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Labour, immigration and Enoch Powell

22/07/2025 17:48 / Leave a comment

Introduction

In an earlier blog, we saw how working parties were set up after the Second World War whose task was to justify racist immigration controls.[1] They repeatedly failed to do so, but they continued their efforts for 17 years. Finally, employing a series of manifestly false arguments, the Tories passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, complete with racist controls.

    Hostility to black Commonwealth immigrants, however, was not confined to the Tories. It was, after all, the Labour government elected in 1945 that set up the working parties in the first place. Kieran Connell writes of “the relentless presence of racism in 1940s Britain, and the related influence of ideas about race.”[2] Labour was part of that pressure and influence. In 1946, Labour Home Secretary Chuter Ede told a cabinet committee that when it came to immigration he would be much happier if it “could be limited to entrants from the Western countries, whose traditions and social backgrounds were more nearly equal to our own.”[3] When the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948 with 492 Jamaicans ready to work to rebuild post-war Britain, 11 Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, notifying him of “the fact that several hundred West Indians have arrived in this country trusting that our government will provide them with food, shelter and employment.” They feared that “their success might encourage other British subjects to follow their example.” This would turn Britain into

an open reception centre for immigration not selected in relation to health, education and training and above all regardless of whether assimilation was possible or not … An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.[4]

Attlee replied to the letter, reassuring them that “if our policy [of unrestricted immigration] were to result in a great influx of undesirables we might, however unwillingly, have to consider modifying it.”[5]  Kenan Malik notes that this exchange of letters contains many assumptions that shaped official and popular attitudes to post-war black immigration:

There are two kinds of British citizens: white people and “undesirables”. Britain is in danger of being swamped by immigrants taking advantage of the nation’s generosity. Immigrants’ standards of “health, education and training” are lower than those of British people. Black people are incapable of assimilating British culture. A large black presence in Britain would create social tensions.[6]

Such attitudes didn’t end with that decade but continued through the 17 years to 1962. At first, therefore, it seems puzzling that Labour opposed the 1962 Act throughout its passage through parliament. It did so, however, in the context of the ending of British rule in countries that were previously part of the British Empire and were now becoming independent nations. Britain’s post-war determination to justify immigration controls against black immigrants now came up against its need to build Commonwealth institutions and keep a political and economic foothold in the countries it once ruled. To that end, the Commonwealth was increasingly promoted as a “family of nations”. Any suggestion that the racism that had served British interests “out there” in the old Empire might now be applied to citizens of the new Commonwealth when they came here could threaten the whole project. This was a dilemma for both the main political parties. Lord Salisbury (Lord President of the Council and Tory Leader of the House of Lords) was a strong advocate of immigration controls. When a working party reported that there was no evidence that black immigrants were more inclined to criminality than white natives, he roundly declared in 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.”[7] Lord Swinton (Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations) agreed but warned Salisbury of the dangers ahead: “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.”[8] Other Tories were more cautious. Henry Hopkinson, Minister of State at the Colonial Office, declared: “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.”[9]  In 1958, Arthur Bottomley, on Labour’s front bench, had also spoken up for the new Commonwealth and against immigration controls:

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.[10]

It seemed for a while as if the battle between racist immigration controls, espoused by both parties, and the Commonwealth ideal of a “family of nations”, also espoused by both parties, might be won by the Commonwealth. But when Labour won the 1964 general election, the new government immediately refocused on immigration controls and increased the restrictions in the 1962 Act. In the years to come, Labour would introduce legislation and rules to reduce black immigration whenever it got the chance.

Facing both ways

    Labour in government dealt with the embarrassing contradiction between racism and the “Commonwealth ideal” by facing both ways and hoping nobody would notice. It constantly sought to reassure voters that it “understood” their “genuine concerns” about immigration and enacted increasingly restrictive immigration laws. At the same time, it denied being racist and passed legislation aimed at creating “good race relations”. What often emerged from this process, however, were weak race-relations laws, suggesting that the government’s priority was to curb immigration. Thus, the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968 were half-hearted affairs. While the 1965 Act did prohibit “incitement to racial hatred”, when it came to discrimination it didn’t include discrimination in housing and employment, and it didn’t apply to the police; and while the 1968 Act went further and included discrimination in housing and employment, the government decided that this would not apply to the police, who had exerted strong pressure on the cabinet not to include them. Home Secretary James Callaghan told the cabinet at the time:

The opposition of the Police Federation to amending the [police disciplinary] code has been intense and deep-seated. And the Police Advisory Board has been unanimous in advising me not to proceed.[11]

    In 1968, the government introduced a new Commonwealth Immigrants Act which seemed set to undo the limited good the two Race Relations Acts had done. The Act refused all Commonwealth immigrants entry into the UK unless they could prove they were – or one of their parents or grandparents was – born, naturalised or adopted in the UK, or unless they were otherwise registered in specified circumstances as UK citizens.[12] This meant that citizens in the “white” Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) were not refused entry. The Act was Labour’s response to the Kenyan Asians crisis, when racism on the far right of the Tory Party was at its most virulent and dangerous. It was a decision to follow the Tory racists.

