strangers within
a study group
young fabian pamphlet 10 3s6d
young fabian pamphlet 10 strangers within
contents	1	introduction	1
	2	immigrant legislation	7
	3	the social services	14
	4	employment	26
	5	conclusion	32
this pamphlet, like all publications of the Fabian Society, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individuals who prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publications which it issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour movement. Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1. November 1965
1.	introduction
This pamphlet makes certain recommendations for the improvement of relations between different cultural and ethnic groups in Britain, ft does not advocate a single culture, in which the assimilation of these groups is achieved at the cost of submerging all differences between them and the other groups in Britain. It deals with those immigrants from Commonwealth countries who are either non-white or non-English speaking, or both, and with the children of those who settle here, a new generation born in this country, with no other home or loyalties.
Already there are too many signs that the immigrant problem is being replaced by a “colour problem”. This must be prevented by every possible means. Prejudice, being an attitude, cannot be altered by legislation, but discrimination can and must be prevented by legislation in as many fields and in as many cases as possible. If action is not taken, the practice of discrimination will inevitably provoke prejudice and discrimination from more and more of the host community because it lessens the chances of the day to day contact which is the best way for people to realise that the things they have in common with people of all nationalities are more fundamental than their differences. This is not to say that the immigrant groups should be broken down to form an even distribution of coloured English skilfully blended into the English social landscape. We recognise that the bulk of the new arrivals have settled in the large urban areas, initially for economic reasons, and will wish to remain in an environment where they feel at ease. These areas of high immigrant settlement and distinctive culture are likely to flourish for one generation at least. But they must not become traps from which neither the immigrant, nor more important, his children can escape. The new generation, educated in Britain, differ from the assimilated children of previous migrant groups in that they will be distinguishable in appearance even after differences of language and religion have diminished. There is a danger that this distinction may set them apart unless positive measures are taken
now to counteract discrimination whenever it appears; to ensure to the descendants of immigrants the same mobility in housing, employment, education and leisure that is enjoyed by all citizens under the law7.
CHANGING CLIMATE OF PUBLIC OPINION
In the space of the last five years there has been a marked change in the public attitude towards Commonwealth immigrants as expressed in the mass media and from political platforms. Since the Commonwealth Immigrants Act became law, the nature of the debate has changed from a discussion of whether Britain should curtail absolute freedom of entry by Commonwealth citizens, to a consideration of whether we should restrict the number of coloured people allowed to live here. Increasingly attention has been drawn to what makes ordinary decent people prejudiced, on the argument that we may not agree with them, but we must understand them.
Thus, with controls already implemented, with the initial problems of assimilation now far better understood than they were five years ago, with a growing apparatus of welfare organisations, the press debates whether we can “absorb" a million coloured people (not a million first generation immigrants) and the politicians wrangle over tighter controls. Mrs. Ruth Glass, in a letter to The Times (1 February 1965) protested that “In this country, there has been during the past few months a growing movement of racialism—accelerated, or tolerated, no less by well meaning people who think that they are free from prejudice, than by those who cater to prejudice. The movement, promoted in the name of “realism”, is based on the assumption that racial prejudice is immutable, and that colour problems per se are larger than they really are. And because such views are being spread, prejudice does, indeed, become more pervasive, and I he problems do grow.”
The race riots of 1958 in Notting Dale, West London, and Nottingham, took
both press and public opinion by surprise. The subsequent analysis of what had happened, in terms of dissimilar cultures and a grave housing shortage, was scrupulously fair. The Mosley spokesmen alone were credited with using the occasion to point a connection between the riots and uncontrolled immigration, and they were universally condemned for it, as were the “stunted palid thugs” who were the agents of violence. Most explanations followed that of The Times (5 September 1958): “Fights between white and coloured people have flared up in this area because it is a rough area, suspicious of strangers, and used to settling its differences with fists and knives anyway. Into this miserable breeding ground come the strangers, and some of them behave badly by any standards. Then come the young roughs, hunting in packs, and find the trouble they are looking for.”
Coloured immigrants at that time formed one tenth of the population of Notting Dale, and the problem of assimilation was at its worst. But no section of the main national press queried the right of free entry, or the expectation that black and white could live harmoniously together, if left alone by palid thugs. It was not until January 1961 that the Institute of Race Relations introduced a section on Britain into its newsletter. It noted the number of local newspaper reports of vice among coloured people in areas like Brixton, but paid tribute to the sober way in which the press generally had handled the great debate on controls which came to a head after the Oversea Migration Board Report showing the jump in Commonwealth (and Irish) im-immigration in 1960. The simultaneous leaders in The Times (17 December I960) and the Daily Telegraph (17 December
1960)	showed a differing emphasis becoming apparent. The former stressed the need for agreement at a Commonwealth conference, the latter wondered whether it was time for the unilateral abandonment of the principle of free entry. “That principle wears thin when harmless citizens are driven from their homes before the onset of an alien way of life. They begin to wonder whether
social justice applied to them, or only to coloured people."
the strange
death of a liberal attitude
In 1961 the press gave an almost unanimously hostile reception to the early attempts to stampede the Macmillan government into restriction of immigration. Their columns were open to the advocates of control, but their reporting of the situation remained accurate and fair, with some local exceptions. When Mr. Butler introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill less than a month after the 1961 Tory Conference there was intensive press criticism. Once he had edged crabwise into the open and announced on 17 November that the bill could not apply to the Irish its hypocrisy was generally condemned by the national press. The verdict of The Times (17 November
1961) after the debates was that this was a bill which was perhaps incapable of acceptance with "any shred of decency”. And looking ahead The Observer (18 March 1962) remarked: "Some control of immigration is right and inevitable. But when the time comes to renew the Act in 1963, the Government should replace it with something fairer in principle, and more equitable in practice." That advice has never been followed by either main party.
The press remained restrained throughout 1962 and 1963, with the exception of some local newspapers now covering news of friction with immigrants exhaustively. The main weight of the national press was concentrated upon the exposure of prejudice rather than upon its dissection. The Daily Telegraph pointed the inconsistency between applauding West Indian cricketers but denying employment to their fellow countrymen on the Bristol buses (27 June 1963). The Daily Mirror hunted down magistrates who revealed colour prejudice in their remarks on the bench (15 September
1962). The 1963 bye-elections at West Bromwich and Deptford were both fought with race as an issue, but it was not given disproportionate treatment in the press. Perhaps, partly as a result of
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this, both Labour candidates, with their party’s record on immigration to defend, won handsomely without making concessions. In this same period the bbc went out of its way to produce plays which helped public opinion to accept the coloured newcomer as no different from oneself. Sir Gerald Nabarro was censored when he said on “Any Questions”, “Would you want your blonde blue eyed daughter to marry a big buck nigger, with the prospect of coffee-coloured grandchildren?” Regrettably this excised the prompt reply of another panelist that she would not want her blonde blue eyed daughter marrying Sir Gerald Nabarro.
The days when sane men in the mass media could agree together to keep a sense of proportion about racial controversy were numbered. National attention was drawn as the 1964 election approached to flourishing pockets of prejudice. Central to this trend was Smethwick. The able Midlands correspondent of The Times pointed out as early as March 1963 that the local Smethwick Telephone had already devoted 1,650 column inches to the immigration problem. Of the “If you want a nigger neighbour” slogan that Mr. Peter Griffiths was quoted as saying, “I would not condemn people who say that ... I would say that is how they see the situation in Smethwick ... I fully understand the feeling of the people who say it. I would say it is exasperation, not fascism” {The Times, 9 March 1964). Since the Labour Party went completely on to the defensive they faced unceasing press interest on this one issue throughout. Nothing else got off the ground in Smethwick. The local Labour chairman was quoted as saying, “Once, when you said you came from Smethwick, people recognised it as a hard-working craftsman’s town. Now they say, ‘Oh, that’s where all the blacks live” (Birmingham Evening Mail, 17 September 1963).
The result at Smethwick produced a further rash of articles and tv programmes about the racial issue in British politics. The old notion that the “dark strangers”
would be merged comparatively painlessly into the social landscape was dropped. The irresponsible media speculated irresponsibly, the responsible media sheered nervously around the subject. The bbc, for example, cancelled its coverage of Smethwick entirely, at a time when an objective account, not only of the controversy, but also of how it was handled, would have been of value. After the election the bbc “Tonight” programme saw fit to take Malcom X on a guided tour of Smethwick.
The irr newsletter reflected on 1964: “As the year waxed, the inevitable immigrant host frictions and tensions tended to get increased attention in the press and the mass media, usually under the rubric of “the problem” or “the colour problem”. This development did not necessarily reflect any sudden change for the worse, although it may have helped to create a climate for such deterioration. It could be directly associated with the intensification of party political debate and rivalry in the election year.”
Conservatives: the breakdown of self-controls
The two parties are taking the issue out of party politics—but at the wrong end. The 1964 election brought Mr. Griffiths and Dr. Wyndham Davies to join the Midlands mps. Within a few months Aubrey Tones, under heavy fire in his constituency, bowed gracefully out of politics. Sir Edward Boyle was replaced by the less liberal Peter Thorney-croft as shadow Home Secretary. Sir Alec Douglas-Home meanwhile issued the first renewed appeal for stricter control, taken up by Sir Frank Soskice in what was at best an announcement of unhappy coincidence.
Sir Cyril Osborne was now a figure in the land. By standing still where others had shuffled sideways on the issue, he seemed to possess a sort of grotesque integrity. He was invited to state his views in a Spectator symposium. He did. “Those who so vehemently denounce the slogan ‘Keep Britain White’ should answer the question, do they want to
4
turn it black? If unlimited immigration were allowed, we should ultimately become a chocolate coloured Afro-Asian mixed society. That I do not want” {Spectator, 4 December 1964).
Yet when he introduced a bill in March, 1965 to prohibit all immigration pro tem, and calling for tougher deportation procedures, the Tory leadership took it over, watered it down, and sent it through the lobby with party blessing. Selwyn Lloyd, Thorneycroft, Sandys, Godber and Powell trooped in behind their leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. So did Edward Heath. The Conservative Central Council in London gave Mr. Patrick Wall an enthusiastic response when he called upon it to “reject the multi-racial state”. Smethwick’s first export, Councillor Thornton, prospective candidate for Stoke-on-Trent, was quoted as referring to immigrants as “the lowest of the low”. (Staffs. Evening Sentinel, 7 May 1965). In early July Mr Selwyn Lloyd, chairman of the Conservative policy group on immigration, rounded off a shabby session by announcing that “For a period of years we must see that no more immigrants come in than leave”. This, he explained, was necessary because even with no new immigrants here “the numbers of immigrants here would grow, because of their high birth rate”. So the hunt was up. By what definition can a man born in this country be regarded as an immigrant? The debate had moved on to the most dangerous level of all, the control of numbers rather than entry.
Labour reappraisals
When the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came up for renewal in 1964 there were no dissentient voices. But would the Labour Party be able to stop there, and push ahead with positive measures for assimilation? It was soon apparent that the stress was to be on the issue of controls. At a time of press scare stories about their breakdown, Richard Crossman said in the West Midlands. “Two years ago the Conservatives instituted completely ineffective controls, and now they blame us because the flood of
illegal immigrants is threatening to undermine the efforts we are making” (our italics). When impulsive George Brown said at Sheffield “It is absolutely mad at a time when our labour force is allegedly over used and when our new labour force is going to rise only slightly, to talk about limiting the number of people who can be used. It does not make any sense” (Sunday Times, 28 March 1965). the Labour Party rocked with tortuous explanations that he had not been talking about immigration at all. Mr. Maurice Edelman rushed into print in the Daily Express to disown him, calling for a three year ban on immigration with only compassionate exceptions. The Sun (30 March 1965) commented, “But it is not Mr Brown who is extreme. It is those who ascribe to the British people a degree of prejudice so intense that nine hundred thousand odd brown skinned fellow citizens can be treated as a hostile invading force”. A note of extreme pes-sismism now characterised the thoughts of leading cabinet ministers. Richard Crossman confessed in a debate at London University that he thought colour prejudice as endemic as anti-semitism. “I am aware that anti-semitism is not something which only wicked people have . . . There isn't a gentile community in the western world which isn't liable to anti-semitism. And if we’re honest with ourselves, there isn’t a gentile in the western world who fails to be anti-semetic, except by knowing he is and suppressing it. Well, that’s the situation, and what applies to anti-semitism applies in my view to coloured people.” George Brown said, “Scratch any of us and you will find an immigrant not far down”. Now the scratching was expected to reveal a repressed racialist.
