Immigration and Race

Lesson 20
A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society, 1959-1975

LO: To analyse attitudes

to immigration and race

analyse responses to the issues posed by immigration and

settlement

evaluate legislation passed to curb immigration and deal with
the issues of race relations

measure how far Britain had become multicultural by 1975
Why do you think Britain needed to encourage foreign labour to come to the UK in 1948?

When an advert appeared in the Daily Gleaner (a Jamaican newspaper) advertising cheap
transport for anyone who wanted to come to the UK to find work, large numbers of West
Indians seized the opportunity. Many Jamaicans had served in British forces during the
war and were keen to try civilian life in the UK. Others were just curious.
 How do these images compare to
the one on page 124?
On the misty morning of
June 22nd 1948, the Empire
Windrush, steamed up the
Thames to London, where
she disembarked some 500
hopeful settlers from
Kingston, Jamaica. The new
arrivals were the first wave
in Britain’s post-war drive
to recruit labour from the
Commonwealth to cover
employment shortages in
state-run services like the
NHS and London Transport.
1. How many
Commonwealth
countries can you
name?
2. What do you
notice about
migration in
1967?
3. Is this
surprising?

90
80
In a survey in Nottingham in
the early 1960s, Robert
70 Davison found that 87% of
60 Jamaicans said they felt
50
‘British’ before they came to
England and 86% were happy
40 Emigration to: for their children to feel
30 Immigration from: ‘English’. However, among
20 the Indians and Pakistanis
only 2% felt ‘British’, and
10
only 6% wanted their
0 children to be.
a li
a da nd a ia ies A
na al a ric In
d d US
u str Ca Ze Af In
A w est
Ne W
 A large proportion of
Many people from
immigrants were ex- Adverts appeared in
the colonies were
servicemen who had newspapers such as
brought up to
fought in the British the Daily Gleaner
revere Britain as
forces during WW2 encouraging people
the ‘Mother-land’
to travel to Britain

Ships such as the British

Empire Windrush infrastructure
allowed passengers badly needed
to travel rebuilding after
inexpensively - £28 the war and there
for a troopdeck was a shortage of
ticket labour

Wages paid to workers People were curious and

in Britain were
significantly higher than
people had been used to
in their home countries
wanted to see what life
was like in Britain.
Most people only
expected to stay a few
years
 Activity 2

Name
Born/Died
Country
Background

Achievements/ Events
As mass immigration continued, so did the rise of racial
prejudice. Many areas experienced rioting as white people
feared the arrival of a black community.

These men and women had been offered work in a country

they had been brought up to revere; they didn’t expect to
experience racial prejudice.

Legislation had allowed people from the Commonwealth

unhindered rights to enter Britain because they carried a
British passport.

Under pressure, the government legislated to make

immigration for non-white people harder. In practice, this
meant children born to white families in the remnants of
Empire or the former colonies could enter Britain. Their black
counterparts could not.

While government was tightening the entry rules, racial

tension meant it had to try to tackle prejudice and two race
relations acts followed.

By 1970 Britain's non-white residents numbered

approximately 1.4 million - a third of these children born in
the United Kingdom.
Read p125-127 and complete the following table

Date Party in Power Details of Act or Event Positive impact Negative impact

British Nationality Act - Gave British citizenship

1948 Labour and right of entry to commonwealth inhabitants

1962

1965

1965

1968

1968

1971
Why was this cartoon produced?

No Room at the Inn, Leslie Illingworth

cartoon, 1961
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act restricted
the rights of British Commonwealth citizens from
places such as the West Indies, India and Pakistan
to settle in Britain.
 In her book My Life With Nye, Jennie Lee
explained her views on Oswald Mosley.

He had a fatal flaw in his character. An

overwhelming arrogance and an unshakable
conviction that he was born to rule, drove
him on to the criminal folly of donning a
black shirt and surrounding himself with a
band of bullyboys, and so becoming a
pathetic imitation Hitler, doomed to political
impotence for the rest of his life.

The new uncertainties revitalised Mosley, who re-

emerged to stand as a candidate in the 1959 election
in Kensington North (which included Notting Hill), a
first parliamentary election for him since 1931.
Mosley made immigration his campaign issue,
combining calls for assisted repatriation with scare
stories regarding the criminality and sexual deviance
of blacks. The 8.1% share of the vote he secured
was a personal humiliation. The Union Movement had
worked heavily in the area attempting to increase
racial tension and Mosley fully expected to win.
Mosley was unsuccessful in his final attempt to
enter the House of Commons for Shoreditch &
Finsbury (1966).
Rivers of
Blood
April 22,
1968
From the
Birmingham
Post

"Like the
Roman, I see
the River
Tiber foaming
with much
blood"
 British Movement
Skinhead
Movement National Socialist
Movement
Patriotic Party

Racial NDP – National

Preservation Democratic Party
Society
Many faces National Front
True Tories
of the (NF)
Far- Right
National Labour BNP – British
Party National Party
White Defence
League

League of Empire
Union Movement
Loyalists
British Union of
Fascists
April 4 1968: Martin Luther King killed
The American black civil rights leader, Dr
Martin Luther King, has been assassinated.

