Immigration and Race

LO: To analyse attitudes to immigration and race

A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society, 1959-1975

Lesson 20

� 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

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.

Why do you think Britain needed to encourage foreign labour to come to the UK in 1948?

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.

How do these images compare to the one on page 124?

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40

50

60

70

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Australia

Canad

a

New Z

ealand

Africa

India

West Ind

ies USA

Emigration to:

Immigration from:

1. How many Commonwealth countries can you name?

2. What do you notice about migration in 1967?

3. Is this surprising?

In a survey in Nottingham in the early 1960s, Robert Davison found that 87% of Jamaicans said they felt ‘British’ before they came to England and 86% were happy for their children to feel ‘English’. However, among the Indians and Pakistanis only 2% felt ‘British’, and only 6% wanted their children to be.

Many people from the colonies were brought up to revere Britain as the ‘Mother-land’

A large proportion of immigrants were ex-servicemen who had fought in the British forces during WW2

Adverts appeared in newspapers such as the Daily Gleaner encouraging people to travel to Britain

Ships such as the Empire Windrush allowed passengers to travel inexpensively - £28 for a troopdeck ticket

British infrastructure badly needed rebuilding after the war and there was a shortage of labour

Wages paid to workers in Britain were significantly higher than people had been used to in their home countries

People were curious and 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.

1965

1962

1968

1965

1971

1968

British Nationality Act - Gave British citizenship and right of entry to commonwealth inhabitantsLabour1948

Negative impactPositive impactDetails of Act or EventParty in PowerDate

Read p125-127 and complete the following table

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.

Why was this cartoon produced?

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).

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.

Rivers of Blood

April 22, 1968

From the Birmingham

Post

"Like the Roman, I see the River

Tiber foaming with much blood"

British Movement

Many facesof the

Far- Right

Skinhead Movement

Racial Preservation Society

True Tories

National Labour Party

League of Empire Loyalists

Union Movement

White Defence League

British Union of Fascists

BNP – British National Party

National Front (NF)

NDP – National Democratic Party

Patriotic Party

National Socialist Movement

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?

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."

Black Power was a political movement in the United States that sought to express a new racial consciousness

Was Powell a racist?

Was he right?

Was Powell to blame for the racism of the 1960s?

Yes, by today’s standards.

But he was not a fascist: he declined the opportunity to stand as a candidate for the NF

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?

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 Partaired 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-Socialist views. Garnett’s reactionary tirades set new standards for vulgar and aggressive language on television.

What does the popularity of this show tell us about attitudes to race in the late sixties?

BBC research showed an audience rating of 67, bettered only by the pilot episode of Steptoe and Son. Just 5 weeks into the series the show had toppled Coronation Street from the top of the ratings. In March 1967 the show drew a stunning 18 million viewers.

Speight and Mitchell insisted that they 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.

“not a flattening process of assimilation, but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance".

“Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for me, let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pains.”

"Our multiculturalism which started out as a straightforward recognition of diversity became a sort of system which prized racial and ethnic difference above all other values and there lies the problem… It is necessary to assert a core of Britishness for all citizens which means stressing shared values.”

Supporters of the Labour government's approach believed it was defending the rights of minorities to preserve their culture, whilst encouraging their participation as citizens: integration without assimilation. Critics argue that insularity is a barrier to the integration of minorities.

Trevor Phillips

John Sentamu

Roy Jenkins

The state of Britain’s immigrant communities c.1975

Forces preventing assimilationForces helping assimilation

Read p130-2 and complete the following table….

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?