With the White Paper the Government revealed just how far over its shoulder it had looked at the public mood. This document has brought many people, who had hoped that the Labour Party could take a stand against further concessions to racialism, to the point of despair. Yet Roy Hattersley, commissioned by the Spectator to defend the document, thought it “A genuine, if badly presented, essay in integration” and reminded the
5
reader of a little old lady in his constituency who could not be expected to love the immigrant whilst she “lives in a Birmingham back street”. He went on "How . . . does all this differ from the worst sort of racialist propaganda. The answer is simple: the motives are different.”
Those who hoped that the Labour Party might yet find its conscience at the party conference heard speeches that would have been hissed at the Conservative conference in 1961. There were, it is true, many eloquent and honourable speeches critical of the white paper. But there was also Mr Robert Mellish, “Those who talk about integration are not doing anything about it,” he told the Conference. “Go to Victoria Station on Sunday night and see the hundreds of these people coming in from the West Indies”. Mr. Mellish cannot have seen that particular sight for some long time, but it obviously deeply disturbed him. It cannot be denied that the Party has moved to the right, that there has been an attempt to strike tough, anti-immigrant attitudes, in spite of the quite remarkable record of work for integration by many individual members of the party, as well as by many pressure groups, such as the National Council for Civil Liberties.
the press: who was cerebral ?
Before^ the 1964 election the Guardian (26 September 1964) appealed to the party leaders, “Let’s keep it cerebral!” This appeal, wholly valid, should have been addressed to the fourth estate as well as the third.The Guardian, The Sun, The Economist, and a few others, have kept it cerebral; the rest have not. The obsession with race relations is now so great that papers can argue that they are failing in their duty if they do not reflect it. But many exceeded this.
The main flaws have been in sensational presentation of ostensibly fair series, in advancing under the respectable aegis of the opinion page articles that toyed with racialist notion, saturation of the correspondence columns with racialist pro-
paganda, and, worst of all, an apparent slanting of news so as to place coloured persons in the worst light possible.
One notable example of leading an objective series with “scare” advance publicity and a lurid beginning came from The Times. “The Dark Million” was the title of the series, “Here in lohn Bull’s coloured island, is a volcano perilously close to erupting” was the blurb. The series began by laying great stress on the numbers, in justification of the sensational title. The dark 800,000 would have had disadvantages to a sub-editor, though not to a statistician. As the series went on the research and impartiality that had gone into it became more apparent, but the way it was launched and advertised remains extremely dubious. At the other extreme the News of the World (24 January, 1964) ran a parallel series using the same sensational opening. The “frank investigation in depth” began with an article about Manchester. “With the silent approval or indifferent acquiescence of Manchester’s million population the “coloureds” live their own lives with their own customs and even their own laws. Tribal Courts. Their crime statistics are low—but misleading. For the West Indians in Moss Side hold their own tribal courts and hand out their own punishments.”
Flirting with racialist views, by giving them the benefit of serious and prolonged discussion, has become more common. For whatever reason, the folk heroes of unreason haunt the correspondence columns. Mr Gurden and Mr Griffiths put their case with increasing frequency in the Daily Telegraph. In the Beaver-brook press Percy Howard (the name adopted by Robert Pitman when he wishes to remain anonymous) weighed in with “Are we heading for a Race War” (Sunday Express, 8 November 1964) and four months later Mr Pitman produced, “Why this smoke screen over the race issue?” to prove that anything Percy Howard did he could do too.
“A new catch phrase is haunting our public life. It has all the glib surface glitter of an advertising jingle. It oozes
6
with smooth reassurance, like a slogan for remedies against indigestion or bad breath. It is:	‘Immigration must be
taken out of party politics’.” As an essay in imputing the worst possible motives to those who would do this Mr. Pitman’s broadside could hardly have been bettered. In the Sunday Telegraph (17 January 1965) Peregrine Worsthorne wrote, “Many people in this country want to keep Britain white for perfectly decent, respectable reasons. But because no respectable party will endorse this aim, it is left to the Fascists, as the Leyton bye-election shows, to debase it into an evil racialist slogan.”
In this way what can best be described as genteel racialism, that is the acceptance that prejudiced views are genuinely held by others though never by oneself, made its appearance among the opinion leaders. There is a section of the press that will load any story involving immigrants in fairly sensational style, although reports of actual discrimination are rarely handled without sympathy for the immigrants concerned. The problem is very largely one of presentation. When a newspaper refers to so-called news items sensationally it is even less defensible. The News of the World has made much play with the numbers game, it alleged in a front page lead story (30 May 1965), “Sir Frank Sockice is studying a report compiled by police and immigration officers. The report reveals that an estimated
750,000	immigrants have entered the country illegally . . . The serious increase in the numbers of illegal immigrants indi-ctaes that the Home Office figures of 1,502,114 foreign and coloured immigrants, is a gross under estimate. Police believe 2,000,000 is more realistic.” (Our italics.) This grotesque exaggeration again went unreprimanded.
On a national level the greatest single attention to the immigrant problem is now undoubtedly paid by the Daily Telegraph. For a paper which prides itself on exhaustive news coverage the quantity may be explicable; the quality is not. Partly this is due to alarmist headlines, such as “Immigrants’ children swamp schools” (Daily Telegraph, 15 June
1965) over an article which actually dealt only with the problem in Nottingham’s 5 plus group. Partly it is the prominence given to the toughest Conservative spokesman on race, and to Lord Elton’s “Why must Colin Jordan speak for Britain?” line. On 22 April the second lead story on the front page washeadlined, “Typhoid outbreak in Smethwick ; three Jamaicans ill; silence to avoid panic”. In fact two of the three were carriers, the main person to speak of panic was the Tory mayor, Alderman Niven. To shame the Daily Telegraph for this disgraceful report it is only necessary to compare it with that in the Smethwick Telephone (23 April 1965): “Typhoid: three year old girl and two carriers in Smethwick”. This account took its main comment from the moh, “This is an isolated case, and these have occurred with some frequency throughout the country.” On the next day the front page story was headlined “Immigrants refusing typhoid test”.
The picture of the coloured immigrant which must stay in the minds of Daily Telegraph readers cannot be a happy one. When this is coupled with the much-publicised second thoughts of the Daily Mirror (26 September 1965) on the white paper, “Immigration: the truth in black and white”, and the Daily Mail (5 July 1965) statement that Selwyn Lloyd’s one for one proposal was “welcome because it sets a frame for the debate which needs to be started . . it isn’t surprising that public attitudes have hardened.
It took courage for Mr St John-Stevas publicly to chastise Selwyn Lloyd’s proposals and for the original 16 Labour critics of the Government white paper to speak out when they did. But only by such acts will the tide be turned. Many organisations and many individuals have worked unsparingly for better race relations. Their efforts have been overlaid by the great debate about whether we can be a multi-racial society. We already are, and the controversy simply makes their work the harder. Only the greatest care and restraint will prevent Mrs. Glass’s self-fulfilling prophecy doing just that.
2.	immigrant legislation
For the purposes of considering the control of immigration the century since 1865 can conveniently be split in half. During the first fifty years, before the outbreak of the first world war, immigration was virtually unchecked. From the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars until the passing of the ineffectual Aliens Act of 1905 no alien was prevented from entering Britain and none was expelled. Yet over these fifty years Britain had a net outflow, through migration, of almost 2+ million people (Royal Commission on Population 1949, Cmd 7695 paras 40-46), and, indeed, the past century has witnessed a great excess of emigration over immigration. Nonetheless, before the first world war there was a considerable volume of Jewish immigration to Britain, though the number of such immigrants to Britain was markedly less than the number going to many other Western European countries (Royal Commission on Alien Immigration 1903, Cmd 1741).
The entry of aliens first became a political issue in peacetime during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Pressure for control came chiefly from two sources, the protectionist wing of the Conservative Party and the Trades Union Congress (principally the former), and a gesture towards illiberalism was made by the passing of the Aliens Act 1905. Effective control of entry was then introduced by the Aliens Restrictions Act 1914, but assurances were given that the restrictions would cease to have effect when the war finished. After the end of hostilities the restrictions (Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919) were retained on a temporary basis on the ground that the state of national danger was not over. The emergency has never ended.
commonwealth citizens
The largest category of immigrants in the inter-war years was that of former emigrants returning; but when the second world war was followed, not by a slump and unemployment as the first had been, but by a shortage of manpower, immigrants were in demand to fill the labour gap.
Many of the coloured citizens of the British colonies who fought in the second world war were demobilised in Britain. Some of them stayed on because there were employment opportunities here which they knew did not exist at home. Others returned to Britain after a spell of unemployment in their own countries. This trickle had become a stream by the late 1950s. Two fillips to this were provided at the beginning of the decade. One of the first things the Tories did on their return to power in 1951 was to destroy the bulk-buying agreements and one of the first agreements destroyed was the bulk buying of sugar from the West Indies. In 1952 the McCarran-Walter Act further limited the entry of West Indians into the United States. During the fifties the volume of Commonwealth immigration expanded and contracted in accordance with the English economic climate.
The following is a rough estimate of the net intake, that is the difference between the total number admitted and the total number embarked, of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, Asia, East and West Africa and the Mediterranean during the years immediately before the implementation of the Commonwealth
Immigrants Act 1962:			
1955	42,700	1959	21,600
1965	46,850	1960	57,700
1957	42,400	1961	136,400
1958	29,850	1962*	94,900
* to 30	June 1962.		
It is not possible to say how far the marked increase in 1960-1962 reflected the expanding labour market and how much it was a response to the artificial stimulus presented, as the clamour within the Conservative Party for controls reached fever pitch and the prospect of impending restrictions loomed increasingly large. For the first time, when an economic boom was petering out, immigrants came in with scant regard for whether jobs and houses could be found. A fear of racial friction led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which does not apply to the Southern Irish, although half of the immigrants coming to Britain at that time, according to the
Oversea Migration Board, were Irish. The Act was passed shortly before the same Government announced its wish to sign the Treaty of Rome, which provides for increasing freedom of movement of labour between the signatory countries. The figures for the net intake of Commonwealth citizens from Commonwealth countries other than Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the years since the Act, are as follows:
1962*	8,685	1964	62,117
1963	57,049	1965f	33,383
*from 1 July 1962 tto 30 June 1965
The numbers actually admitted from such countries were as follows:
1963	1964
voucher holders 28,678	13,888
dependants	27,393	38,952
total	56,071	52,840
the southern Irish
I	he Commonwealth Immigrants Act is drafted to cover the Southern Irish, although it is not applied to them. At the time of the Act the Conservatives said they would like to control the Irish as well, if only it were practicable. Now they say that they would not wish to control the Irish even if they thought it could be done, the Irish being, in Mr Thorneycroft’s phrase “part of our ethnic whole” (Hansard, vol 709, col 343). Mr Butler tried to solace some of bis own supporters by saying that he would reserve the right to impose restrictions which he had previously shown were unworkable. Nobody wants to aggravate the subsiding border tension between Eire and Ulster. The alternative is control within the United Kingdom. Mr Paget put the position neatly when he said: “The control is not to be applied to the Irish unless there is an absolute necessity, that absolute necessity will not arise as long as the Irish immigrants continue to be white, but, if owing to Commonwealth people coming through the Irish ports, the Irish immigrants begin to be black, an absolute necessity will arise”. Labour’s view was that the absence of controls on
the Irish destroyed the claim that the Act was non-discriminatory and that their inclusion within the ambit of the Act demonstrated the haste with which the Bill had been brought forward. This, together with the absence of prior consultation with the Commonwealth indicated that the Bill was a sop to racialist sentiment at the Tory Party conference. Labour also thought that the result of the Act “would be not so much to reduce coloured immigration as to lead to a tremendous increase in immigration from Southern Ireland,” (Denis Healey, Hansard, vol 654, col 1269), a prediction which has not been borne out. Nevertheless the Irish are still the largest single immigrant group, and coloured newcomers are still a minority even among minorities. The estimated net intake of citizens of the Irish Republic into the uk and the gross number of aliens accepted for permanent residence (Hansard, 5 and 1 July 1965) are as follows:
	Irish	aliens
1960	33,000	16,833
1961	35,000	15,689
1962	32,000	15,600
1963	28,000	15,349
1964	30,000	19,211
These figures are not very helpful as aliens cannot be accepted for settlement until after four years' residence.
the commonwealth immigrants act 1962.
