered how the First World War had been followed by the Russian Revolution and Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham) warned the House of Commons in 1943 that “if you do not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution”.[1] As historian Eric Hobsbawm noted:

“Nobody dreamed of a post-war return to 1939 … as statesmen after the First World War had dreamed of a return to the world of 1913. A British government under Winston Churchill committed itself, in the midst of a desperate war, to a comprehensive welfare state and full employment.”[2]

Civis Britannicus sum

Such a project would require much work and many workers, and the story of how the job was eventually done is usually told in terms of the willing recruitment of black and Asian workers from the colonies and ex-colonies to augment the labour force. As more and more colonies achieved independence, imperial rhetoric about British rule over an empire “on which the sun never sets” gave way to a Commonwealth rhetoric used by both the Labour and Conservative parties for many years following the war. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell told his party conference in 1961:

“I believe with all my heart that the existence of this remarkable, multiracial collection – association – of independent nations, stretching across five continents, covering every race, is something that is potentially of immense value to the world.”[3]

More specifically, in 1954, Henry Hopkinson, Conservative minister of state at the Colonial Office, declared that colonial subjects’ right of free entry into the UK was

“not something we want to tamper with lightly … We still take pride in the fact that a man can say civis Britannicus sum [I am a British citizen] whatever his colour may be and we take pride in the fact that he wants to and can come to the mother country.”[4]

Indeed, for at least a century no distinction had been made between citizens of the British Empire regarding their right to enter Britain. The reasons for this were economic and political: from the middle of the nineteenth century “the economic imperatives of the free flow of goods, labour and services within the Empire enhanced the feeling that such distinctions were likely to be detrimental to broad imperial interests”.[5] In the post-war period Britain wanted to foster good relations with the newly independent countries in order to keep a foothold, particularly in terms of economic power, in the regions of the world it once ruled. These were the realities which underlay the softer talk of the Commonwealth and the continued right of free entry into Britain for all its members – and it was against this background that the British Nationality Act 1948 was introduced. Its purpose in defining UK and Colonies citizenship, it has been argued, was not to reaffirm rights of free entry but to “curb colonial nationalism”.[6] Nevertheless, within this context, the Act did confirm those rights.

“… we cannot force them to return …”

The hard post-war reality, however, proved to be very different from the soft rhetoric, for another narrative dominated policymaking from the outset. It had little to do with giving members of the Commonwealth family a warm welcome from mother. Rather it reflected a darker picture: Empire as the enslavement, exploitation and repression of subject peoples, justified (when thought necessary) only by notions of their inferiority.

The 1945 Labour government attempted from the beginning to limit the number of black and Asian Commonwealth and colonial citizens allowed into the country. It resorted to administrative methods of control, many of doubtful legality and most of them secret. The government’s first action was to ensure the early repatriation of the black workers who had been urgently recruited from the colonies during the war. It also set about discouraging them from returning. This was true in the case of about a thousand Caribbean technicians and trainees recruited to work in war factories in Merseyside and Lancashire. In April 1945 an official at the Colonial Office had minuted that, because they were British subjects, “we cannot force them to return” – but it would be “undesirable” to encourage them to stay.[7] The Ministry of Labour managed to repatriate most of them by the middle of 1947. Then, in order to discourage them from returning, an official film was distributed in the Caribbean,

“showing the very worst aspects of life in Britain in deep mid-winter. Immigrants were portrayed as likely to be without work and comfortable accommodation against a background of weather that must have been filmed during the appallingly cold winter of 1947-8.”[8]

Redistribution of labour and recruitment from Europe

But the need for labour remained and the government tried to solve the problem in two ways – neither of which involved importing labour from the colonies. First, it tried to increase labour mobility within the existing population and, secondly, it imported labour from Europe.

A Ministry of Labour report[9] had predicted before the end of the war that there would not be sufficient mobility of labour within the country to face the challenges of the post-war world. Workers would have to be more willing to move into sectors where they were needed most. Virtually no one could be excluded, it was said, for everyone had to be part of the reconstruction project, even the unskilled and those “below normal standards”. In 1947 the government issued an invitation for people to go to their local labour exchanges to register themselves. Some incentives (in the form of Ministry of Labour hostels and training) were provided, plus the threat of prosecution.[10] The presenter of the radio programme Can I Help You? entered into the spirit of the government’s intentions: “The hope is … to comb out from plainly unessential [sic] occupations people who could be better employed; and to get the genuine drones in all classes to earn their keep …”

Prime minister Clement Attlee had hoped that this project would provide what he had identified as the “missing million” workers but six months later only 95,900 of the “drones” had responded.^[11] Moreover, one source of home-grown labour had hardly been tapped in this exercise: women, essential during the war, were now told to go back to the home and make way for the men returned from battle. There were still sectors where women might work (e.g. textiles) but, as Harris notes, “their ability to do so was greatly hampered by the reluctance of the government to maintain the war-time level of crèche provision”. Thus an important source of labour was largely excluded.