The Kenyan Asians: race, nation and the end of Empire

The Kenyan Asians were being forced out of Kenya by its government’s Africanisation policy, which excluded Kenya’s Asian population from employment and other rights. Many of them had British passports, which a British Conservative government had allowed them to retain following Kenya’s independence in 1963. Now, not surprisingly, they expected to be able to use them. The Labour government, however, decided otherwise. 80,000 of them, out of a total of about 200,000, had arrived in Britain by early 1968 and the government had been under pressure from several directions to keep them out. A campaign against allowing them to enter the country was launched by Tory MPs Duncan Sandys and Enoch Powell. Sandys had already told the Conservative Party Conference in 1967:

We are determined to preserve the British character of Britain. We welcome other races, in reasonable numbers. But we have already admitted more than we can absorb.[13]

Now Powell set about raising the temperature: he used deliberately provocative and racist language. He claimed a woman had written to him (anonymously, Powell alleged, out of fear of reprisals if her identity became known) claiming abuse by “Negroes”. She had, according to Powell’s story, paid off her mortgage and had started to let some of the rooms in her house to tenants; but she wouldn’t let to “Negroes”:

Then the immigrants moved in [to the neighbourhood]. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out … She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.”[14]

Powell declared:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.[15]

    The British Empire, which Powell had supported, was no more. Its former subjects had fought for, and won, their independence. Satnam Virdee argues that, for Powell,

Black and Asian workers had now become the unintended reminder of peoples abroad who wanted nothing to do with the British Empire. And, in the mind of Powell, this invited the question, “What are they doing here in Britain?”[16]

For Powell, they “represented the living embodiment of the Empire that now was lost, a painful and daily reminder of [Britain’s] defeat on the world stage.”[17] For that reason, as well as his nightmare that the “immigrant-descended population” would lead to a “funeral pyre”, he was in favour of their repatriation (or, as he put it, their “re-emigration”) to the countries they or their parents had come from:

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected.[18] 

The way to solve this problem was through “the encouragement of re-emigration”. Powell noted that no such policy had been tried, so there was no evidence from which to judge potential success or failure: “Nobody knows,” he said. So he once again called his constituents in aid to support him:

I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.[19]

The leader of the Tory opposition, Edward Heath, sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet after the speech. But there were demonstrations in support of Powell in the immediate aftermath of the speech and his sacking. There were strikes by thousands of workers. They began in the West Midlands, where Powell’s constituency was located. Construction workers and power workers struck in Wolverhampton and Birmingham, there were strikes in Coventry and Gateshead. Then they spread to the London docks and the meat porters of Smithfield market. Strikers marched “from the East End to Westminster carrying placards reading ‘Don’t knock Enoch’ and ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’.”[20]

    But Powell remained sacked. His intervention was not welcomed by mainstream politicians in the Tory party, Labour or the Liberal Party. For one thing, his provocative racism seemed likely to threaten Britain’s social stability if unchecked. Moreover, good relations with the independent countries of the Commonwealth were still deemed vital to British interests: Powell’s racism not only threatened stability at home, it endangered good and profitable relations abroad. Nevertheless, there were some in official circles who seemed to believe that government promises to its citizens could be broken with impunity. Eric Norris, the British High Commissioner in Nairobi, was against allowing the Kenyan Asians in and he watched them as they queued outside his office demanding that the British government keep its promises and honour its commitments: “They all had a touching faith”, he later said scornfully, “that we’d honour the passports that they’d got.”[21] There had been still other pressures on the government: the far-right National Front – whose preoccupations were, like Powell’s, with white British identity and the repatriation of black and Asian immigrants – were stirring in the same pot. But the government could have resisted these pressures. The liberal press, churches, students and others opposed the campaign against the Kenyan Asians and could have been called in aid. Instead, it joined the Tory racists. Home Secretary James Callaghan wrote a memo to the cabinet:

We must bear in mind that the problem is potentially much wider than East Africa. There are another one and a quarter million people not subject to our immigration control … At some future time we may be faced with an influx from Aden or Malaysia.[22]

 The Act was passed in 72 hours. It met Callaghan’s wider fears, and it rendered the Kenyan Asians’ passports worthless. No wonder that a year later The Economist declared that Labour had “pinched the Tories’ white trousers”.[23]

[1] By Hook or by Crook – Determined to be Hostile: https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/05/04/__trashed-2/

[2]  Connell, Kieran (2024), Multicultural Britain: A People’s History, C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., London, p. 46.

[3] Cited, ibid., p. 20.

[4] Cited, Malik, Kenan (1996), The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, Macmillan, Basingstoke, p. 19.

[5] Cited, ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] 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.

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

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

[10] Foot, P. (1968), The Politics of Harold Wilson, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, p. 251.

[11] “Callaghan: I was wrong on police and race”, BBC News, 8 January 1999: BBC NEWS | Special Report | 1999 | 01/99 | 1968 Secret History | Callaghan: I was wrong on police and race

[12] Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, s. 1 (2A).

[13]  Playing the Race Card, 24 October 1999, Channel Four Television, London.

[14] Palash Ghosh, ”Enoch Powell’s ’Rivers of Blood‘ Speech”, International Business Times, 14/6/2011: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech (FULL-TEXT) | IBTimes

[15] Ibid.

[16] Virdee, S. & McGeever, B. (2023). Britain in Fragments: Why things are falling apart, Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. 71.

[17] Ghosh, op cit.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Virdee, S. & McGeever, B. (2023). Britain in Fragments: Why things are falling apart, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp., 72-74.

[21] Playing the Race Card, 24 October 1999, Channel Four Television, London.

[22] Cited, Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: the case against immigration controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 53.

[23] Cited, ibid., p. 51.

By hook or by crook — determined to be hostile

04/05/2025 20:42 / 4 Comments on By hook or by crook — determined to be hostile

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.

[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.