This Act was supposed to provide a context, or “breathing space” as it was called, for the improvement of race relations, but over two years later when the Conservative Government left office little else had been done in the field beyond this one negative measure, and what the Act seemed principally to have achieved, apart from making respectable the racialist feelings which had motivated it, was agitation for yet more stringent restrictions. Labour’s prophecy that “If we do nothing else but just have this Bill, the problem will get steadily worse” (Patrick Gordon Walker, Hansard, vol 649, col 715) has been proved abundantly justified. Moreover, the clamour to re-
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duce numbers, once acceded to, inevitably becomes self-perpetuating, for dependants come over to join single men and families have children.
The Act provides that a Commonwealth citizen who wants to work and settle in the United Kingdom must first obtain a Ministry of Labour voucher. There are three categories. Category A is for applications by employers in this country who have a specific job to offer to a particular Commonwealth citizen. Category B is for applications by Commonwealth citizens without a specific job to come to but with certain special skills or qualifications. Category C is for all others. Categories A and B have priority. Category C is operated on a “first come, first served” basis, subject to no country receiving more than a quarter of the available vouchers. In September 1964 Category C was discontinued. There is a waiting list of over 300,000 in this category, but, as applications have priority in accordance with the order in which they are lodged, this is of little significance, and indeed in the months immediately following the coming into operation of the Act, a high proportion of the vouchers issued were not taken up.
the immigration white paper
In 1964, 20,824 Ministry of Tabour vouchers were issued, of which 14.705 were taken up. In the same year 42,500 work permits were issued to aliens. Under Labour’s white paper. Immigration from the Commonwealth (Cmd 2739) the rate of issue of vouchers has been reduced to 8,500 a year, of which the first
1,000	a year for at least the next two years are earmarked for white Malta (para 15). The remaining 7,500 will be issued primarily to persons in Category B, which is redefined (para 16) to comprise the following:
doctors, dentists and trained nurses ;
teachers who are eligible for the status of qualified teacher in this country ;
graduates in science or technology who
have had at least two years’ experience in suitable employment since graduation,
non-graduates with certain professional qualifications who have had at least two years’ experience in suitable employment since qualifying.
Any left over will be issued to persons in category A, on a first come first served basis, subject to no commonwealth country, apart from Malta, receiving more than 15 per cent. It therefore seems unlikely that any Commonwealth country will receive more than 300 A vouchers per year. It is significant to note that last year 520 work permits were issued to South Africans, who will accordingly now be in a more favourable position than Commonwealth citizens.
“They want our doctors and nurses,” commented Dr David Pitt, chairman of card, aptly, “and the few scientists we can produce, but they don’t want our ordinary workers.” The day after the white paper on Immigration appeared the Ministry of Overseas Development published an excellent white paper on Overseas Aid, which noted with regret that “A large number of professional and skilled people from developing countries is emigrating permanently to developed countries. There has almost certainly been a net flow of qualified people out of the developing countries in recent years” (Cmd 2736, para 49). On the other hand the “export” of working men is no less a valuable contribution to the economies of many developing nations than the money the emigrants are able to send home.
The white paper on Immigration is also concerned to prevent “evasion” of controls. The Home Secretary calculates the rate of “evasion” by taking the difference between the net balance over a given period and the number deliberately admitted for settlement during the same period. On this basis, according to a parliamentary reply, a few days after the evasion scare was launched, by Lord Stonham on 23 February 1965, unreported in the press, there are 15,000
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evasions by persons from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to the much publicised 10,000 from all other Commonwealth countries. It is proposed to stop the present practice of admitting freely children aged over 16 and under 18 who are coming to join one or both parents, although the Home Secretary will be able to consider individual applications for the admission where exclusion would cause hardship (para 20). The effect of this is to make it risky for an immigrant to leave his child behind to finish his education. The Government are also stopping the practice of admitting freely children under 16 joining a relative other than a parent, and illegitimate children joining their father (para 21). Again in individual cases permission to enter can be given where hardship can be shown. It also appears that the freedom to bring in a “common law” wife for which Labour fought so hard in 1962, may be withdrawn, and also that children may no longer be able to bring over, for example, their widowed mother.
The Government has been very thorough in its suggestions for preventing places being taken by those who are not eligible. It has not been so thorough in ensuring that places are not denied to those who are entitled to them. Under section
2	of the Aliens Act 1905 immigrant appeal boards were set up, and of those who were refused leave to land by immigration officers before the boards were abolished at the beginning of the first world war about a fifth appealed, and of these appeals about 40 per cent were successful. In fulfilling several of his functions, such as deciding whether X is the lawful wife of Y, an immigration officer is acting in a purely judicial capacity and is not concerned with policy.
One of the Labour Party’s foremost achievements during the debates on the Act was to secure the publication of the instructions given to immigration officers and Labour divided the House when the government refused to set up appeal tribunals, a refusal castigated by one Labour mp as an “outrageous refusal of an elementary right”. That mp is now
Her Majesty’s Attorney General (Hansard, vol 653, col 361).
The Government insists that immigrants must not be regarded as second class citizens. However, they have announced that they propose to seek a general power, which would of course “be exercised with discretion”, to impose conditions on the admission of immigrants, such as registering with the police (paras 23 and 24); and that they also intend to seek a general power, as distinguished from the existing power to implement a court’s recommendation after a conviction for an offence punishable by imprisonment, for the Home Secretary to “repatriate” (a vile euphemism for deport) “if he considers the public interest to require it”, a Commonwealth citizen who has been lawfully resident in the United Kingdom for less than five years (para 25). If he has been here lawfully for six months he may make representation to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, whose advice the Home Secretary is not bound to accept (para 26). The Home Secretary will be able to deport any immigrant who is here unlawfully, whether because he obtained entry by misrepresentation, or because he has broken a condition attached to his entry. Conditions are imposed by immigration officers without right of appeal. Theoretically, a first year university student, whose entry was subject to a condition that he should not take employment, would be liable to deportation, without even being able to make representations to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, if he worked for the gpo in the week before Christmas. If a Home Secretary decided to use this technical slip as a cloak for deporting someone he considered “undesirable”, no recourse to the courts would be open.
Yet Labour undertook that on taking office they would restrict the existing power of deportation by providing that a recommendation to deport could be made only by a judge, and not as under the Act by a judge or a magistrate in the case of a conviction for any offence punishable by imprisonment. The Carmen Bryan debacle appears to have been very quickly forgotten.
11
The white paper does not pretend to be based on economic notions. It is based on the fact that immigrants tend to congregate in large measure in areas with an existing acute housing shortage and where other social services are also already seriously overloaded, despite immigrant staffing. However, the Government is at the present time seeking to reduce immigration only from the Commonwealth. Moreover, the Milner Holland Report on Housing in Greater London (Crnd 2605, p202), speaking of one area with a serious housing shortage and many Commonwealth immigrants, said, “Immigrants come to London in search of work—and find it ... If they did not come, either their places would be taken by immigrants from other parts of the country, or a large number of essential jobs would remain unfilled.” Roy Hattersley has argued (Spectator,	20
August 1965) that “the test of the Government’s sincerity must be the enthusiasm with which it puts its assimilation plans into operation”. Precisely; and what makes the white paper so disquieting is that the section on “Integration” which should have been much the most important, contains very few positive proposals, and some of those that are put forward are thoroughly bad. The white paper is deplorable for the same reasons which led Hugh Gaitskell to condemn the Commonwealth Immigrants Act: it is based on colour, and it does not admit it. In fact, the word “coloured” does not appear anywhere in the white paper, although it has figured prominently in subsequent ministerial pronouncements. Keeping out non-profes-sional coloured people is not the way to diminish colour prejudice; indeed, making coloured people already here and their children feel that they are officially regarded as something which has to be endured could add a colour problem to a white problem.
THE RACE RELATIONS BILL
The first point to be made about the Race Relations Bill is that it is not a race relations bill. “Basically,” emphasised Sir Frank Soskice “the Bill is con-
cerned with public order” (Hansard, vol 711, col 927). It even contains a clause which has nothing specifically to do with race but was inserted simply to clarify a possible ambiguity in the Public Order Act.
The common law offence of sedition requires an intention to stir up disorder. Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1936 extended the common law by providing that a likelihood of disorder occurring was sufficient, whether or not the prospect of disorder was intended or even foreseen, and the judges have recently ruled, in the case of Jordan v. Burgoyne, that this means likelihood among the particular audience, however sensitive or malicious, a decision that undoubtedly constitutes an unjustifiable interference with freedom of speech. The Race Relations Bill extends common law in a different direction, by providing that an intention, actual not imputed, to stir up racial hatred is also sufficient. The Attorney General, who alone can prosecute for the new offence, must prove four things: firstly, that the accused used words that were “threatening, abusive or insulting”; secondly, that those words were uttered or published publicly; thirdly, that they were likely to stir up racial hatred ; and, fourthly, that he intended by those words to stir up racial hatred.
The new provision does not mean that in certain circumstances the criminal law now concerns itself with the contents of a speech as such, but the emphasis is no longer exclusively on the likelihood of a breach of the peace in the particular instance where the words were positively intended to create or worsen an inflammatory situation. Mr. Peter Griffiths in a speech described by Mr. Selwyn Lloyd as “admirable” described the Bill in his usual ambigious way as “some kind of gag if there is to be continuing mass immigration”, to which Sir Dingle Foot made the necessary retort, namely that the Bill will act as a gag only on those who deliberately set out to incite racial hatred {Hansard, vol 711, cols 1032, 1013, 1048). Mr. Griffiths and Mr. Harold Gurden were drafted on to the Conservative side
12
of the committee at the last moment to replace two more liberal members of the party.
discrimination in public places
Under the Bill, as originally presented, discrimination in four specified categories of public places would have been a criminal offence. In respect of two of these, public transport and premises maintained by local authorities, there appears to be no evidence of discrimination at the moment. A group of Labour back benchers made gallant efforts to amend this clause, and the criminal sanction has now been replaced by concilation machinery backed up where necessary by civil proceedings without an individual remedy, culminating in the last analysis in a recalcitrant and persistent discriminator being punished for contempt of Court.
