Introduction

In recent blogs, I examined the hostile environment policy introduced by UK Home Secretary Theresa May during the early 2010s and the political scandals and human tragedies that followed: the Windrush and Mediterranean scandals.[1] Although at first sight the hostile environment policy seemed to be the creation of Conservative (Tory) governments, first under David Cameron and then under Theresa May, a closer examination raised questions about the policies on immigration and race adopted by all the main political parties over a much longer period. I will show, in particular, that both Tory and Labour governments have long been enthusiasts for racist immigration controls. I begin in 1945 and the need for reconstruction of the country after the destruction wreaked during the Second World War. In doing so, I will need to destroy a myth that has comforted most of us for many years. It is the myth that a universal welcome was given by governments of the UK and its people to the mainly Caribbean immigrants who came to help reconstruct the country after the war. The reality, however, was different and more complex. Acknowledging this reality will be essential if we are to understand the decades that followed.

Reconstruction

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. Workers were certainly needed and the government tried, first,  to persuade workers at home to relocate to different parts of the country where the need was greatest. This had limited success, as did the government’s attempts to recruit workers from the devastated European continent. There was, however, a third source of labour that could be tapped: for at least a century no official distinction had been made between citizens of the British Empire when it came to their right to enter and live in Britain. However, contrary to the myth still propagated and almost universally accepted today, the post-war Labour government was reluctant to use this source if it meant recruiting non-white people from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, although many workers had been recruited urgently from those regions while the war was raging, the government’s intention now was to return them to their home countries. As early as April 1945, a Colonial Office official, referring to around a thousand Caribbean workers in Merseyside and Lancashire, wrote that, because they were British, “we cannot force them to return”, but it would be “undesirable” to encourage them to stay.^[2] But by the middle of 1947, the government had managed to deport most of them by administrative means and, when it came to discouraging new migrants, one highly questionable means used was the distribution in the Caribbean of an official film that showed

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.^[3]

At the same time, however, the government was busy trying to recruit Poles in camps throughout the UK, displaced persons in Germany, Austria and Italy, people from the Baltic states and the unemployed of Europe. Anybody was more welcome than the Caribbean workers.

But there were pressures which made this position increasingly uncomfortable for the government: it became increasingly clear after the war that the British Empire was coming to an end and Britain began to seek good political and economic relations with the newly independent former colonies, most of which were becoming part of the new British Commonwealth. The government sought to reassure Commonwealth leaders of its goodwill by maintaining the status quo on immigration: the British Nationality Act 1948 confirmed the already-existing right of Commonwealth citizens to come to the “mother country” to live and work. Behind the scenes, however, the government was still determined to travel in the opposite direction.

Working parties

In 1947, the governors of Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana, countries which had high unemployment rates, tried to persuade the British government that allowing some of their workers into Britain would be beneficial both to them and to Britain. In 1948, the Colonial Office responded by setting up an interdepartmental working party, the first of many set up during these years:  the “Working Party on the Employment in the UK of Surplus Colonial Labour”. Its first task was to determine whether there was a prima facie case for using colonial workers to help in reconstructing the country. The working party seemed willing to take the broad hint being offered: it concluded that there was no overall shortage of labour in the UK after all and that the only sector of the economy that might benefit from colonial labour was the health sector.^[4] The government, however, remained worried.

    In 1953, a confidential meeting of ministers at the Colonial Office agreed that, before legislation to restrict immigration could be introduced, empirical evidence would be needed to justify it. Police surveillance of black communities was used for this purpose and surveys were undertaken by a wide range of government departments and voluntary organisations.^[5] A working party on “The Employment of Coloured People in the United Kingdom” was set up. It studied the information provided to it by the government and produced a report in 1954. The cabinet was disappointed. After considering issues related to the number of immigrants in the country, employment and unemployment, housing and criminality, it failed to provide evidence to justify legislation. For some cabinet ministers, the working party had totally missed the point. Lord Salisbury declared that the working party did not seem to recognise “the dangers of the increasing immigration of coloured people into this country.”^[6] He later spelt out his views even more clearly, declaring that “for me it is not 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.”^[7]

    Many similar working parties and departmental and interdepartmental committees were set up in this post-war period, many of them overlapping in the tasks they were set. There was the “Interdepartmental Committee on colonial people in the United Kingdom”, based in the Home Office; the “Cabinet Committee on colonial immigrants”; and the one that seemed to express its discriminatory intentions most clearly in its title: 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”. Nevertheless, none of these committees and working parties managed to produce convincing evidence to justify legislation. On the latter committee’s reports between 1959 and 1961, Spencer writes:

Viewed objectively, the reports of the Working Party consistently failed to fulfil the purpose defined in its title …. In the areas of public order, crime, employment and health there was little noteworthy to report to their political masters.^[8]

Moreover, there was uncertainty within government circles about whether there was sufficient public support for immigration controls. In November 1954, Lord Swinton, the Colonial Secretary, wrote a memorandum expressing the hope that “responsible public opinion is moving in the direction of favouring immigration control”. There was, however, “a good deal to be done before it is more solidly in favour of it”.^[9] In June 1955, Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Eden expressing the view that, while controls were obviously necessary, the government needed “to enlist a sufficient body of public support for the legislation that would be needed”.^[10] So Caribbean workers continued to arrive. Indeed, since 1949, the new National Health Service (NHS) had begun recruiting nurses from the Caribbean. In 1956, London Transport began recruiting Caribbean staff. They came because they were needed. They came because they could. But trouble was brewing which might, in the end, give Eden and Brook what they wanted.

