BRITAIN SEE THYSELF PART II. A POST-REFERENDUM DIARY AND A HISTORY OF BRITISH SELF-PITY

Brian Reade in yesterday's Mirror: "How can we say we’re still one of the most tolerant, accepting nations on earth when some police forces are reporting a five-fold rise in race hate crimes, Polish shops are plastered in vile graffiti, Asians are being called a word that hasn’t been in common usage for decades, leaflets are being put through doors telling foreigners to go home, and the late, great Michael Foot has swastikas daubed on his memorial stone?"

Stickers that appeared in Glasgow a few days after the referendum vote.

Ok, I'm going to ramble.  Feel free to disregard this may be TLDR for some. But these two have driven me spare with what they've said today. And I need to say the following before my teeth grind away.










It has been decided that it's time for the Labour party to finally 'confront' immigration. A triple delusion going on in the talk of Rachel Reeves and Chuka Ummuna, just as there was in the doomsaying of Frank Field and others during the referendum campaign, firstly that Labour historically have been ‘too soft’, secondly that what they’re proposing is a new dialogue for Labour, thirdly that this ‘debate’ is in any way a new one. The public ‘debate’ about immigration has a long long history in the UK, none of which really casts any of the political parties in a good light.


Such a history could start with the 1905 Aliens Act, the first act of parliament to actively seek control of immigration and perhaps the first attempt to institutionalise the idea that immigrants alone are responsible for deteriorating conditions/wages for workers. The left can be thanked for this scapegoating - the act's introduction was due partly to concerted campaigning from Trade Union and socialist groups throughout the last years of the Victoria era. In 1892 more than 40 left-leaning bodies adopted resolutions calling for restrictions on immigration, especially by East European Jews. Manchester Trades Council's statement was typical: 

“It is time that workers of this country . . . rose up and protested with firmness against the continuation of this curse [of Jewish immigration]”.

“the vast amount of poverty and misery which exists is in no way due to the influx of foreign workmen, but is the result of the private ownership of the means of production”

“duty to combine against a common enemy, [rather] than fight against us, whose interests are identical with yours”.

“undesirable immigrant [who] cannot show that he has in his possession or is in a position to obtain the means of decently supporting himself”

“saturated with class prejudice from almost the first clause to the last and divorced from every true democratic instinct. It has proved itself arbitrary, retrograde, tyrannical and cruel”

The act - inevitably as it fed off an already rising tide of Jew-hatred - rapidly becomes accompanied by a sharp rise in anti-Semitism against East End Jews, fired by the gutter-press who feed the myths about them stealing jobs from British workers and scrounging from the system. One wonders whether - without union agitation and the TUC's capitulation to racism in blaming immigrants for worsening conditions - the act would have got through (recall Ben Tillet, the docker's leader in 1892 famously speaking to migrant workers: "Yes you are our brothers . . .but we wish you had not come”. Sounds familiar?).  No side of British politics can really emerge well from this episode. In the early years of the C20th Liberal & Tory MPs repeatedly blamed immigrants for the housing crisis. Liberal MP Cathcart Wilson was just one of a chorus of cross-party voices saying similar things when he said in 1902:

". . . what's the point of workmen's dwellings if the places of our own people, the backbone of the country, are to be taken over by the refuse scum of other nations?"

Crucially, from its birth, immigration policy then as now, was designed in the UK to create scapegoats/targets for the increasingly impoverished working class, and to assuage a press whose pitch of enmity against immigrants has always been hysterical, hostile, actually fundamentally doubtful of the existence of 'genuine' immigrants. . So jewish people fleeing Russian pogroms become 'so-called refugees'. Then, as now, sew suspicion, divide and rule.

"There landed yesterday at Southampton from the transport Cheshire over 600 so-called refugees, their passages having been paid out of the Lord Mayor's Fund. . .There was scarce a hundred of them that had, by right, deserved such help, and these were the Englishmen of the party. The rest were Jews. . .They fought and jostled for the foremost places at the gangways. . .When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare."
Daily Mail, February 3, 1900

In 1919 the racist Aliens Restrictions act gets rewrit taking on the powers given by the 1914 wartime Act into peacetime, extending restrictions on immigration to include the employment rights of resident aliens, barring them from certain jobs (eg. the civil service) and avowedly targeting 'criminals', 'paupers' and 'undesirables'. It also made it illegal for aliens to promote industrial action. The extension of the restrictions reflected the post-war end to labour-shortages and the need to 'safeguard' jobs for indigenous white Britons and returning servicemen. Post WW1 it’s German & Jewish workers who are the ones to blame in parliament for any UK 'decline' and that blame comes from both Lab & Tory politicians. And just as now, anyone out here with brown skin can also consider themselves a target from post-referendum racism, so then South Asian migrants (although not formally classified as 'aliens' as they were citizens of empire) also faced harrasment and abuse because of the legislation. The 1919 act gets renewed every year from 1919 to 1971. Letting aliens know, that they're barely tolerated, not welcome, that the UK is just waiting for a chance to get rid. It's a message that's been kept up ever since, if not by government, than by the press the govt kowtow to with such regularity. 