As long as the criminal sanction remained, and conciliation machinery was omitted, it was strongly arguable that the ambit of the anti-discrimination clause of the Bill was sufficiently wide and should not have been extended. The introduction of criminal procedure was therefore inapposite, as there would seem to be little point in making discrimination criminal in a narrow category of cases where the criminal law would be by no means ineffective and, at the same time providing machinery for concilation over another and broader field. Canadian experience suggests that anti-discrimination commissions work effectively only when they cover the whole field. However, the decision, in Mr Thorneycroft’s words, “to remove the taint of criminality against the kindly, wise and just British people” (Hansard, vol 711, col 955) but otherwise leave the clause intact, was unfortunate. The Bill effectively provides a licence to discriminate in the places of public resort it does not cover, and although the purpose of introducing conciliation should have been to make it possible to widen the scope of the Bill to embrace housing, employment, insurance and credit facilities, where discrimination is rife and
of great and mounting concern to the immigrant community, this has not been done. Housing and employment are dealt with below, but one area of discrimination not again mentioned is motor insurance. Motor insurance underwriting guides issued to branch managers sometimes specify that “white races may be considered at normal terms” but that “coloured races must be specially considered where it is impossible to avoid quoting”. In spite of repeated challenges no evidence has ever been produced that certain racial groups constitute categories of abnormal risk, which is scarcely surprising as actuaries are apparently not employed in the motor insurance field and the categories used make no differentiation between different nationalities, or even between immigrants and their children. Insurance against third party risks is, of course, compulsory by law.
The cumbersome and protracted process of satisfying in turn, without right of appeal, a local conciliation committee and then the Race Relations Board, (neither of which has power to compel the attendance before itself either of witnesses or of the alleged discriminator who, if he is expertly advised, will ignore them or to take evidence on oath or subpoena documents), and then the Attorney General and finally a judge that there has been a course of discriminatory conduct had been introduced to deal in effect only with discrimination in restaurants, hotels and places of en-tentainment.
Mr Donald Chapman moved amendments to extend the anti-discrimination clause to places of public resort generally, or failing that to add shops, employment agencies and other places providing services to customers and clients. These amendments, and two others moved by Labour back benchers, one of which sought to extend the jurisdiction of the Race Relations Board beyond dealing with complaints of discrimination in places of public resort and the other of which required the Race Relations Board to notify the complainant of the report it made to the Attorney General, were defeated by the combined forces of
13
the Government front bench and the majority of the Opposition.
leases
The Birr does not deal at all with employment, and has only one miserable provision in the field of housing, a clause which must be one of the most extraordinary to have appeared in recent legislation. The clause renders unenforceable by a landlord a covenant in a lease against assignment and sub-letting to persons referred to by “colour, race or ethnic or national origins”, but instead of striking it down utterly converts it and widens it into a covenant against assignment without the landlord’s consent. The clause goes on to provide that in the above case and where there is a covenant in the lease against assignment without the landlord’s consent, such consent cannot be withheld on grounds of “colour, race, ethnic or national origins”, unless the landlord and tenant share accommodation other than staircases and the like.
It does not, however, annul discriminatory clauses in contracts generally, or even discriminatory restrictive covenants against the sale of freeholds; it does not prevent the extraction of inflated premiums from immigrant purchasers where the lease permits a premium to be taken by a landlord from a new tenant; and, most ludicrous of all, it does not deal with discrimination in the grant of tenancies, and, of course, generally where there is a change of tenant other than on death a fresh tenancy is granted rather than the old one being transferred. Moreover, if the lease contains an absolute prohibition against assignment the landlord can always permit and waive a “breach” of the covenant as and when he chooses, and if he chooses not to do so by reference to the “colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” of the assignee, he is outside the ambit of the Bill. This covenant will become increasingly popular with landlords in view of the new Rent Bill; and the landlord can also avoid the clause by stipulating that before applying for consent to dispose
of the lease the tenant must offer to surrender the lease to him.
A clause, whose limited application is as narrow as this, can be avoided by anyone determined to avoid it. Further, discriminators in places of public resort will be able to run rings round the conciliation procedure for months before there is any prospect of their being brought to a halt; and complainants will be frustrated in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred by finding out that the discrimination they have suffered is not within the jurisdiction of the conciliation committees. As the exact effect of the Bill becomes increasingly appreciated by immigrants their feeling that it is a fraud will turn towards bitterness. Amongst coloured citizens there are few who would subscribe to the theory that racialists will appreciate the error of their ways now that Parliament has made the appropriate gesture.
3.	the social services
EDUCATION
The Department of Education and Science Circular, no 7/65, published in June, is the Government’s principal contribution to the problems arising out of the presence in schools of large numbers of children from immigrant families. Only three of its nineteen paragraphs are devoted to essential questions of education and special teaching for non-English speaking children, and the government has clearly not found it possible to offer the kind of leadership in planning and expanding the educational effort in heavily immigrant schools that is really required. Instead, the principal empasis is on the supposed desirability of physically dispersing immigrant children from areas of concentration. These conclusions are repeated in the white paper of August without awareness of the criticisms they have received.
a problem of quantity ?
The origin of this pre-occupation with the counting of heads in school is not hard to find. As we have noted elsewhere, immigrants have tended to concentrate in certain old, decaying parts of large cities and their children have inevitably collected in a very limited number of schools within these areas. For instance in Bradford the mainly Asian immigrant children originally accumulated almost entirely in six of the city’s 150 schools. Several years ago one primary school in Huddersfield found 70 per cent of the immigrant families living in its catchment area. Cypriots in Islington. Asians and West Indians in Birmingham, Italians in Bedford—all have caused percentages in certain schools to rise as high as 60 or 70 per cent immigrant, and figures in the 20s and 30s per cent are commonplace in certain schools in almost all cities with sizeable overall immigrant populations. Thus it has been easy to see the problem in terms of simple numbers and look no more closely than that.
Tt is also sometimes argued that outbreaks of prejudice are dependent on the
rise above a certain level of coloured pupils. In fact the most crucial determining factor in that is the sort of leadership offered by staff. There are many schools with a large coloured element in which prejudice is confined to individual incidents or is not noticeable at all, because of the qualities of the teachers and the way they have handled the potential problem. At others, teachers complain of a tense inter-racial atmosphere after relatively few coloured children have arrived. But it is certain from such evidence as has been collected that we must not be too reassured by the often quoted view that prejudice is unknown in children. The most thorough study yet done in this country, in a large secondary school in Islington, showed some sort of prejudice in 75 per cent of the pupils, including prejudice between different immigrant groups. If colour consciousness is established in a community it will spread down into the primary school. Age is not in itself a hindrance to prejudice.
To be prepared for this it is essential that colleges of education should adjust themselves to the need to train teachers for a multi-racial society, and that textbooks and syllabuses in the social studies should be brought into line with the world of today. Many organisations and individuals are working hard to improve the quality of education for international and inter-racial understanding and they deserve more central recognition and assistance than they get. The Circular offers useful advice but no hope of any solid Government contribution.
physical conditions
Another inflammatory point is that many of the schools facing problems of prejudice, English teaching and overcrowding are physically in bad condition and in the sort of area to which it is hard to attract teachers. Prejudice thrives in such circumstances, and the purely technical problems are even harder to overcome. Social strains that may be caused by immigration should certainly be a factor in determining the allocation of funds for new building and a more favourable
15
staffing ratio. The Circular recognises only the latter point and even so merely repeats the all-party policy of increasing teacher quotas. As we shall see, however, it does not back this up either with an offer of help in establishing specialist language teachers or show awareness of the difference between quotas and real teachers—a point it would have done well to take from the Second Report of the Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council, on which it otherwise draws heavily.
Nottingham and Leicester are two places where the immigrant community has been associated with general overcrowding of certain schools. The former has already had to postpone new entries while the situation is alleviated. This kind of overcrowding occurs constantly in British schools, with or without immigrants ; one must not take a contributory factor for the cause. But such blithe statements as this ignore the natural tendency to look for scapegoats, so we repeat—special thought must be given to areas where immigration and overcrowding are associated, in education as in housing.
Therefore, apart from the question of physical concentration, it is general education for better understanding, improved physical environment and special language teaching that are the three outstanding practical points for action. Of the three, the last, as the Circular begins by saying, is the major educational task. Those familiar with areas of heavy West Indian settlement tend to emphasise the former two, but as thfe Circular was principally indebted to experience in the midlands and in Southall it is not surprising that the need for special language teaching is at least paid lip service.
language difficulty ________________
The proportion of immigrant children not speaking English varies more or less inversely to the proportion of West Indians among them. Of the latter it is normally only about 10 to 15 per cent
whose dialect is so heavy as to need special attention. Otherwise, London’s Cypriots show about 25 per cent with no English, and in the very mixed immigrant communities of Birmingham and Leicester the overall figure is about the same. In Nottingham, where West Indians predominate, only 14 per cent of the children need help with the language. However, in the Asian communities in the North and in Smethwick, almost all the new arrivals and 50 to 60 per cent overall have no, or very little, English.
These figures are offered tentatively, in the knowledge that there is no satisfactory standard test of linguistic ability, and that apparent fluency often conceals a deeper inadequacy, which will, however, materially affect the child’s ability to do himself justice educationally, as is rightly recognised in the Circular. But the figures do show that in many places —Bedford with its Italians is another— there is a substantial specialist teaching task to be done. There is plenty of evidence that the schools which most successfully handle the difficulties caused for both sides by the arrival of non-English speaking children, are those which have taken most care in the provision of special teaching arrangements for them, regardless of the exact percentage that they are in the school.
Indeed, we are now left with the conclusion that mere quantity is not the clue to the whole question which Circular, July 1965, seems to think it is. The leadership offered by teachers, the general nature of the community and the provision of special English teaching are the most potent factors. Neither prejudice nor the language problem is automatically geared to quantity. Nor have the Government’s or any other proposals for a dispersal system for immigrant children been linked to the problem of general overcrowding.
dispersal by quota
The counting of heads which the Circular recommends is also undesirable in that it distracts attention away from the
16
more urgent problems which need tackling. The only italicised sentence of the Circular is deferrent to the sensibilities of non-immigrant parents who fear for their own children. It is suggested that one third is a sort of magic ratio below which things will be more or less all right. It is really not possible to attach much meaning to this figure, which is put forward in contradiction of an earlier statement that the proportion which may cause strain cannot be precisely defined. Local factors vary unendingly. The principal variable is the knowledge of English of the children concerned ; others which affect the problems considerably are the previous schooling the children have or have not had, whether they are literate in another language or alphabet, the pre-existing conditions in the school itself and the age at which the pupils arrive there. Also a single linguistic group presents a far more intractable problem than one in which there is a variety of mother tongues. In these circumstances the suggestion that immigrant children should stand up and be counted as such fully deserves being branded as discriminatory as it already has been by many immigrant and inter-racial organisations.
Not only is it impossible to arrive at any one meaningful ratio, but the Department of Education and Science itself has failed to supply a definition of the word immigrant. One enquirer was told that it might mean anyone from overseas or in Britain for the past ten years of immigrant parents. One local education authority has been reported as requiring from head teachers a return of all children of non-European stock—one or both parents—even if born here, but not of European children who do not speak English. So suspicion grows that suggestions for dispersal of school children entail taking this sort of view of the immigration question—that it is colour that really counts.
There are of course great practical difficulties in moving children around, as it usually means a public bussing system. For this reason if for no others several authorities have already announced that
they will ignore the Circular's recommendations. London and Birmingham have been prominent among them. However, three smaller units—Southall, now part of Ealing. West Bromwich and Bradford—had already taken a lead in distribution schemes before the government showed its hand. No undue difficulties appear to have arisen, nor can we yet judge how effective these logistical operations will be in promoting integration. Southall’s and Bradford’s immigrants are largely non-English speaking Asians, and in both cases the bussing scheme is linked to nearly or completely full-time separate tuition for the children based on the need for language training. West Bromwich appears to be treating West Indians and Asians equally—as immigrants to be drawn off equally from the Beeches Road area, where an exceptionally heavy concentration had formed.