Dr King was shot dead in the

southern US city of Memphis,
Tennessee, where he was to lead a
march of sanitation workers
protesting against low wages and
poor working conditions.
He was shot in the neck as he stood
on a hotel balcony and died in
hospital soon afterwards.
Reverend Jesse Jackson was on the
balcony with Dr King when the
single shot rang out…

What impact do you think this news would have had on race relations in Britain?
Black Power was a political
movement in the United States
that sought to express a new
racial consciousness

Stokely Carmichael served as

chairman of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
prime minister of the Black Panther
Party. Like Malcolm X He diverged
from King's ideals of nonviolent direct
action. Carmichael called for "Black
Power,” a term King resisted because
of its violent connotations. "He saw
nonviolence as a principle, which means
it had to be used at all times, under all
conditions. I saw it as a tactic. If it
was working, I would use it; if it wasn't
working, I'm picking up guns because I
want my freedom by any means
necessary."
Was Powell a racist?
Yes, by today’s standards.
But he was not a fascist: he declined the opportunity to stand as a candidate for the NF

Was he right?
There was some truth in the predictions he made:
 There has been racial violence, though not on the scale of America
 By 2000, he predicted, immigrants and their children would number 5-7 million.
Considered scaremongering at the time, this was not far off.
 His fear was that immigration would alter what it meant to be British. Our culture has
been changed. We listen to different music from our grandparents, eat different food; we
talk differently. (Though other factors such as the pervasiveness of American media, new
technology, and globalisation have also been influential.)
Where Powell was mistaken is in thinking culture can stand still. If Shakespeare were to
visit 1940s Britain how would he respond?

Was Powell to blame for the

racism of the 1960s?

No. His incendiary remarks fanned the flames of racial bigotry. But his response was
just as much a symptom of the fear and uncertainty created by the changing population
as anybody else’s.
Where Powell is culpable is that he carried the banner for the far-right. As a
government minister he lent a sense of legitimacy to their cause and encouraged others
to bring their prejudices out into the open.
1. What do these
statistics tell us about
attitudes to immigration
in 1969?
2. Which groups were most
hostile to ‘coloured’
immigration’?
 Till Death Us Do Part
aired from 1965 until 1975.
The show was created by
Johnny Speight and
centred on the East End
Garnett family, led by Alf
Garnett (Warren Mitchell),
a white working-class man
who holds racist and anti-
BBC research showed an Socialist views. Garnett’s
audience rating of 67, reactionary tirades set new
bettered only by the pilot standards for vulgar and
episode of Steptoe and Son. aggressive language on
Just 5 weeks into the series television.
the show had toppled
Coronation Street from the
top of the ratings. In March
1967 the show drew a stunning
Speight and Mitchell insisted that they
18 million viewers.
wanted people to be repelled by Alf
Garnett, but he was such a compelling
character that often the audience could not
help but laugh along. Since the programme
was broadcast with a laughter track, it is
obvious that audiences laughed more at his
racist jokes than at his eventual
comeuppance.

What does the popularity of this show tell us about attitudes to race in the late sixties?
 “Multiculturalism has
seemed to imply,
wrongly for me, let
“not a flattening other cultures be
process of assimilation, allowed to express
but equal opportunity themselves but do
accompanied by cultural not let the majority
diversity in an culture at all tell us
atmosphere of mutual its glories, its
Roy Jenkins tolerance". struggles, its joys,
its pains.”
Supporters of the
Labour government's John Sentamu
approach believed it was
defending the rights of "Our multiculturalism which started out as a
minorities to preserve straightforward recognition of diversity
their culture, whilst became a sort of system which prized racial and
encouraging their ethnic difference above all other values and
participation as citizens: there lies the problem… It is necessary to
integration without assert a core of Britishness for all citizens
assimilation. Critics Trevor Phillips
which means stressing shared values.”
argue that insularity is a
barrier to the
integration of minorities.
Read p130-2 and complete the following table….

The state of Britain’s immigrant communities c.1975

Forces helping assimilation Forces preventing assimilation

A carnival-goer
dances at the annual
Notting Hill Carnival
in London. The
carnival, first held in
1964, is one of the
world's largest
street parties.
 Talking Points
• To what extent did immigrants expect to be welcomed
when they came to Britain in the 1960s?
• Is it important to feel “British” if you live in Britain?
• How far should Enoch Powell be blamed for racist
behaviour in the late 1960s?
• Why were so many measures taken to curb immigration in
the 1960s?
• How were the life chances of young blacks brought up in
Britain inferior to those of whites in the early 1970s?
• Do you think racial harmony will only be possible when
immigrant communities are fully assimilated into a
British way of life?