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The Real Story of Immigration Into Britain

by Andrew Colllingwood
14 August 2024 11:00 AM

Britain’s migration policy is widely considered to have been an important driver of the protest, riots and ethnic violence that have erupted since the horrific attacks in Southport. Yet the story of migration into Britain – and the policy of multiculturalism that it begat – is little understood.

The story begins with the Nationality Act of 1948. Prior to the Act, the concept of a ‘British Citizen’ did not quite exist. Britons, like Indians, Jamaicans or Hongkongers, were subjects of the Crown to which they owed allegiance. After the Second World War, however, Britain was faced with the preordained break up of its Empire, and changing relations with its component parts and with the Commonwealth.

The 1948 Act was in part a response to this, and put those born in the U.K.’s Dominions and Commonwealth on equal footing to Britons. Although the previous shared status of ‘British Subject’ had in theory similar qualities, the Nationality Act meant that even with the new form of national citizenship, somebody from Kingston, Jamaica could live and work in the U.K. as freely as somebody from Kingston-upon-Thames.

Britain’s politicians and civil servants grossly underestimated the number who would use this opportunity. The Cabinet Papers in the National Archives show that what started as a trickle turned into a flood. For the five years after the Act passed, “Immigration from colonies remained at no more than 2,000 per year. This increased in 1954 and had reached over 135,000 by 1961.” By the late 60s, there were well over a million non-whites in Britain, up from only a handful after the war. Most had alien cultures, and often religions, too.

This posed a unique problem for England, where the majority of the newcomers settled. As Benjamin Schwarz showed in his superbly written essay, ‘Unmaking England’, Britain’s ethnic composition had remained almost unchanged for nearly a millennium-and-a-half, or, it might be argued, much longer than that.

Genetic records show that the matrilineal ancestors of some three quarters of white Britons were already in the British Isles some 6,000 years ago. “The tiny number of Roman and Norman conquerors were the thinnest veneer over the native population,” argues Mr. Schwarz, “and have left virtually no genetic trace.” Angles, Saxons, Frisians and similar (which brought no more than 250k) essentially completed the mix. “As the dean of British geneticists, Oxford’s Sir Walter Bodmer, explains, the country’s genetic history reveals ‘the extraordinary stability of the British population. Britain hasn’t changed much since 600 AD.'” To be clear, this not to make an argument for blood and soil nationalism. It does, however, give the lie to the shibboleth that we have “always been a nation of immigrants.”

In fact, it would be difficult to identify a nation to which this statement would be less aptly applied: what makes England, and Britain, unique is its ethnic stability. For instance, Benjamin Schwarz points out that in the 1960s, Iona and Peter Opie showed that English children had played many of the same games since the 1100s. Robert Tombs, a professor of history at Cambridge, suggests that: “If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a fair claim to be the oldest nation in the world.”

This singular permanence allowed England to develop and “evolve in itself and to adopt foreign cultural influences wholly on its own terms”, Schwarz contends (pointing out that even William the Conqueror was accepted as Sovereign because he vowed to uphold English Law). This Law, of course, is the Common Law, the immeasurable advantages of which are well rehearsed; however, it is difficult to imagine such a system – or even a community in which societal trust extends as far beyond extended family as it does in Britain – emerging and surviving in a country that had not remained so stable for so long.
Ironically, Britain’s stability had previously also made it uniquely tolerant of eccentricity and thus highly effective at integrating foreigners (to the extent their children were entirely anglicised: think Holst, Handel, Disraeli, Conrad, Churchill, Elliot, et al.) The problem posed by the immigration of the 1950s and 60s, therefore, was its scale and speed, which inevitably led to the formation of ethnic immigrant enclaves, making integration impossible.

In the second half of the 1960s, two of Britain’s greatest politicians offered competing solutions to this predicament.