The Minister has undoubtedly been impressed by the us Civil Rights movement’s strong support for a quota system. In this instance the experience of the us is a false analogy, since they are trying to break down long established patterns of segregation, while here we are endeavouring, or should be, to prevent such patterns forming in the first place. The immigrant concentrations derive from the housing problem. The long term solution must lie in that direction. The physical moving of school children, quite apart from its infringement on rights of free choice of school, is tackling the symptom and not the cause. However, as the Circular partly suggests, where school catchment areas can be skilfully adjusted in advance, to avoid such a gathering of non-English speaking children as would make special language teaching much more difficult, this should be done. Such adjustments should still permit the choice of school to be within walking distance.
special language teaching
When such a non-English speaking pupil arrives at the school, the question remains as to how exactly special coaching should be organised. Tt is again regret-
17
table that the Circular endorses the full time reception class as the best method.
This system has admittedly worked well in some secondary schools in Islington, and has more in general to recommend it in the case of older or less bright pupils, whose ability to learn a new language easily is less. In Southall, however, there are cases where the class is so full time (and with an immigrant teacher of the same nationality) that there is almost no contact between the language learners and the rest of the school.
This is bad not only for the very obvious social reasons, but because the language itself must be practised and learnt through mixing with English-speaking children. Although, except with very young children it is dangerous to assume that it can be learnt entirely by such mixing, nevertheless too much separation can be opposed on linguistic as well as on social grounds.
Part time teaching can be organised in a number of ways. Birmingham’s system, which could well be imitated more, is to send peripatetic teachers round the schools to teach small groups of children withdrawn from other classes for short periods. They have a team of twelve such teachers, as well as some “centre” schools where there are language specialists on the staff full time. Most of the special English teachers working in Islington and Harringay are also attached permanently to one school since there are so many with enough Cypriot children to occupy one full time teacher. Dudley, Wolverhampton, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester, are a few of those boroughs known to us to employ part time teachers of English for immigrant children. Smethwick’s withdrawal English classes, though handicapped by teacher shortage, have been working excellently, and in no way reflect the bad name the borough has on other points.
Nottingham, with a very large immigrant population, has even successfully persisted in a policy of seeing to these linguistic needs within ordinary classes, by skilful use of group methods, and trying
to maintain a high level of teachers and welfare assistants.
reception centres
The most recent trend is the setting up of reception centres for the special classes. Perhaps the prototype to which these centres can be traced is the Spring Grove scheme in Huddersfield, which, from 1958, catered specially for all immigrant children who needed special instruction in English. By 1961 that part of the school’s work had grown so large that it was made into a full time special English department. Eventually this became larger than the rest of the school and the scheme burst its banks and the burden had to be spread. Though it was shown that it is hopeless to try to channel all non-English speaking children through one school, the plan was a courageous and well intentioned one. The experience there has been drawn on by a number of other boroughs, and one can only hope that Batley, Walsall, Bradford, Bolton and Slough—all of which have quite recently set up reception centres—will not suffer the same fate. These centres are a sort of converse to the dispersal approach, bringing the non-English speakers together for a specific practical purpose as opposed to the spreading of all immigrants, for its own sake. It is extremely important that they should not be so full time that they prevent enough mixing with other children. The sense of identity of the immigrant child must remain with his own school. Evidence already available from the longer established language centres in London, at Islington, Battersea and Camberwell, tells us that instruction on a half daily basis permits this.
So intensive part time teaching of English is essential if Asian and European children are to have a fair chance to benefit from their education here, and if normal class teachers are to do justice to the English speaking majority—for the Circular is correct to say that the rights of all children to their education must be observed. It is useless to ignore the special language problem of some immi-
18
grant children or to try to get by without taking special steps where they are required. We believe that, if a full investigation were made many dark corners would be found in the national picture, where immigrant pupils are thrust unscrupulously into the remedial or esn classes, left unattended at the back of ordinary classes of which they understand nothing, and may even develop a sort of “deafness” to English which will be almost insuperable if tackled later.
teacher training and supply
We have said that teachers in general need to be better prepared for work in multi-racial schools, but there is an equally pressing need for the development of a full scale specialist branch of education in this country in the teaching of English as a second language. Institutes of education can certainly do more than, with some honourable exceptions such as Leeds, they have done. The five university departments in this field should be assisted by grants to look more at the situation in this country as well as overseas. A sixth such department is needed at Birmingham to serve the West Midlands. They should guide and assist the training colleges in regions of high immigrant settlement to specialise also. Only thus will the increased teacher quotas have proper meaning.
Moreover, experience must be collected and new techniques and materials developed in a national research and information centre in this field. We trust that the hope for this held out in paragraph 17 of the circular will be implemented as soon as possible. The Circular’s pious hope that colleges of education “can be expected” to play their part is meaningless unless attached to a practical and financially supported programme such as has been suggested. Playing some part in this process will be immigrant teachers and welfare assistants. It is horrifying to learn that of three thousand immigrants admitted as teachers, only two hundred are now in the classroom. Mainly to blame is the lack of co-ordination between Govern-
ment departments, which means that a Ministry of Labour voucher is no guarantee of recognition by education authorities. Some immigrant applicants have to be rejected because of their own inadequate spoken English, while fear of prejudice deters some potential employers.
But it is quite wrong to employ immigrant teachers specifically in connection with specialist teaching of immigrant children. Whereas coloured teachers will normally be a measure of, and a contribution to, integration, an immigrant teacher with an immigrant class will only serve to underline the differences between the two communities. Social considerations apart, in such classes both teachers and pupils know that they can fall back on their vernacular and the learning of English is correspondingly retarded. But immigrants may often be able to assist with the problems of very fresh arrivals from overseas in the capacity of welfare assistant. Pre-school play groups are also of great importance in securing integration at the earliest stages. Problems that arise in schools in immigrant areas are going to be solved by education not logistics. Many schools and local authorities are getting on quite happily with percentages of immigrant children far in excess of that recommended by the Circular. Redistribution is not in itself a solution. The arrangements made within each school after the bus draws up at the door, wherever the bus comes from, are the vital point.
HOUSING
The presence of immigrants need not of itself create social tensions, despite the Government’s assertion to the contrary at one point in its white paper (para 32:	cf para 38). According to
the Milner Holland Report unsatisfactory living conditions among immigrants in the form of overcrowding are caused because immigrants “in a number of respects are often shamelessly exploited” and “do not receive sufficient reliable professional help and advice” with the direct consequence that, having on account of their acute need bought unsuit-
19
able properties at high prices and involved themselves in expensive mortgages, they overcrowd in order to meet their commitments. “The plight of the immigrant,” says Milner Holland,’ is the outcome, and too often an extreme example of London’s housing difficulties: it is not their cause” (p202).
As newcomers, and sometimes fairly nomadic newcomers, immigrants have at present a very low priority for obtaining local authority housing. The survey ol parts of North Kensington undertaken by the Centre for Urban Studies points the paradox: “The very people who are not wanted on the local housing market are needed for the local labour market." The Milner Holland Report found that in Greater London there is a marked degree of reluctance among private landlords to let to coloured tenants and that where such lettings do occur the rents are in general higher (pi89).
The paucity of rented property in the public or in the shrinking private sector available to coloured immigrants had led to them buying houses on a large scale, frequently in neighbourhoods where the houses are too decrepit for middle class tastes and too large for working class pockets. The situation is excellently summarised by the Milner Holland Report: “Unfortunately these immigrants are all too often the victims ... of exploitation by a disreputable fringe of persons making quick profits out of their difficulties, such as the self-styled but quite unqualified estate agent, the unscrupulous mortgage broker and the providers of loans on mortgage at high rates of interest. A very common end result of the activitnes of these gentlemen is that the immigrant purchaser finds himself the owner or indifferent, often downright bad, property, for which he has paid too high a price, saddled with liabilities for rates, interest and mortgage repayments far beyond his means and with obligations for repairs which he has no hope of fulfilling. These factors inevitably bring in their train high rents and overcrowding in an attempt to meet high running costs . . . We are in no doubt that this general picture is valid for a substantial
number of coloured immigrants who have purchased London houses” (pl89).
Discrimination in private housing could be dealt with by the proposed conciliation committees to be set up under the Race Relations Bill. The Bill should have been extended in this way. The New York State Commission for Human Rights, in its report for 1962, says of housing, “The Commission has achieved successful conciliations in complaint after complaint, rarely needing public hearings or other enforcement devices. The overwhelming majority of respondents are anxious to conciliate complaints brought against them and in the process of conciliation gain a greater respect for the law and its necessity”.
multi-occupation
The sale value'of rented property which becomes multi-occupied, generally appreciates unless the property is held under the fag end of a long lease. It is likely to appreciate more rapidly with the advent of rent regulation. Therefore, once a house becomes multi-occupied it is unlikely that the process will be reversed without positive steps being taken. This reversal will not occur unless local authorities take responsibility for those who are decanted by enforcement measures. By and large the character of a neighbourhood goes down as the number of people in the houses in that neighbourhood goes up. Unless higher priority is given to the occupants of overcrowded dwellings in the competition for council houses areas which are far from being slums at present will deteriorate dramatically, and the danger is that where the process starts in a particular area pressure from housing associations in adjacent areas will lead to attempts to confine multi-occupation to that area, where it might accordingly become widespread. This in its turn could lead to that area being regarded as a predominantly immigrant one, for as the Milner Holland Report stated, and this is doubtless of general application, “It is clear that recent immigrants are more often found in crowded conditions and in shared
20
houses than native born Londoners
(p202).
The white paper says that the Minister of Housing is examining the statutory powers to improve conditions in multioccupied houses with a view to making them more effective, and is considering introducing legislation to require registration of houses before multi-occupation is allowed to occur (para 38). Such legislation may well, following the precedent of the Birmingham Corporation Bill 1965 (which is designed to ensure that within that city adequate conversion is effected before multi-occupation can take place), include power to refuse registration if the house “is situated in a locality which renders it unsuitable” for multi-occupa-tion. This power is open to serious abuse. Instead of being used in certain instances to prevent any further multi-occupation in an area where it is already common it may well be used extensively to restrict multi-occupation to the areas where it already exists in some measure. Also open to abuse is the power in the Bill to refuse registration to any individual whom the Corporation considers unsuitable to operate a house in multi-occupation. At present some local authorities arrange and rearrange their slum clearance and other development scheme so that the neighbourhoods which have had a recent influx of immigrants are never included within them. Professor Rex in New Society cited a plan to redevelop Sparkbrook which had been rejected because, according to a member of the public works committee, “600 immigrant families would have to be rehoused” (12 August 1965).
residential qualifications
The white paper says: “As time goes on immigrants will qualify for rehousing by local authorities either by virtue of residential qualifications or through being displaced by slum clearance or other redevelopment. Thus it will become commonplace for Commonwealth immigrants to be rehoused by local authorities in pursuance of their , normal statutory responsibilities” (para 36). As a pre-
diction for the forseeable future this is unduly sanguine, to say the least, and as an excuse for doing nothing in the present it does not stand up to examination.
Vacancies in council houses are allocated broadly to two classes of persons, to those on the council waiting list and to those who have been displaced from their existing homes as a result of schemes involving demolition. According to Milner Holland (pi27) in the last three or four years more than half the vacancies which became available in council dwellings in Greater London have been filled by those displaced from their existing homes as a result of slum clearance and the like. In some London boroughs the proportion is very much higher than this, and is likely to increase. The effect is that a growing proportion of cases may jump the queue. As far as waiting lists are concerned, residential qualifications exist in three ways: firstly, there may be a requirement that the applicant must reside in the area of the authority at the time of applying for his name to be placed on the list (though employment in the area is sometimes sufficient); secondly, there may in addition be a requirement that before his name goes on the list he should have resided in the area for a specified number of years ; and, thirdly, once an applicant is on the list his position in it may be determined by a points scheme which is explicitly loaded in favour of those who have been in the area for many years and against newcomers to the area even, except in rare cases, if they are key workers. The third way is often the most important in practice, if only because in many cases a person would not be able to get to the top of the list within the specified number of years in any case.
Those most inadequately housed tend to be the newcomers to an area, which means that those who are most discriminated against are often those who are most in need. The excuse invariably given is that residential qualifications prevent people coming into the area of the authority with a view to living in bad conditions and becoming eligible for council housing shortly after arrival
21
ahead of people who have been on the waiting list for many years. This somewhat fanciful picture, which rather plays down the fact that migrants are attracted to an area because of employment prospects and often despite the absence of rather than because of the presence of housing opportunities, is perhaps plausible as long as some authorities have a residential qualification and others do not. Part of the answer would be for none of them to have it. The abolition of residential qualifications was recommended in 1955 in a Report by a subcommittee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee, recently approved by the Milner Holland Report (pl25), and the Commonwealth Immigrants’ Advisory Council Report (Cmnd 2796, para 13), and also, somewhat gingerly by a recent Ministry of Housing Circular (No. 22/ 65). Mr. Mellish has said: “Their effect is to delay the examination of need until other tests, unrelated to housing conditions, have been satisfied. We are anxious to do all we can to get them abolished, or, at least, reduced to a minimum”. (.South London Press, 22 October, 1965). The white paper states that the Government’s maxim in housing policy is as follows: “The sole test for action in the housing field is the quality and nature of housing need without distinctions based on the origins of those in need” (para 35). As long as local authorities make distinctions based on origin and do not regard the nature and quality of need as the paramount consideration, the Government’s expressed philosophy as well as the need for industrial mobility requires that it should take its own measures to improve the lot of immigrants in housing. This is not giving preferential treatment to a particular class of persons: it is nothing more than a corrective to the discrimination which is practised against them and an elementary measure to put them on an equal footing. Extreme instances abound. The Milner Holland Report found one points scheme that gave twice as many points for British nationality as for damp and insanitary conditions (pi29), and recently the Conservative minority on the council of the London Borough of Ealing, which includes Southall, moved an amendment stipu-
lating a 15 year residential qualification on immigrants before they could join the housing list, and a five year qualification for British born residents, the amendment being supported by five Labour councillors who revolted. One other abstained. Deptford Council bought up houses in a circle round the “Caribbean quarter” to let to white people, and Smethwick Council sought to buy up houses in Marshall Street, where a number of coloured families have their homes, for resale to white purchasers, without apparently, in either case, wishing at the same time to buy up houses in exclusively or preponderantly white areas for resale at market prices to coloured purchasers.
Nonetheless, these blatant cases apart, the general position as outlined above is such, in effect if not in intention, that it is not enough for Mr Crossman to say, as he did to the Institute of Housing Managers: “Allocation must be done on the basis of need, regardless of colour, race or creed. This will be the responsibility of the councils concerned.” (The Times, 17 September 1965). Responsibility lies with the Government:	local
authorities are unlikely to do this themselves.
HEALTH
As the white paper says, any discussion of immigrants and the Health Service must begin by stressing the contribution which immigrants make to the service. (Cmnd 2739, para 27). Our shortage of nurses and doctors is notorious, and we are heavily dependent on immigrants in both these fields. The proportion of immigrant nurses in the metropolitan area is approximately 17 per cent, and the proportion of immigrant hospital doctors in the whole country is at least 40 per cent. Those people, whether cryptoracialist or simply ill informed, who grudge the demands which immigrants make on the Health Service should ask themselves whether, if we lost the services of immigrants, there would be a health service on which anyone, immigrant or non-immigrant, could make very many demands. They should also ask
22
how many cleaning and catering staff would be available to hospitals if there were no substantial number of immigrants in this country. The contribution which immigrants put into the Health Service in labour alone, even without considering the taxes they pay, more than matches anything they take out of it. If such comparisons were more widely made, it would soon be realised that they are odious. The service exists to relieve ill health, not to reckon up a profit and loss account for sections of individual members of the community.
housing conditions
Once these arguments are disposed of, it is possible to discuss the practical problems raised by certain diseases and medical needs among the various immigrant communities. One disease which is more prevalent among many immigrant communities than among others is tb. This is not a problem which can be entirely, or even largely, met by the much publicised means of health checks at entry, since the latest information available suggests that the majority of illnesses among immigrants are contracted after arrival (Cmnd 2739, para 27).
The problem is then largely one of medical and social conditions in Britain. The latest figures available for the London area give a rate of tb among the white English population of 5 per 1,000. The corresponding figures for immigrant communities are:
Irish 20 per 1,000
Cypriots 20 per 1,000
Indians and Pakistanis 30 per 1,000
West Indians 8 per 1,000
Africans 13 per 1,000
(paper by R. V. Freeman, Islington moh,
to the Socialist Medical Association, 23
June 1965).
These figures, like many others, show an immigrant problem, but not a colour problem:	the	figures for Irish and
Cypriots are far higher than those for West Indians. The exceptionally high figure for Indians and Pakistanis may be
partly explained on climatic grounds. Among those who work in the mills at Bradford, the high tb figures can be partly explained on occupational health grounds: they are doing jobs which few English people now want to do, and should not be penalised for incurring the health risks involved. But neither of these explanations will do for the Irish: Ireland is not, for example, famed for the dryness of its climate. Some part, at least, of the explanation for high tb figures among immigrants must be in terms which cover the Irish as well as the Asians. The most obvious difficulty which is common to both these groups is bad housing. It seems likely that damp and overcrowded conditions are one of the chief causes of tb in immigrant communities. This conclusion is confirmed by the white paper, which is more adequate on health than on many other questions (Cmnd 2739, para 55). The problem must then be tackled by improvements in the housing situation. Meanwhile, the Government should continue its efforts, which we welcome, to make x-ray examination and bgc vaccination for children, more widely available, and their existence more widely known. This, like many other reforms whose necessity has been highlighted by the presence of immigrants, would be needed even if there were no immigrants in this country, tb is not confined to immigrants, and measures for its prevention or earlier detection would be desirable even if they made no impact whatever on the immigrants’ problems.
maternity beds
Another medical need which has recently been much discussed is that for maternity beds. Here again a large proportion of the demand comes from the Irish. At Park Royal Hospital in June 1965, 35 per cent of maternity beds were occupied by the Irish, as against 16 per cent by West Indians, and 4 per cent by other immigrants (The Times, 25 June, 1965). The demand for maternity beds cannot be entirely explained in terms of birth rate, since one of the factors taken into account in allocating maternity beds is
23
housing, and here again we return to the difficulties of immigrants in finding good housing. Confinements are obviously undesirable in conditions of statutory overcrowding (over 1.5 people per room), and so long as the proportion of housing available to immigrants is small enough to drive them into overcrowded conditions, so long, whatever their birth rate, they will continue to make a heavy demand on maternity beds in hospitals. The hospital building programme is at present under review, and we would recommend an increase in the number and proportion of maternity beds allotted, not only or specifically to immigrant areas, but to areas with severe overcrowding or other bad housing conditions. This problem has been highlighted by the collection of statistics about immigrants, but there is no reason to suppose that it is confined to them.
The adoption of family planning by immigrants is likely to be in proportion to the increase in their standard of living and their integration with the rest of the community. Since information about family planning is often passed on in conversation between friends, the more the immigrants are cold shouldered, the less they are likely to learn about family planning. Meanwhile, Derby Corporation is attempting to get information across to women who do not speak English, by means of a booklet relying heavily on illustrations. Dr. Vyner Leyshon, the Derby moh, said: “Many immigrants who cannot speak English have become citizens of our town, and have a right to be told of the methods of birth control available to them” (The Times, 19 August 1965).
false alarms
Another common subject of agitation has been vd. This again, is not peculiarly, or even particularly, an immigrant problem. The World Health Organisation has found that the rise in vd has been worldwide, and exists in countries like Denmark and Sweden, which have no immigrant communities. (The Times, 20 January 1965). It is, however, a disease
which has always been common among communities of men without their womenfolk, and particularly in a strange country. It is also an illness about which the public has been peculiarly ready to find scapegoats. We have no recommendations for tackling the world wide medical problem. That part of the problem which relates to immigrants is best tackled by continuing the policy of allowing dependants, including common law wives, to join the men of their families here. Since 1963 the vd statistics among West Indians have dropped, and there is every reason to suppose that this is connected with the decline in the proportion of single men among the West Indian population.
Another illness occasionally found among immigrants, and often given a publicity out of all proportion to the cases involved, is typhoid. This, too, is not a specifically immigrant disease. The two biggest outbreaks of typhoid involving British citizens in recent years have been those at Aberdeen and at Zermatt. The risk of typhoid is probably more frequently met during holidays abroad than by people who come in contact with immigrants in this country. Inoculation is already available to those who ask for it, and gps and mohs should encourage the public to take the opportunity. The Ministry of Health should give any necessary help with the provision of vaccine, as it does with the bcg vaccine for tuberculosis. This, too, would be a sound and useful measure if there were no immigrants in this country at all. The same points apply to smallpox as to typhoid. Other diseases about which propaganda is made, such as leprosy, are not found in any significant numbers, and in spite of all popular belief to the contrary leprosy is barely a contagious disease. Most other tropical infections do not flourish in the British climate, and need not cause alarm.
information
One other problem must be considered: that of providing information. This must be a two way process. Immigrants need
24
information on arrival about the Health Service (and other social services) and mohs could benefit from information about the arrival of immigrants in their area. This is particularly important in order to ensure that immigrants register with a doctor on arrival in this country. Attempts are now being made by port authorities to tell immigrants about the health services available, and to notify local authorities to whose areas they are going of their impending arrival. If these attempts prove inadequate, there might be a strong case for reviving and extending a scheme which has in the past been used for Cypriots. Before the independence of Cyprus, Cypriots intending to come to Britain were bound to inform the government of Cyprus of their intention, giving an address, or at least a local authority area, to which they intended to come. The Cyprus government then sent on these notifications to its Commissioner in London, who in turn would notify the relevant local authority. It was then the local authority’s duty to visit the newly arrived immigrant, to give him any necessary information about health and welfare services in his area, and to report back to the Cyprus commissioner in London on his housing conditions. This scheme did involve that acceptance of responsibility for newly arrived immigrants which has often been conspicuously lacking. It could also help to prevent undue concentration in a few towns.
health checks
Finally, we must discuss the vexed question of health checks on entry or in immigrants’ countries of origin. Any consideration of health questions strongly reinforces the argument we have already put forward, that whatever tests the Government institutes should apply to the southern Irish, equally with other immigrants, both Commonwealth and alien. There is a medical case for health checks, but it is not a case based on any special risks involved in immigration. It is simply that there is always a case for detecting and treating ill health wherever possible. If the motive for health checks is to be simply this, they could be justi-
fied. But if they are to be based on any argument of special health risks caused by immigration, the white paper itself does not support such an argument (Cmnd 2739, para 27). The validity of any arguments for health tests depends on the motives with which they are put forward. For what motives are health tests recommended?
FRIENDSHIP COUNCILS
There have always been bodies which came into special contact with the immigrant population: and in areas where immigrants have settled, welfare groups directed solely to immigrants’ interests have existed for fifteen years, such as the Birmingham Co-ordinating Committee for work among Commonwealth immigrants, and the Bristol Colonial Workers’ Welfare Committee. However, the real impetus to community participation in solving the problems of multi-racial living came with the initiatives of the London Council for Social Services, a body financed by the lcc, and responsible for co-ordinating all the social services, statutory and voluntary.
In 1957 this body set up an Immigrants’ Advisory Committee, one of whose major activities is encouraging local authorities to sponsor friendship councils. These have a variety of names. In the white paper they are described as “voluntary liaison committees”. They are intended to engage representatives of as many local groups as possible, and also enthusiastic individuals, in promoting racial harmony and attempting to solve particular problems which impede it.
The Immigrants’ Advisory Council recommends that local authorities should sponsor their friendship councils in the following concrete ways:
The Mayor should call the first public meeting to propose the formation of the Council, so that its creation is clearly an act of the representative and officially elected delegates of the whole community. A frienship council’s work is to benefit the community as a whole, not
25
any particular group. It is the community which is degraded and demoralised by prejudice and discrimination.
Officers of the local authority, such as the housing manager and the leader of the council, should be represented.
A room and secretarial facilities should be offered in the town hall.	____
It is also strongly recommended that a full time paid officer be appointed, on whom will devolve the main responsibility for field work.
There were at the time of the publication of the white paper about 30 such friendship councils up and down the country, though not all of them have received much local government support. They are in a good position to alter the atmosphere of their communities. They are able to expose its injustices, and condemn discrimination in such a “respectable” way that the extreme and deeply prejudiced minority is pushed out of the limits of respectability. It then loses the power to occupy an apparently moderate position, and so the power to attract the support of many by no means bigoted people whose sympathies are uncertain. But although the composition of the councils is multiracial, their real effect is on the “host” community. They have no teeth, and much discrimination is still condoned by law, particularly in the essentials of housing and employment. This is not, however, to argue that they should have statutory powers. On the contrary, their function is one of education. But their task is made harder by the absence of local conciliation committees with statutory powers to handle the tough cases of discrimination.
the white paper
The discussion of voluntary liaison committees takes up paragraphs 61-75 of the Government’s white paper: exactly a third of Part III on integration. This is a more substantial discussion than is devoted to any of the other problems of integration. This section is perhaps more
fully thought out than other parts of the white paper, and the analysis of the situation is a good one. The chief needs of voluntary liaison committees are those described by the Government: co-ordin-ation, full time paid officials, secretarial staff and permanent premises. Unfortunately, the proposals for action are not as good as the description of the needs: they are far less definite and categorical, and the Government must be judged on the interpretation they give to these phrases in their future actions. Unfortunately, the greatest need at the moment is money, and money is the one thing which at the moment the Government finds it hardest to supply. The obscurity of paragraph 75, though regrettable, is perhaps not surprising. We are not told, for example, what the “certain circumstances” may be under which the Government would make a grant towards the salary of a full time official. Nor is it clear how far towards the official’s salary such a grant might extend. It is of course true, in the words of the white paper, that “a degree of autonomy is necessary if the committee is to remain free from party political influence and other partisan pressures”, but such autonomy is quite compatible with considerable financial support from the Government.
Tt is regrettable that the recommendation on office accommodation and secretarial support goes no farther than expressing the hope that local authorities will provide them—a hope which at the moment can only be regarded as pious. Few local authorities are in a position to undertake extra burdens on the rates, and the existence of such a burden on the rates in immigrant areas might help to create just that ill will against the committees among long established local inhabitants which it is essential to avoid. There have been many recent proposals for transferring particular forms of expenditure from rates to the Exchequer, and among them this must surely have a very high priority. It is essential that these committees should in the near future develop a substantial administrative organisation to underpin increasing community participation. The Government have the ideas: will they provide Treasury support?
4.	employment
It is work that draws most coloured immigrants to Britain. They come as there is little or no employment for their skills at home on the level of remuneration they can expect here. Most come intending to return home, and send home a proportion of their earnings. But as time goes on a large number, particularly West Indians, are joined by their families. Children are born and educated here. Soon a quite new generation will come on to the labour market, seeking the career which ought to be open to their talents. It is because of what may happen to them that the problem of double standards in allocating jobs must be tackled now.
Most of the expanding West European economies have relied fairly heavily on immigrant labour to prevent them hitting the “full employment ceiling” generally, “the nations which grow fastest are those which have to hedge their bets least” (Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, p49). Some, like West Germany and Switzerland have drawn from other European countries, notably employing single contract workers, living in camps and hostels. Before the Immigrants Act Britain drew on the Commonwealth as a source of cheap, mobile labour. The pre-1961 statistics show a direct correlation between numbers of immigrants coming into Britain and the state of the economv. Thus the entry fell for the first time for some years in 1958, and even farther in 1959. recovering in 1960 as the British economy was seen to be booming.
The immigrants from the Commonwealth dispersed to the main urban centres where work was to be found. That they found it, is shown by a Government report (Census 1961 ; Commonwealth Immigrants in the Conurbations, hmso), based on a 10 per cent sample of immigrants living in six major conurbations at the time of the 1961 census, 94 per cent of them were regularly employed, against 97 per cent for the working population as a whole. They were scattered through a wide variety of industries, with the four largest employment groupings being the health services,
mainly nurses, road and railway passenger transport, catering and the construction industries. But all these groups together only comprised a quarter of the immigrant working population. Trade and white collar occupations had admitted a disproportionately small number of immigrants; there were for example 20 West Indian nurses to every shop assistant (The Times, 30 lune 1965). Ruth Glass remarked of the census findings that “the only urban jobs in which no single coloured immigrant could be found were those of ministers of the Crown, mps, policemen and chimney sweeps”.
social cost and economic need
No one would wish to underestimate the social cost of the 1960-61 immigrant influx when added to years of neglect of domestic problems. The Economist (28 August 1965) reflected, “. . . in the 1950s it all looked simple enough. Britain was short of labour, particularly for the dreary, or the dirty, or the underpaid jobs . . . The fact that by importing coloured workers, and doing precisely nothing about how and where they might live, we might be also importing a coloured problem occurred to hardly anyone”.
In the furore leading up to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act everyone began to count the cost. The Pakistani was still welcome to work the night shift in obsolescent mills. The West Indian would not be turned away from the bus companies, or the hospitals. Within the confines of their work immigrants received slow but progressive acceptance from their workmates, but in 1964 pressure began to build up for stringent controls on immigrant labour, far beyond the 1962 Act. Whereas in the 1950s social considerations had been conveniently ignored, so now were most of the restrictionst lobby forgetting the economic costs of slamming the door. If they were remembered it was with a mixture of long range forecasting and deep pessimism about race relations. Thus Mr. Norman Pannell: “If, during
27
the necessary process of readjustment in British industry, redundancy occurs on any scale, immigrants, as the latest entrants, are likely to be the first to be dispensed with”. The main economic case for a shutdown on immigration was that immigrants are drawn to areas of static productivity and low wages, bringing with them a high birthrate and low standard of education, further to burden our housing, education and welfare services. Alfred Sherman, putting this case in the Daily Telegraph estimated a built-in demand for labour by overmanned industries so serious that it could only be cured by a halt to immigration, and higher wages for services now heavily dependent on immigrant labour. By cutting entry permits to 7,500 professional and skilled workers from the Commonwealth, as the August white paper proposes, the Government would seem to be falling into line with this view, if one accepts the charitable view of the motives behind that document. But how serious was the inflow of 1954, and what in the view of the Government’s own planners is the demand situation for immigrant labour?
restrictions and projections
[n 1964 42,584 aliens came to Britain to work, almost half of them for less than one year. We have heard few objections about their presence, or the vital modernisation processes which they are impeding. The great majority, of course* came from Europe. In the same year the Government issued 20,000 vouchers to Commonwealth citizens, of which 14,705 were taken up by immigrant workers. Total migration of Commonwealth citizens was
	Admitted	Embarked	balance
India	44,468	28,955	15,513
Pakistan	27,266	16,286	10,980
Jamaica	18,697	10,149	8,548
Canada	119,414	112,146	7,268
Australia	71,458	65,896	5,562
Cyprus	9,144	4,853	4,291
Nigeria	11,543	8,919	2,626
The net increase in the population of Commonwealth origin for 1964 is estim-
ated at 75,499, divided roughly equally between men, women and children under 16 (Commonwealth Immigrants Act,
1962, Statistics 1964, Cmnd 6658). There was a marked increase in dependants joining their families, and only half the number of voucher holders entering in
1963	came in. If this inflow from all the countries of the Commonwealth, including the white Dominions, so terrified the Government, it is important to ask why they did not now have second thoughts about the Irish, 30,000 of whom came in the same period. Yet the Government in its white paper limited its estimate of what the country could absorb to 7,500 entry permits largely limited to professional and skilled immigrant workers. No similar new restrictions have been thought necessary in the case of aliens or Irish citizens.
In economic terms is the figure of 7,500 ( plus 1000 Maltese) one that makes any sense at all? Two recent massive surveys suggest that it is not. The recent niesr survey (“The British Economy in 1975,"’ W. Beckerman and associates, chap 3, p73-80) suggests that in the next ten years Britain will, in fact, have a shrinking proportion of the population at work. By 1975 it anticipated that the proportion of the total population that will be of working age will have fallen to 58 per cent from 64.3 per cent in 1950. The survey says:
“The costly social capital needs of an expanding population will not be offset by a corresponding increase in the population of working age. Between 1960 and 1975 _we expect (it) to rise by only 1.6 million, out of a population increase of 6.7 million; about half of this is due to the assumption about the exceedingly uncertain amount of net immigration.”
The survey accepted a projection of net immigration of just over 40,000 a year from 1962-75, based on the Government Actuary’s department forecasts in
1963. Its estimates of what would be needed to produce an average annual 3.8 per cent rate of growth up to 1975 were of course made before Commonwealth immigration was subjected to proposals
28
for further restriction, in the August white paper. Yet even then the niesr accepted that the labour market would get progessively tighter, with married women necessarily playing a greater role, and greater mobility towards the growth industries needed. The whole point about immigrant labour from the Commonwealth has been its willingness to move where labour is needed, rather than the numerical strength it has added to the total labour force, under used as that may admittedly be in some areas. Also, as Mrs. Glass has pointed out (The Times, 30 June 1963), immigrants tend to have a higher proportion of working people to dependents than the average, and the highest proportion of married women at work. The niesr survey states: “The problem of the capacity of the labout market to absorb a much higher net immigration would only be serious if net immigration represented a particularly abnormal or unfavourable age or occupation structure . . . But, in fact, the reverse seems to be the case”.
