The government has been telling a growing number of UK citizens of Caribbean origin that, after around 50 years’ residence here, that it doesn’t believe they are citizens at all and that they must go “home”. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, tweeted yesterday as Theresa May refused to meet Commonwealth heads of government to answer their concerns. She has now, under the relentless pressure of Lammy and others, apparently agreed to meet them. This is what David Lammy said yesterday:

Awful. I won’t let them get away with this. Our Govt invited the Windrush Generation to Britain as citizens to rebuild our country in the wake of WWII. That these individuals are being treated with such contempt, disrespect and lack of dignity is shameful.

He is right to say that the Windrush Generation helped to rebuild the country after the Second World War. He is right to say that it is shameful that “these individuals are being treated with such contempt, disrespect and lack of dignity”. All power to him and others who are pursuing Theresa May to get her to reverse the cruel and unjust policy of depriving them of benefits and threatening to deport them after their lifetime’s contribution to the UK.

    But the story he then tells is of a post-war Labour government that “invited the Windrush Generation to Britain as citizens to rebuild our country in the wake of WWII”. It didn’t. None of the post-war governments (Labour or Tory) did. They tried to keep them out.

    I reproduce below a short extract from my PhD thesis, which deals with asylum and immigration, where I  give a brief account of what happened at that time.

2.3 Civis Britannicus sum

Such a project [the reconstruction of the country after the devastation of the second world war] 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 (Race Card, 24 October 1999):

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.

More specifically, in 1954, Henry Hopkinson, Conservative minister of state at the Colonial Office, declared (cited Hayter 2000:44) 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.” 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” (Spencer 1997:53). 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. Carter et al. argue that its purpose in defining UK and Colonies citizenship was not to reaffirm rights of free entry but to “curb colonial nationalism” (1993:57). Nevertheless, within this context, the Act did confirm those rights.

2.4 “… we cannot force them to return …”

The post-war reality, however, proved to be very different from the rhetoric. 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 (Spencer 1997:39). 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 (ibid.:32).

2.5 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 (Harris 1993:16) 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, for everyone had to be part of the reconstruction project, even the unskilled and those “below normal standards” (ibid.). 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 (ibid.:18-19). 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 …” (ibid.:17). Attlee had hoped that this project would provide what he had identified as the “missing million” workers (ibid.) but six months later only 95,900 of the “drones” had responded (1993:17-18). 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‖ (ibid.). 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 (ibid.:19). 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” (1997:40):

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.

2.5.1 “… 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” (2000:46). 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”.

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” (Carter et al. 1993:65). Lord Swinton, secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, saw a difficulty and wrote to Salisbury (Spencer 1997:64): “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” (ibid.:67). 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‖ (ibid.:67-68). “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” (ibid.:68).

2.6 Obstacles to racist controls

2.6.1 The Commonwealth connection

It was not just concern for the “white” Commonwealth which made governments delay legislating for controls until 1961. The UK’s relationship with the Commonwealth as a whole was also a factor. In a period of decolonisation and the building of Commonwealth institutions, UK governments trod carefully. For example, openly discriminatory legislation “would jeopardise the future association of the proposed Federation of the West Indies with the Commonwealth” (ibid.:82). Politicians tried to persuade governments in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent to control the flow of migrants at source. They had some success in India and Pakistan, but not in the Caribbean. In 1958 Sir Henry Lintott, Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Relations Office, advised caution on the question of legislation. There had been calls for immigration controls in the wake of the Notting Hill riots (provoked by extreme right-wing groups). Sir Henry advised that in these circumstances immigration controls would imply that “the British people are unable to live with coloured people on tolerable terms” (ibid.:102):

This could be immensely damaging to our whole position as leaders of the Commonwealth which, in its modern form, largely draws its strength from its multi-racial character. If, therefore, strong pressure develops for the introduction of legislation to control immigration, I would hope that some way could be found to delay action and to permit passions to cool.

These arguments were supported not only by many in the Conservative Party in the mid 1950s but by the Labour Party too. In 1958 Arthur Bottomley spoke for the Labour front bench against legislation to control immigration (cited Foot 1968:251):

The central principle on which our status in the Commonwealth is largely dependent is the “open door” to all Commonwealth citizens. If we believe in the importance of our great Commonwealth, we should do nothing in the slightest degree to undermine that principle.

With a House of Commons majority of only fifteen, the Conservative government was vulnerable. Similar considerations had applied in January 1955 when Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George presented his ideas for restrictive legislation to the cabinet. The cabinet judged that “such a bill would not obtain the full support of the Conservative Party and would be opposed in the House by the Labour opposition and outside the House by the Trades Union Congress” (Spencer 1997:76).