Roy Jenkins was perhaps the most consequential British politician never to have been Prime Minister. An elitist and a liberal, Mr (later Lord) Jenkins was highly intelligent, an assiduous worker, a greatly esteemed biographer and a man of letters. He was one of the most important intellectual forces behind much of Britain’s liberal shift since the 1960s. Mr Jenkins argued in a 1966 speech that the country should not become a ‘melting pot’, turning out everybody in a common mould. Instead, immigrants could keep “their own national characteristics and culture”. Thus, integration would not mean flattening assimilation, but “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity”.

This, then, is the core of multiculturalism. Today, the term is commonly misunderstood as ‘different races living alongside each other’. Instead, per Jenkins, it was the idea of many cultures living in parallel and tolerance.

Enoch Powell disagreed. An ambitious and curiously intense man, Powell was perhaps the finest intellect to serve in Parliament since the war. He knew 13 languages, was then the second youngest man to make professor (after Frederick Nietzsche), and had during the war been promoted from Private to Brigadier. Crucially, he had fallen in love with India during the years he had spent there, and had been horrified by the inter-ethnic violence he saw. He had also travelled to the USA in 1967, where he had seen first-hand the bloody conflict between African-Americans and the Detroit police. He believed that the multiculturalism that was de fecto emerging in Britain would inevitably lead to the same outcome. He therefore favoured ending immigration and a programme of voluntary repatriation.

In April 1968, Powell gave a speech in Birmingham to set out his case. What became known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was one of the most notorious speeches in British political history. Powell’s prose was peppered with incendiary language, including racial pejoratives. Edward Heath, the Leader of the Opposition, was appalled by the speech – as were the rest of the Shadow Cabinet – and Powell was dismissed the next day, never to return to front bench politics. Indeed, the speech was so inflammatory that advocating for reduced immigration became difficult in polite society for two generations.

Yet, that same year, perhaps startled by the fact that 74% of Britons polled at the time supported Powell’s recommendations, the government pushed through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to curtail migration. In 1971. The Immigration Act did likewise. In 1981 the British Nationality Act tightened control yet further. The cumulative effect was to keep net migration low until the 1990s.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour was elected. It immediately set out to raise immigration levels in a deliberate effort to make Britain truly multicultural; to make Jenkins’s vision of a diverse Britain real. In 1997, New Labour removed the Primary Purpose Rule, which required those marrying foreigners to prove they had not wed to secure British residency. In 1998, it removed border exit checks to all destinations, making it impossible to know who was in the country and who had overstayed their visa. In 1999, it expanded student permits. In 2000, it relaxed work requirements. In 2004, it expanded post-study work visas. All of these steps (sometimes taken without Parliamentary oversight) led to significant increases in immigration.

Added to this, immigration from the EU increased dramatically. In 2004, the EU expanded with the accession of the so-called A10 countries – Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Given eight of these countries had recently been members of the much poorer Soviet Bloc, many existing EU members harboured concerns that sudden access to the EU’s freedom of movement rights would lead to a surge in migration. The Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg thus placed restrictions on migrant workers from the ‘A8’ countries, including quotas or two-to-five year transition periods. Not Britain. The Home Office estimated that only 5,000-13,000 immigrants a year would arrive from the A8 members, and it therefore saw no need to apply restrictions. In reality, average immigration from the A8 nations into Britain was 72,000 per year, eight times more than the middle of the Home Office’s forecast range.

The same thing happened with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2014: by 2017, there were 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain, implying that some 90,000 had immigrated every year since the beginning of 2014 – three-and-a-half times the government’s estimate.

New Labour’s policies thus led to monumental increase in migration.

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU, in part because freedom of movement within the Single Market made controlling migration near impossible. Yet while Conservative governments have ended free movement, they have increased overall immigration. In 2022, Britain handed out a record 1.1 million visas for foreigners to work or live in the UK. Jonathan Portes, an LSE academic in favour of high immigration, wrote in the Guardian that EU migration had “largely or wholly been replaced by non-EU migration”.

Migration policy since 1949 increased the proportion of Britons living in the U.K. who are non-white from 0.1% in 1951 to nearly a quarter in 2021. Rightly or wrongly, this process has been unpopular.

Tags: Benjamin SchwarzEnoch PowellImmigrationRoy JenkinsThe Nationality Act 1948Tony Blair

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