In the case of immigration from Europe, the government set up Operation Westward Ho in 1947 in order to recruit labour from four sources: Poles in camps throughout the UK, displaced persons in Germany, Austria and Italy, people from the Baltic states and the unemployed of Europe. It was partly knowledge of this recruitment which inspired pleas to the British government from the governors of Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. Each of these territories was suffering from high unemployment, with consequent discontent among their populations, and the governors wrote to London arguing that Britain could solve its own problem and theirs by accepting these workers into the UK. In response to this, an interdepartmental working party was set up which decided that there was no overall shortage of labour after all. Spencer records that the working party’s minutes display “entirely negative attitudes to colonial labour”:

“One senior official at the Ministry of Labour expressed the view that the type of labour available from the empire was not suitable for use in Britain and that displaced persons from Europe were preferable because they could be selected for their specific skills and returned to their homes when no longer required. Colonial workers were, in his view, both difficult to control and likely to be the cause of social problems.”[12]

“… the object is to keep out coloured people”

Opposition to black and Asian immigration continued throughout the next decade, with successive British governments seeking to justify legislation to control it. Hayter observes that the delay in introducing the legislation “was caused by the difficulty of doing so without giving the appearance of discrimination”.[13] There is no doubt, however, about the racist nature of the intent to do so. From 1948 onwards various working parties and departmental and interdepartmental committees were set up to report on the “problems” of accepting black immigrant workers into the UK. All of them were created in the hope of providing evidence that black immigrants were bad for Britain. There was the “Interdepartmental Working Party on the employment in the United Kingdom of surplus colonial labour”, chaired by the Colonial Office; the Home-Office-based “Interdepartmental Committee on colonial people in the United Kingdom”; the “Cabinet Committee on colonial immigrants”; and the one that really gave the game away: the “Interdepartmental Working Party on the social and economic problems arising from the growing influx into the United Kingdom of coloured workers from other Commonwealth countries”. Whew!

Committees reported, cabinets discussed their findings and much correspondence passed between ministers and departments. Lord Salisbury (Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords) wrote in March 1954: “It is not for me merely a question of whether criminal negroes should be allowed in … it is a question of whether great quantities of negroes, criminal or not, should be allowed to come”.[14]

Lord Swinton, secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, saw a difficulty and wrote to Salisbury: “If we legislate on immigration, though we can draft it in non-discriminatory terms, we cannot conceal the obvious fact that the object is to keep out coloured people.” In the case of the “old Dominions” (i.e. the “white” Commonwealth – Canada, Australia, New Zealand), he noted a “continuous stream” of people coming to the UK “in order to try their luck; and it would be a great pity to interfere with this freedom of movement”.[15] Moreover, such interference would undermine the strong ties of kith and kin between the UK and the “white” Commonwealth.

Swinton also believed that those strong ties would be further weakened by the development of a large “coloured” community in Britain – declaring that “such a community is certainly no part of the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached”. “Swinton held the view strongly”, wrote Spencer, “that immigration legislation which adversely affected the rights of British subjects should be avoided ‘if humanly possible’ and if it did become inevitable it was better for the legislation to be overtly discriminatory than to stand in the way of all Commonwealth citizens who wished to come to Britain”.[16]

There were, however, several obstacles to overcome before racist controls could be introduced. We will see in the next blog how these obstacles were overcome.

[1]Philo, G. (undated), Television, Politics and the New Right, Glasgow University Media Group, p. 2. Available from http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup

[2] Hobsbawm, E. (1995), Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 161.

[3] Playing the Race Card, October-November 1999, Channel Four Television, London.

[4] Cited, Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: the Case against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 44.

[5] Spencer, I. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Routledge, London, p. 53.

[6] Carter, B., Harris, C. & Joshi, S. (1993), “The 1951-55 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration”, in James, W. & Harris, C. (eds), Inside Babylon: the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, Verso, London, p. 57.

[7] Spencer, I. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Routledge, London, p. 39.

[8] Ibid., p. 32.

[9] Harris, C. (1993), “Post-war Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army”, in James, W. & Harris, C. (eds), Inside Babylon: the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, Verso, London, p. 16.

[10] Ibid., pp. 18-19.

[11] Ibid., pp. 17-18.

[12] Spencer, I. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Routledge, London, p. 40.

[13] Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: the Case against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 46.

[14] Carter, B., Harris, C. & Joshi, S. (1993), “The 1951-55 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration”, in James, W. & Harris, C. (eds), Inside Babylon: the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, Verso, London, p. 65.

[15] Spencer, I. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Routledge, London, pp. 64, 67.

[16] Ibid., pp. 67-68.