Notting Hill

The first major race riots in Britain occurred in August and September 1958, first in Nottingham and then in Notting Hill Gate (West London). In each case the violence was started by young white men looking for trouble deciding to target black men with white girlfriends or wives.



The Notting Hill Carnival, which has been claimed to be the largest annual street festival in Europe, is a celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture that began in reaction to the Notting Hill Riots. It too has featured on a special stamp issue as a representative aspect of modern Britishness (see here).

In 1976 there was a second race riot in Notting Hill, this time young black men reacting to heavy-handed policing of the Carnival.

Immigration and multiculturalism

Before the Second World War, mass immigration to Britain had been from within Europe, with the most clearly foreign groups being the Irish, and Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Mass immigration from outside Europe began only in the postwar period, when the immigration of substantial numbers of West Indians (that is, people from the Caribbean), Africans (especially from Nigeria) and South Asians (from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) created pockets of far more visible racial and cultural difference in many British cities.

The British Nationality Act 1948 gave a right of settlement in Britain to any citizens of the British Empire or Commonwealth. The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 with 492 immigrants, mostly from Jamaica: the beginning of postwar mass immigration. In 1954 around 10,000 immigrants from the West Indies arrived (see this clip, from about 1 min onwards). Such immigration resulted in a much more visibly culturally and ethnically diverse country. It supplied not only labourers for British industry, but also doctors, dentists and nurses: without the immigration of medical professionals, the NHS would not have survived.

As the 1955 report linked to above has it:

Already their coming has caused a national controversy, but one point must always be borne in mind: whatever our feelings, we cannot deny them entry, for all are British citizens, and as such are entitled to the identical rights of any member of the Empire.

The official approach to integration was proclaimed in 1965 by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, as:

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

Britain is now a multiracial society, with something over 85% of the population identifying itself as "White British" on the 2001 census returns. Another 7% identified themselves as "White Irish" or "White Other" (Polish, etc.); the "non-white" 7% of the population, still well over 4 million people, identified (in descending numbers) as: Indian, Pakistani, "Mixed Race", Black Caribbean, Black African, Bangladeshi, Chinese, "Other Black", and "Other Asian".

The laws that created Britain's current ethnic composition and race relations are:

• Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962
• Race Relations Act 1965
• Commonwealth Immigrant Act 1968
• Race Relations Act 1968
• Race Relations Act 1976
• British Nationality Act 1981
• Immigration Act 1988 (EC free movement)
• British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act 1990
• Asylum and Immigration Act 1993

With the exception of the Immigration Act 1988 (which incorporated European Community agreements on the free movement of persons into British law), the trend of this legislation has been to restrict entry to new immigrants (undoing the work of the British Nationality Act 1948), while at the same time outlawing discrimination against existing immigrants. It was in reaction to the proposed equal opportunities legislation of the Race Relations Act 1968 that Enoch Powell gave his "Rivers of Blood" speech.

The Seventies

In many ways, the 1970s were the nadir of postwar British history, with economic collapse, industrial conflict between capital and labour, high oil prices, inflation and unemployment both rising (a combination that the dominant economic models had not foreseen), a reinvigorated I.R.A. resuming the "armed struggle" in Northern Ireland and beginning a bombing campaign in mainland British cities, and British standing in the international community at a very low ebb, thanks in part to the impossibility of meeting international commitments after the devaluation of the Pound Sterling in 1967. There were those in the civil service and the political establishment who saw their job simply as "managing Britain’s decline" as gracefully as possible. In 1964 British workers were more productive than those of any country in the European Community except Germany; by 1977, Italy was the only E.E.C. country less productive than Britain.

In Northern Ireland the shooting of civilian protesters in Derry by the First Parachute Regiment on 30 January 1972 (killing 13 people, fatally wounding 1 more, and injuring several others) implicated the British armed forces in the cycle of violence in a new way.

The oil crisis of 1973 was exacerbated for Britain by coal strikes, leading to crippling energy shortages and the institution of a three-day working week. This finished Edward Heath's Conservative government of 1970-1974.

A new youth subculture, punk, reflected the prevailing sense of disillusionment and despair. Before the breakthrough of punk to a mass audience, the same sense of despair was reflected in established genres of popular music, such as the 1976 folk/rock single "Hard Times of Old England".

Fringe political movements - Nationalists, Anarchists, Neo-Fascists, Trotskyists, Irish Republicans - gained higher public profiles and disrupted prevailing social discourses. The National Front was formed in 1967, and in the 1970s managed to muster respectable shares of the vote in a number of carefully selected by-elections and local elections in parts of the industrial Midlands and South London. The "Angry Brigade" was a homegrown left-wing terrorist organisation, far less destructive than those of Italy, Germany or the United States, but still a startling new development for Britain.

In 1968 the right-wing Conservative M.P., Enoch Powell, initiated a public debate about immigration and a multiracial society with his infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech, and the 1970s saw growing contention around issues of equal opportunities and integration. As the economy was squeezed, there was a marked tendency to scapegoat immigrants, especially Pakistanis. Skinheads, another youth subculture of the period, were particularly attracted to violence against Asians. Racist violence, and anti-racist activism, gained a new prominence in British life.

A further sterling crisis in 1976 necessitated a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which meant the humiliation of having the I.M.F. dictate government spending cuts. In 1977-1978 the Labour government lost its parliamentary majority and could survive only through a pact with the (tiny) Liberal Party - another worrying development for a country unused to coalition governments. Like the Conservative government that preceded them, the Labour governments of 1974-1979 were brought to an end by their inability to contain industrial disputes.

Rivers of Blood

In the most notorious speech of postwar British politics, the right-wing Conservative M.P., Enoch Powell, spoke against equal opportunities legislation, and in favour of restricting immigration and encouraging the voluntary repatriation of existing immigrants.

The BBC recently devoted a full-length documentary to the speech and its impact:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Key phrases from the speech are:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen. [. . .] As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Hard Times of Old England

A folksong released by the band Steeleye Span on the album All Around My Hat (1975), and subsequently as a sinlge (1976):

Come all brother tradesmen that travel along
O pray come and tell me where the trade is all gone
Long time have I travelled and I cannot find none

Chorus:
And sing O the hard times of Old England
In Old England very hard times

Provisions you buy at the shop it is true
But if you've no money there's none there for you
So what's a poor man and his family to do

Chorus

You must go to the shop and you'll ask for a job
They'll answer you there with a shake and a nod
Well that's enough to make a man turn out and rob.

Chorus

You will see the poor tradesmen a walking the street
From morning 'till night for employment to seek
And scarce have they got any shoes on their feet

Chorus

Our soldiers and sailors have just come from war
Been fighting for Queen and country this year
Come home to be starved better stayed where they were

Chorus

And now to conclude and to finish my song
Let us hope that these hard times they will not last long
I hope soon to have occasion to alter my song

And sing O the good times of Old England
In Old England jolly good times

Immigration report

A 1970 French TV report on immigration to England and the beginnings of multiracial Britain, with a brief snippet of Enoch Powell speaking French: