Addressing ‘Race’ in Britain

Abstract

The story of ‘race’ and racism in Britain in the 1960s is well known. The source of racist ideas is disputed as is the impetus for legislation to limit immigration from Britain’s former colonies.¹ While immigrants from Britain’s colonies and former colonies were not the largest group in the postwar period, they garnered the most media coverage and elicited the strongest reactions from the governmental and public arenas.² The apparent ‘influx’ of ‘New Commonwealth’ immigrants into Britain from the late 1940s was, for many people, the most obvious sign of the end of empire. To those on the political right, it was now Britain itself that was being ‘colonised’.³ The hostility that ‘non-white’ people faced in 1960s Britain is well documented.⁴ There is also a high degree of consensus that the majority of this racism came from, or was displayed by, the working class. The working class, it is argued, felt under threat by increasing migration as they were forced to share neighbourhoods and compete for housing and jobs with those newly arrived.⁵ But this debate in itself replicates one of the key tropes of the period — that the terms ‘immigrant’ and ‘non-white’ could be used interchangeably⁶ This is erroneous on several counts, but does two things which are particularly problematic to the course of the debate. First, as Kathleen Paul has shown, using the terminology of ‘immigrants’ to describe those who were, or continued to be in the early 1960s, members of the empire and Commonwealth robs people of their connection to, and rights within, the United Kingdom.⁷