From the archive: Immigrant areas

July 1965: Will immigration come to dominate British politics?

In 1965, the journalist Paul Foot considered the state of immigration debate in Britain, and a new book from the Institute of Race Relations that surveyed six “immigrant areas” as political case studies.

In the nine months since the general election, Commonwealth immigration has become a central political issue. Party spokesmen constantly refer to their party’s plans for new restrictions. News editors and columnists have discovered that almost anything connected with the “colour problem” makes “good copy”. This has been a remarkably sudden process. In 1963, when the Institute of Race Relations set up a special survey into race relations in Britain under Mr Jim Rose and Mr Nicholas Deakin, politicians were embarrassed by immigration, and the matter was raised in parliament or the constituencies only by extremists. The principles which had inspired the Parliamentary Labour Party violently to oppose the Commonwealth Immigration Bill of 1961 and 1962 had given way to “realism” – the prospect of power. This underlines the intelligence and foresight of Mr Rose and Mr Deakin in commissioning a special election book to examine the political consequences of immigration in six selected “immigrant areas”: three in Greater London – Brixton, Southall and Deptford; two in the West Midlands – Sparkbrook (Birmingham) and Smethwick; and one in the West Riding of Yorkshire – Bradford East. The book more than justifies their decision.

Although all six commentators have carried out sample surveys in their areas to discover how immigrants voted, and what effect their presence had on the votes of the indigenous population, five of them have resisted the temptation simply to reprint the statistics of their findings. They have stuck instead to an attractive journalistic formula – outlining the local background, giving pen portraits of the candidates and reporting the campaign. The statistics are used, neatly and sparingly, as illustrations. Nor have the authors been intimidated by the awe-inspiring impartiality of the Institute into leaving out their own ideas and conclusions. Five of the six write with undisguised sympathy for the immigrants, while Mr Alfred Sherman’s essay on Deptford reflects the long campaign against large-scale immigration which he has waged in the columns of the Daily Telegraph. Particularly impressive are Mr LJ Sharpe’s explanations of why people are more tolerant in Brixton (the earliest West Indian settlement), and Mr Alan Shuttleworth’s description of the immigration issue as “local” rather than “national”, and therefore more comprehensible to a disillusioned and alienated electorate. The exception to all this is the essay on Bradford, which, unlike the others, includes a detailed survey of past local elections.

The six areas under discussion are all “declining” – all of them, despite immigration, have lost population over the last decade. All of them have more than their “share” of slums, particularly of the more squalid, “multi-occupied” slums on the inner rim of towns and cities. In all save one of the areas, politics and political results during the election dominated political patterns, and national issues dominated political argument. In none of these five areas, except possibly in Southall, was the Conservative candidate associated in the electors’ minds with anti-immigrant propaganda. It was left to the minor parties, like the British National Party in Southall, the Independents, like Mr Atkins in Deptford, and local “non-party” organisations, like the Birmingham Immigration Control Association in Birmingham, Perry Barr, to raise the issue centrally and to campaign upon it. Thus traditional working-class loyalty “held” the 1959 Labour vote, without increasing it, and the Labour candidates in all these areas were happy to play down the immigration issue, so generously avoided by their opponents.

Smethwick was the one monstrous exception, where working-class loyalty to Labour was effectively sabotaged. Mr Michael Hartley-Brewer traces the history of anti-immigrant propaganda back to 1960, and explains how it was sucked into the mainstream of Smethwick politics by Mr Peter Griffiths and his fellow Tory councillors. He demonstrates without a shadow of doubt that “Griffiths’s victory was due to the immigration issue”: all the explanations for the Smethwick result volunteered by Griffiths himself – such as the incompetence of Mr Patrick Gordon Walker – are ruthlessly demolished. It was high time that the Griffiths campaign was properly exposed. Yet the importance of Smethwick stretches far beyond the need to set the record straight. Mr Deakin underlines the dangers in his conclusion: the failure of the Conservative Party to “repudiate Alderman Griffiths may lead to the adoption of candidates in various parts of the Midlands” who are “prepared to wring the maximum possible advantage out of the issue”.

Mr Griffiths, in fact, has been feted and applauded in Conservative Constituency Parties, not to mention Conservative University Associations, throughout the land. Central Office proudly release press statements on how Griffiths won Smethwick. In parliament, Griffiths moved all the major opposition amendments to the Race Bill in committee. He has risen to a position of power and prestige in the Conservative Party, and no one can doubt that his call last November to win 20 seats for the Conservatives with a “firm line on immigration” will be answered.

[Further reading: The tyranny of tartanry]