2.6.2 The working party evidence

Another obstacle to immediate legislation was the fact that the working parties set up to provide evidence of the “undesirability” of black immigrants failed to do so. They described “coloured women” as “slow mentally” and said that their “speed of work” was unsatisfactory. They claimed there was “a disproportionate number of convictions for brothel keeping and living on immoral earnings” among West Indian men and made references to “the incidence of venereal disease among coloured people” (Race Card, 24 October 1999). But they failed to make the case for immigration legislation. The committee with the specific mandate to investigate “social and economic problems” relating to “coloured workers” must have been a particular disappointment. In August 1955 the committee’s draft statement went to the cabinet. The allegation of a high incidence of venereal disease was included here – but only as a “suggestion”. The author of the report admitted that there were no figures to support the claim (Spencer 1997:78). Spencer summarises the committee’s findings (ibid.):

Although “coloured” immigration was running at the rate of about 30,000 a year … even those arriving most recently had found jobs easily and were making “a useful contribution to our manpower resources”. Unemployment … could not be regarded as a problem, nor could undue demands on National Assistance or the National Health Service … The immigrants were for the most part law-abiding except for problems with [cannabis] and living off the immoral earnings of women. Though the immigrants had not been “assimilated” there was no evidence of racial tension and it was apparent that some “coloured” workers in the transport industry had made a favourable impression.

The same was true of the working party’s reports between 1959 and 1961. “Viewed objectively”, writes Spencer,

the reports of the Working Party consistently failed to fulfil the purpose defined in its title – to identify “the social and economic problems arising from the growing influx of coloured workers”. In the areas of public order, crime, employment and health there was little noteworthy to report to their political masters (1997:119).

Moreover, the Treasury, when asked whether black and Asian immigration benefited the economy, “gave the clear advice that on economic grounds there was no justification for introducing immigration controls: most immigrants found employment without creating unemployment for the natives and, in particular by easing labour bottlenecks, they contributed to the productive capacity of the economy as a whole” (Hayter 2000:48).

But, in the end, the working party managed to construct an argument for controls: “assimilability – that is, of numbers and colour – was the criterion that mattered in the end” (Spencer 1997:118). Between 1959 and 1961 there were large increases in the numbers of blacks and Asians entering the UK. At the beginning of the period there were around 21,000 entries a year; by the end they had risen to 136,000 (though much of this last figure may have been due to the fact that the government had signalled its intention to introduce legislation and larger numbers had decided to come in order to “beat the ban”). Working party officials compensated for their inability to find existing problems by predicting that they would arise later (ibid.:119):

Thus in February 1961, whilst it was admitted that black immigrants were being readily absorbed into the economy, [officials predicted] “it is likely to be increasingly difficult for them to find jobs during the next few years”. Further, it was doubtful if the “tolerance of the white people for the coloured would survive the test of competition for employment”.

There would be “strains imposed by coloured immigrants on the housing resources of certain local authorities and the dangers of social tensions inherent in the existence of large unassimilated coloured communities” (ibid.:118). The working party recommended immigration controls. It was “prepared to admit that the case for restriction could not ‘at present’ rest on health, crime, public order or employment grounds” (ibid.:120) 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.

Now there was just one obstacle impeding the introduction of controls.

2.6.3 Public opinion

One of the government’s worries about introducing legislation had been the uncertainty of public opinion. Racist stereotyping in the higher echelons of government could also be found among the general population. Bruce Paice (head of immigration, Home Office, 1955-1966), interviewed in 1999, believed that “the population of this country was in favour of the British Empire as long as it stayed where it was: they didn‘t want it here” (Race Card 24 October 1999). It is true that hostility towards black people existed throughout the 1950s, and in 1958 the tensions turned into violent confrontation. In Nottingham and in the Notting Hill area of London there were attacks on black people, followed by riots, orchestrated by white extremist groups (Favell 2001:103). After these explosions racist violence continued but became more sporadic, ranging from individual attacks to mob violence (Fryer 1984:380). Nevertheless, for much of this period governments had not been confident that public opinion would be on its side when it came to legislation on immigration control. In November 1954 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” (cited Carter et al. 1993:66). In June 1955 cabinet

secretary Sir Norman Brook wrote to prime minister Anthony Eden expressing the view that, evident as the need was for controls, the government needed “to enlist a sufficient body of public support for the legislation that would be needed” (cited ibid.). In November 1955 the cabinet recognised that public opinion had not “matured sufficiently” and public consent, conclude Carter et al., “could only be assured if the racist intent of the bill were concealed behind a cloak of universalism which applied restrictions equally to all British subjects” (1993:68).

2.7 Mission accomplished

By 1961 the cloak was in place, and a Bill could be prepared. Home secretary R.A. Butler donned the cloak in a television interview: “We shall decide on a basis absolutely regardless of colour and without prejudice,” he told the interviewer. “It will have to be for Commonwealth immigration as a whole if we decide [to do it]” (Race Card, 24 October 1999). He removed the cloak, however, when he explained the work voucher scheme at the heart of the Bill to his cabinet colleagues (cited Hayter 2000:47):

The great merit of this scheme is 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.

The Bill passed into law and became the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.

For full references please consult this link to the original thesis:

https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/assets/hull:2678a/content