"'The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage . . .' In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalfe, the Old Street magistrate, yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering the country through the 'back door' - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed."
Daily Mail, August 20, 1938

"A typically baffling illustration of the difficulty is the fact that Britain now has more Jews than Germany ever had. If a further accretion of, say, 100,000 of them come into the country, how could the danger be averted of an anti-Jewish feeling here?"

The Observer, July 31, 1938

Notwithstanding popular anger about Mosley, through the 30s MPs from all sides complained about Jewish refugees 'scurrying' from Germany and repeatedly called for 'tightening' of immigration. There were mass deportations of 'enemy aliens' throughout WWII, esp after internment although state-sponsored schemes still brought in cheap colonial labour which had a dual benefit - migrant labour could be directed towards labour shortages but the govt could still galvanise nationalism/xenophobia through the Aliens act. 'Brightest and best' is what we say now - in 49 the govt feared the 'over-fertile races' and wanted migrants 'of good stock and not prevented by race or religion from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged into it' (Royal Commission on Population 1949, a response to Windrush arrival). It’s exactly the same narrative still in use now - migrant labour is only good if carries no cost - if migrants have 'dependants' they're not welcome. In 1947 the British govt started forcing prospective migrants to sign a form stating they're single, unattached and had no dependent relatives. Immigration policy in the UK has never been about people -  it’s been purely about continuing a supply of flexible exploitable labour while bearing minimum cost. So, in boom times of labour shortage governments encourage migration (racism can 'take a back seat' when it's unproductive). When the boom's over … blame the immigrants for the decline and start talking about tightening and sending 'em back.  Look at how when the economy slowed in the late 60s/early 70s - black/asian/immigrant workers were always the fiirst to lose jobs Old old story. Still going on, even more so after the crash. Crucially, Labour talk at the moment that it's 'time for Labour' to get involved in immigration debates overlooks the moves of appeasement and support for Tory controls that accompany the whole political history of immigration and racism in the UK for the last 50 years.




Labour cannot and must not assume it can cover itself in glory here. Through the 50s there was a constant association in press and parliament between immigrants & 'high birth rates', disease, violent crime and Labour. Throughout the same period, the official position of the Labour Party on immigration control was one of consistent opposition. When the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill was debated in Parliament in November 1961, the Labour Party opposed it on the same grounds it had presented in 1958. Gordon Walker, Labour MP for Smethwick, contended that the Conservative Home Secretary R. A. Butler

‘advocates a Bill into which race discrimination is now written – not only into its spirit and practice but into its very letter’

Walker was right. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants act overwhelmingly targets black & asian migrants and ensured racist immigration law became the basis for the next 60 years, enshrining in law that insiduous notion that immigration equals more darkies, less 'integration', more problems. The instinct in Labour even after the bill was passed was to favour a more benevolent notion of Commonwealth, defending the right of free entry to the UK for Commonwealth citizens.  During the Bill’s second reading, Walker declared that Labour would ‘bitterly oppose the Bill and will resist it’ as it was ‘widely and rightly regarded as introducing a colour bar into our legislation’. Hugh Gaitskell himself always emphasised how immigration was being already effectively regulated by economics and together with Dennis Healey, then spokesman for Labour on colonial relations, pledged to fight the bill in opposition and repeal it should Labour return to government. This all changes after Gaitskell's death in early 1963. Harold Wilson upended Labour's 'unconditional' opposition to immigration control and announced that the party did support 'certain provisions' of the Act, and that Labour 'do not contest the need for control of immigration'.



This growing consensus between the parties that controls alone could address the colour 'problem' was in part a response to events - the infamous Smethwick by-election in 64 was the moment when both parties realised that immigration was an issue that could win or lose seats. In an eerie mirror of today Labour attempted to 'compete' with the nasty racist campaigning of Peter Griffiths (the notorious 'if you want a nigger neighbour vote labour' poster) with their own assertions and admissions that immigrants were the problem, and they were going to get tough. Gordon Walker, who in 61 was so opposed to the racist Commonwealth act was singing a different tune in his own local party's eve-of-poll leaflet, pleading

"Be fair. Immigrants only arrived in Smethwick in large numbers during the past ten years--while the Tory government was in power. You can't blame Labour or Gordon Walker for that. Labour favours continued control of immigration, stricter health checks and deportation of those convicted of criminal offences. Labour will give local authorities greater power to help overcrowding. Labour will provide new and better housing.'

In the by-election, contrary to national trends, Griffith's vote remained steady and  Labour's fell. Walker's surrender to the Tories' racist narratives fed the idea that immigration was the key voting issue and that Labour had better get as tough as the Tories if they didn't want to lose votes. Leading left-wing light in the PLP, Richard Crossman, who had once stated how proud he was to be opposing the Tories' immigration bill as a 'shameful piece of colour bar legislation', now confided to his diary:

 'Ever since the Smethwick election it has been quite clear that immigration can be the greatest potential voteloser for the Labour Party if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come and blight the central areas of our cities.'