Smoke and mirrors – mission accomplished

The trouble had its roots in the new post-war world order and Britain’s position in it as a declining colonial power. As we have seen, the British were having to face the end of their Empire as one by one its old colonies achieved independence. For supporters of the British Empire, the saddest loss was India – over which Queen Victoria had proudly declared herself Empress – which became independent in 1947. Others were to follow. As Satnam Virdee notes of this period, “the limitations of Britain’s declining imperial reach were badly exposed by its seeming inability to repress movements for national independence in Kenya, Malaya and elsewhere.”^[11] This process steadily changed Britain’s view of itself, and the consequences were given clear focus during the Suez crisis of 1956. Egypt, under President Nasser, had nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain had control over the canal at that time and regarded it as crucial to maintaining its pre-eminence in the Middle East. So Britain, together with France and Israel, invaded Egypt to take the canal back. The US refused to support the invasion, the UN intervened, and the invaders withdrew. “This episode”, writes Virdee, “had a devastating effect on British national confidence.”^[12]  As former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson would later express it poignantly: “Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.”^[13] The consequences unfolded gradually. Two years after Suez, in the summer of 1958, there were riots in Nottingham (in the East Midlands) and in Notting Hill (in West London): “On successive nights, thousands of white people gathered in the streets of St Ann’s in Nottingham looking for black people to attack.”^[14] In Notting Hill, “young white men attacked black residents and attempted to drive them off the streets …”^[15] They were armed with “iron bars, butcher’s knives and weighted leather belts”^[16] The black community armed themselves and responded.

    The police downplayed any racist element in the attacks. DS Walters, in his official report, said the press was wrong to call the disturbances “racial riots”. He put most of the blame on “ruffians, with coloured and white” who engaged in “hooliganism”.^[17]  However, the reality was otherwise, as crowds of “300-400 white people in Bramley Road shouting, ‘We will kill all black bastards’ [told one police officer] ‘Mind your own business, copper. Keep out of it. We will settle these niggers our way. We’ll murder the bastards.’”^[18] Likewise, the Foreign Office – in line with the government’s fears of offending Commonwealth governments –  immediately played the riots down, telling its overseas diplomats to say that “by foreign standards” the disturbances would not even count as riots.^[19] Nevertheless, “[i]n cases committed for trial, there were three white defendants for every black one.”^[20] The racist attacks were encouraged and provoked by neofascist groups such as the Union Movement (led by Oswald Mosley, who had been leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s), the White Defence League and the League of Empire Loyalists.^[21] The problem for the government was that, however much it wanted to stop “coloured” immigration, if it was seen to do so in response to racist violence this would be equally offensive to Commonwealth governments and undermine Britain’s position as leader of the multicultural Commonwealth.

    The government’s dilemma: how to conceal the racism behind its intended immigration controls? As we have seen, the working party with the clearest mandate to focus on “social and economic problems” consistently failed to construct an argument for controls which would do the job. So, in the end, working party officials concocted a solution: they compensated for their failure to find existing problems by predicting that they would arise in the future. They were, writes Spencer, “prepared to admit that the case for restriction could not ‘at present’ rest on health, crime, public order or employment grounds”,^[22] but

[i]n the end, the official mind made recommendations based on predictions about … future difficulties which were founded on prejudice rather than on evidence derived from the history of the Asian and black presence in Britain.^[23]

In 1961, Home Secretary R. A. Butler claimed, in a TV interview, that a decision on immigration controls would be made “on a basis absolutely regardless of colour and without prejudice.”^[24] But he told the cabinet a very different story: when describing the work-voucher scheme at the heart of the government’s proposed Bill, he reassured them that “the great merit” of the scheme was

that it can be presented as making no distinction on grounds of race or colour … Although the scheme purports to relate solely to employment and to be non-discriminatory, the aim is primarily social and its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively.^[25]

The Bill passed into law and became the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the first piece of legislation to control Commonwealth immigration after the war. The myth of a universal welcome should have died at that point.

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[1] Hostile Environment: the Windrush Scandal: https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/22/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-i/; https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/26/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-ii/; https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/30/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-iii/; https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/04/02/hostile-environment-the-mediterranean-scandal/;

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

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

[4] Ibid., p. 40. Spencer cites National Archives, CO 1006/1, but this now seems to be unavailable.

[5] 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, pp. 58-59.

[6] National Archives, CAB 124/1191, Marquis of Salisbury, Minute, 8 August 1954.

[7] National Archives, CAB 124/1191, Marquis of Salisbury to Viscount Swinton, 19 November 1954.

[8] Spencer, I. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939: the Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Routledge, London, p. 119.

[9] Cited, ibid., p. 66.

[10] National Archives, PREM 11/824, briefing note, Norman Brook (Cabinet Secretary) to Prime Minister, 14 June 1955.]

[11] Virdee, S. (2014), Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p. 107.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Cited, James Barber, “Britain’s place in the world”, British Journal of International Studies 6 (1980), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 93: Britain’s Place in the World on JSTOR

[14] Virdee, S. (2014), Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p. 108.

[15] Hilliard, C., “Mapping the Notting Hill riots”, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 93, \issue 1, Spring 2022, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 47-68.

[16] Travis, A. “After 44 years secret papers reveal truth about five nights of violence in Notting Hill”, The Guardian, 24 August 2002.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Virdee, S. (2014), Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p. 108.

[19] Hilliard, C., “Mapping the Notting Hill riots”, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 93, \issue 1, Spring 2022, pp. 47-68: Mapping the Notting Hill Riots: Racism and the Streets of Post-war Britain | History Workshop Journal | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

[20] Ibid.

[21] Virdee, S. (2014), Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, p. 108.

[22] Spencer, op. cit., p. 120.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Playing the Race Card, BBC2 TV documentary, 24 October 1999.

[25] Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 47.