For more than 50 years, the terms of the debate about immigration in Britain have been set by the far right. Far-right leaders have been allowed to exert an influence over mainstream policy and rhetoric that has far outweighed their actual political clout. It is why we should be angered, but not surprised, by the recent launch of the government White Paper on immigration, at which Sir Keir Starmer warned that because of immigration, Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers”.
In some ways, as I argue in my recent book, the pattern was set with the Conservative Government’s response to the racist rioting that took place in Nottingham and London in the summer of 1958. In both cities, dozens of white men assembled over consecutive weekends with the intention of attacking Black passers-by and Black owned property. In Nottingham there were cries of “go back to your own country” and “let’s lynch them”, while in London tensions were whipped up by the Union Movement, an organization led by the veteran British fascist Oswald Mosley.
In the aftermath of the unrest, there was no official statement on the events from the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and no government minister bothered to visit any of the effected areas. In fact, the lesson that was learned was that it was not the problem of white racism that needed addressing. Rather, Macmillan and his ministers concluded, it was unchecked immigration from Britain’s colonies and former colonies.
The first post-war restrictions on immigration were introduced in 1962 in the shape of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. It has become a notorious piece of legislation, particularly because it showed the lengths to which the Government was willing to go to clamp down on Black and South Asian migration in particular. The voucher scheme it introduced primarily effected “unskilled” migrants, most of whom came from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. Irish migrants, by contrast, the majority of whom were unskilled but white, were exempt.
The Act even included a clause that allowed for the deportation of any Commonwealth migrant convicted of a crime within five years of their arrival in Britain, a key Union Movement policy. Just as the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, recently accused Keir Starmer of mimicking Reform’s hardline stance on migration, so in 1962 the Union Movement gleefully highlighted the influence the group now seemed to wield. Anyone who says, “restrict immigration” and “deport undesirables”, a spokesman claimed, were simply repeating, parrot like, Union Movement talking points.
The response of the Labour Party to the Immigrants Act is telling. Just as in 2020 Keir Starmer paid lip service towards a principled stance on migration – he pledged an immigration system based on “compassion and dignity” – so the Labour leader in 1962, Hugh Gaitskill, decried the Immigrants Act as a “miserable, shameful, shabby” piece of legislation. It was, he said, likely the first victory the fascists had ever won in Britain.
Yet having narrowly won the 1964 General Election, the Labour Party – now under the leadership of Harold Wilson – quickly abandoned its opposition to the 1962 Act. With one eye on the increasingly hardline interventions being made on the question of immigration by an ambitious Conservative shadow minister called Enoch Powell, the new government found ways of strengthening immigration restrictions still further.
In 1968, spooked by the prospect of rising immigration from the former British colony of Kenya, where 100,000 South Asians had effectively been expelled from the country, Labour ministers passed its own Commonwealth Immigrants Act. The Act decreed that although the Kenyan Asians were British passport holders who had hitherto enjoyed the same rights as anyone who had been born in the UK, they no longer had the automatic right to live and work in their own country.
Planes carrying Asians from Kenya were turned away from British airports, though a specially inserted clause in the legislation ensured that white citizens of the former empire would not be affected. The Times described the 1968 Act as “probably the most shameful measure that Labour members have ever been asked by their whips to support”.
Historians have characterised Labour’s approach in the 1960s as being dualistic. The policies on immigration went hand in hand with the introduction of legislation designed to address racism in the workplace, housing and elsewhere. The former is often framed as being a price worth paying, one that allowed the Labour Party the necessary space to attend to the latter.
Similar arguments have been made about the Labour governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2000, for example, Tony Blair’s government implemented the findings of the MacPherson Report which, in its investigation of the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the racist murder of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, belatedly provided official recognition of the police’s endemic problem with institutional racism. New legislation was subsequently introduced that required the police and other public authorities to eliminate racial discrimination and promote equality of opportunity.
Yet this window of progressivism was soon overshadowed by what was understood as the need to tack to the right on immigration. This was fuelled by a changing geopolitical climate, particularly the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the subsequent “war on terror”, as well as the increase in influence of another iteration of the far-right – Nick Griffin’s British National Party (BNP), which was making electoral inroads in local elections, particularly in the north of England.
David Blunkett, who was made Home Secretary in June 2001, began talking tough. He stressed the need for conformity to “British values”, “common citizenship” and “social cohesion”. He openly re-allocated funds that had originally been earmarked for neighbourhoods with large Asian populations to those constituencies that had voted heavily for the BNP. He warned Asian families they risked “schizophrenic” divisions unless they spoke English at home, and – in the wake of a moral panic around “illegal” migration stoked by the tabloid press – proclaimed he had no sympathy with refugees because in his view they would be better off going back home to rebuild their own countries.
In 2002, this rhetoric was backed up by new legislation. In many ways, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act is the connecting line between the approach taken by Labour in the 1960s and the current Labour proposals on immigration announced earlier this month. The 2002 Act gave new powers to immigration officers, withdrew state support from any asylum seeker found to be in breach of the correct procedures, and required that all new applicants for British citizenship would have to take a “Citizenship Oath and Pledge” to uphold Britain’s “democratic values” and its “rights and freedoms”. Of course, white Britons who were members of neo-fascist groups like the BNP were not required to prove their commitment to democratic freedoms.
The 2002 Act was, in effect, a precursor to what would become the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government’s “Hostile Environment” policy a decade later. As one Government minister put it in 2007, “living here illegally should become ever more uncomfortable and ever more constrained”.
In the epilogue to my book, which I finished before the last General Election, I made a prediction. “If the past is any guide”, I wrote, “it is almost certain that policies like these will periodically re-emerge in the years to come”. It was a variation of the Sri Lankan activist and writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s famous maxim that “what Enoch Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after”.
It is often suggested that it is the responsibility of mainstream politicians to address people’s concerns on immigration. Failure to do so, it is argued, would leave the field open to the far right. This has been the consensus among politicians on the left and right, whether spoken or otherwise, for the best part of 50 years. But where has it left us? With a newly-installed Labour government, fresh from a landslide election victory, attempting to ventriloquise the language and ideas of Farage’s Reform UK, a party which was only formed in 2018 but which is currently polling well ahead of Labour. In the aftermath of Starmer’s launch of the immigration White Paper, the Reform lead over Labour increased.
What is often missing from the debate around immigration is how common it has now become for people in Britain to have migration written into their family story. In 2021, for instance, more than a third of the population of England were either migrants themselves or else had parents or grandparents born outside of the UK, and ten million people – almost 17 per cent of the population as a whole – had been born overseas. Both Birmingham and Leicester now have majority ethnic minority populations, and by the 2040s it is estimated there will be no one left with any memory of Britain before the twin post-war processes of growing immigration and widespread ethnic diversity.
While this has contributed towards support for politicians like Farage, it also means there is a significant part of the population whose views are not being catered for. It is worth noting that, despite the longstanding nature of the political debate on immigration and a succession of moral panics driven by the tabloid press, opinion polling regularly shows majorities who think immigration has had a positive impact on Britain. There is a bold, progressive political case to be made for the cultural, social and economic role played by immigration, particularly when framed in relation to the multicultural society Britain has now become. But it will take a politician with principle and vision to make it.