The National Plan
The Government white paper had suggested that the Government had decided that the high social cost of Commonwealth immigration outweighed the need for more manpower; the National Plan, published one month later, suggested that it might have to think again. In May a report of the National Economic Development Council had indicated a probable labour shortage in the area of 300,000 by 1970. The National Plan states simply (The National Plan, p25), “The demands for extra manpower total about 800,000 over the plan period. This compares with an expected increase in the labour force of about 400,000, which might be raised to about 600,000 as a result of successful policies designed to use more fully the labour reserves in the less prosperous regions. There would still remain, however, a manpower gap of some 200,000.” With the total working population expected to rise by no more than 0.25 per cent per annum, achievement of the projected 25 per cent growth in output by 1970 will obviously be ex-
tremely difficult. The Plan’s exhortations for a more efficient use of labour will still leave a manpower gap, which could have been filled by immigrant labour, admitted at a rate of perhaps 50,000 per annum, in all voucher categories, as the need for them dictated. According to the Plan, the following sectors of the economy will have the heaviest increase, in thousands, in the demand for labour, over 1964:
1964	1970
manufacturing	9,016	9,308	+292
health & education 2,352	2,812	+460
miscel. services	2,190	2,296	+106
public administration and defence	1,730	2,296	+99
construction	1,802	1,900	+98
These are areas where immigrant labour has already made a particular contribution. The entry of around 7,500 A and B category immigrants will not make much impact on the labour force, Presumably the Government calculates that the marginal cost of Commonwealth immigration is much higher than that of the increasing number of aliens now entering the country to work. By leaving the latter alone it has created the impression that the prime reason for its timidity is colour. The firms which have been recruiting in the Commonwealth will look elsewhere; indeed, according to the Jamaican Minister of Labour they are already doing so (The Guardian, 17 August 1965). As this goes on the contrast between assimilation measures and immigration policy will grow, making the former more difficult to implement. And the labour our economy needed will be lost, or picked up piecemeal in the safe white southlands of Europe.
immigrants at work
For the immigrant arriving in this country without a job, in the old C voucher days, the problem of finding one was not too difficult. Mrs. Glass notes from the 1961 census, when uncontrolled immigration was at its peak, that only six per cent of Commonwealth immigrants were unemployed, though a large number
29
had only just arrived in the country. The work was often work which white labour would not touch. Employers, if it meant the difference between a job done and a job left undone, usually overruled any protests from white labour, mindful that they were there to maximise profits. Profits, at least, are colour blind. Thus there has been over the last ten years a series of minor and swiftly stifled explosions over the initial employment of coloured labour even where they provided no threat to anyone’s job. There was initial resistance to working with coloured bus conductors at Nottingham in 1954, with coloured nurses in Swansea in 1955, and somewhere in most years since. What has usually happened has been that the employers have resisted the pressure, the unions concerned have eventually called a meeting, and the men have been told that their intolerance runs counter to union principles. Occasionally a whole union branch rebels on the issue—as at the Alcan factory in Banbury in 1962. Usually the early resistance evaporates and, at work more than anywhere else, the immigrants are first tolerated and then respected. Fewer than one in ten white workers, questioned in a survey at Nottingham (“West Indians at Work", New Society, 2 July 1964), said they could not get on with coloured workmates.
Nevertheless both management and unions could do far more for this level of coloured, unskilled or semi-skilled worker. We know of very few unions which run special courses for its local branch officials or rank and file on the assimilation of immigrant recruits, nor managers who would affirm that they are there to do more than hire and fire when immigrants feel neglected or cut off. The immigrants are often ignorant of union procedures, as the chairman of the Leicester campaign for racial equality, Mr. Dipak Nandy, recently pointed out (The Times, 1 September 1965): “Questions are always being raised about why do not immigrants join trade unions and why do they not attend branch meetings. Some immigrants feel that these are organisations which are outside them, and they cannot see any point in belonging
to the union or doing anything for it.” Union leaders in Leicester have agreed to join the Leicester campaign in organising a series of lectures on trade unionism, and working with a sub-committee investigating complaints of exploitation. Many more unions should follow this example.
What happens when there is complete alienation of the immigrant labour force is illustrated by the recent strike at a Courtaulds mill in Preston, which employed a large number of coloured immigrants from India, Pakistan and the West Indies, about 750 out of a total 2,400 working force (J. Arthur Torode, New Society, 17 June 1965, “Race moves in on the unions”).
Here, at the Red Scar mill, an agreement between Courtaulds and the t & gwu about increasing productivity on the rayon spindles, was upset by a violent explosion of anger by the coloured labour force at the factory. They claimed that they had not been consulted, that there was deliberate exploitation by firm and union behind their backs. The meeting at which the decision was ratified had been attended by only six immigrants, out of 750 working at the mill. The union, which had published recruiting leaflets in urdu, was enraged that this apathy should be followed by such accusations. Within days the press, the Racial Action Adjustment Society, and a host of self appointed advisers descended on the strikers. This situation was not the great racial incident it was then proclaimed ; it was the result of a firm taking many immigrants workers to do some of its most unpleasant jobs, and then doing nothing to help them settle in ; it was the result of a major union accepting coloured members, but refusing to make any special arrangements for them, on the grounds that dissimilar treatment would only aggravate racial tension, or create it where none existed Only three shop stewards out of 28 at Red Scar, were immigrants, when they comprised one third of the labour force. The personnel officer was quoted as saying: “The social life of immigrants is not company business. We do nothing at
30
all about it”. There are many factories like Red Scar, and unless something is done about it there will be more outbursts from isolated immigrant workers.
the problem of promotion
The men at Red Scar claimed that they had no pathway to promotion. In that they would probably be echoed by many more of their compatriots than would ever come out on strike. For management shows a great reluctance to promote coloured labour to supervisory roles. A number of reason are advanced for this, the first is that there is a high turnover of immigrant labour, that it is very difficult to persuade them to stay in one job for very long. This alleged fickleness is not something borne out b> the few available surveys of immigrants who have lived for any period in one town. “Although nearly six in ten have been in this country for less than three and a half years, over four in ten had been with their present employers more than three years” (“West Indians at work”, New Society, 2 July 1965). There is undoubtedly some resistance to the promotion of craftsmen who have not served the appropriate apprenticeship from the craft unions, and far more often firms allege that harmonious relations with the unions are only possible if the promotion of immigrants is slowed down. The manager of a factory will feel that this discrimination will not be noticed as immigrants are (a) newly arrived, and (b) thought to be always on the move. But neither of these qualifications will apply in future. Employers will now be dealing, not with immigrant workers, but with coloured workers settled with their families in one town and one occupation long enough to understand what they should be entitled to expect in promotion. An executive of a Slough dyeworks (“We like Pakistanis because they don’t show the colour”) told us that there would be a union explosion if coloured workers were promoted to supervisor.
The various municipal bus companies, which have always employed large num-
bers of immigrants (with exceptional disputes over the principle, as at Bristol in 1963) have not shown themselves very ready to promote coloured conductors to drivers and above. The figures released by London Transport this year show that 29 per cent of male conductors are coloured, but only 7.4 per cent of drivers. There are no coloured inspectors at all out of nearly 4,500 coloured employees. London Transport, who recruit specially in Barbados, claim that this is merely because no suitable applicant has yet come forward. In fact, as with the question of coloured policemen, this excuse conceals the larger one about the social readiness of the community to accept orders, investigation, or control from a coloured man.
discrimination in employment
The root of the problem is, then, upward mobility and the confrontation with middle class prejudice. Surveys carried out by the New York State Commission for human rights have shown that in New York minority groups can find initial employment but not subsequent advancement. There are signs that the same problem is now present here on a large scale. An increasing number of children born to immigrant families in this country, or at least educated here, will not tolerate the unpleasant jobs their fathers secured on arrival. But they are met by an inpenetrable wall of polite rejection. White collar jobs are very largely reserved—unofficially—for white faced people. Firms say the customer will not like it. Personnel officers talk of trouble in the typing pool. In a survey carried out by the Observer (3 May 1964) employment agencies were questioned as to why almost all advertisements placed with them stated “regret no overseas applicants for this post”. Firms advertising were queried. The ici point division in Slough had “at this particular moment no coloured shop floor workers on the pay roll”. An executive of one of the oil companies said that sensitivity counted against coloured applicants, “We didn’t have the position for him and he felt he was being held
31
back because of his colour. This is where the little chip on the shoulder comes in.” The banks and insurance companies either refuse to talk or said that they would have to see in the future whether a few coloured staff could be used. “Obviously this is a service industry, and we have to provide the sort of service that the customers want. Before I could give an answer on this we would have to test the market.”
The big London stores, queried on the absence of coloured serving staff either talked of hypothetical scenes in which the coloured sales girl would be insulted by foaming racialists from “the wrong part of America,” or gave the refusal direct as at the British Home Stores in Lewisham, “I am sorry dear, I am afraid we don’t take coloured people at all” ; or the refusal polite as at Harrods, “We have many coloured workers, but it is quite true that we have not yet got them as sales assistants. The management’s view on the sales side is rather like, I believe, that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police . . .” Few people will admit to prejudice of their own. The customer or the white staff are usually blamed. But that prejudice is not abating. The youth employment officer for Willenhall said in his half yearly report back in 1962 of his area of the West Midlands, “by far the largest proportion of the firms in my area refuse to employ coloured people at all.” The third report of the Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council (Sept. 1964, Cmnd 2458't recalls that its witnesses from the Youth Employment Service found it generally significantly more difficult to place immigrants in clerical work that local born skilled labourers. “As a whole we have received no evidence that immigrant school leavers are unemployed ... we are more apprehensive as regards both the future and the present that they may have difficulty in finding the right jobs for their qualifications and abilities”. Since one third of all girls leaving school go into office work this kind of discrimination is frightening. The proposals for integration in part three of the Govern-white paper have very liittle to say on “the complex issues of discrimination in
employment”. The most absurd recommendation is that “The Government make it a rule that an employer who attaches discriminatory conditions is not to be helped by the Exchanges to fill vacancies if it appears he is acting from personal prejudice” (our italics) (para 51). In fact successive Ministers, Tory and Labour, have refused over the years to disclose the number of firms discriminating in this way, and if anything has been done about them. Thus Mr Godber in 1964: “My local officers have to make a note of the stipulations made by employers when notifying their vacancies to us otherwise they would send men for job which they had no chance of getting.” And Mr Gunter in 1965: “My Hon. Friend does not make the distinction, which is very necessary, between employers who have personal prejudices of this sort, and employers who have difficulties which they cannot overcome because of the feeling of their workers or customers.” Most employers claim to be chronic sufferers from other people’s prejudices.
The proposals for “integration” in the white paper are throughout less precise than those for control. No one will be much wiser after reading that “The complex issue of discrimination in employment is being tackled in a number of effective, if unobtrusive, ways”. More effect and less unobtrusiveness is required, and that can best be obtained by fighting discrimination by employers against coloured applicants, and employer/union collusion in the non promotion of coloured employees, out in the open. Providing a source of anpeal for the man who suspects that a job or a promotion has been denied to him on grounds of race or colour is more important than card indexing places which might embarrass him if he applied for employment. He may tramp the streets for months, the victim of “other people” and their prejudices, unless those who cite them are compelled to make a stand either with them or against them. Public opinion will never be educated out of prejudice if the agencies of government wait to take up arms against declared racialists
5.	conclusion
There- is no inviolable principle, socialist or otherwise, that unrestricted immigration should always be allowed into Britain from the Commonwealth. Neither need there be a precise correlation between immigration figures and unfilled employment vacancies. Obviously, social cost counts as well as economic need; this was too often forgotten in the fifties.
Now the former is exaggerated and the latter played down whenever the immigrants concerned are coloured. The flow of immigration should be so ordered as to give equal weight to both, and that means far more immigrants than the Government is prepared to accept. Labour was bound to oppose the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. No case was made for the introduction of controls at the time, and the controls were not coupled with any positive measures to assist in the integration of the immigrants already here or those who would subsequently come in. However, the Labour Government has been justified in not restoring complete freedom of entry.
The right to impose controls is acknowledged by the Commonwealth, although their application hitherto has been unacceptable. To reopen the gates at the present time would result in too many people coming in over too short a period. Since the introduction of controls a backlog has accumulated of those desiring entry which must be of fairly formidable proportions. Even more important is the certainty that the Conservatives would immediately announce that if they were returned to power their first action would be to restore controls. That would result in another rush to beat the impending ban.
Controls must, however, satisfy six conditions, none of which is satisfied at present.
Firstly, they must be all-embracing and totally non-discriminatory.
Secondly, they must be based, and shown to be based, on grounds that are adequate and rational and have nothing to
do, directly or indirectly, with colour.
Thirdly, they must not be regarded as in any way a substitute for action to alleviate shortages which the presence of immigrants has highlighted.
Fourthly, they must be preceded or accompanied by positive measures for assimilation. Britain is already a multiracial society and would continue to be so even if no more immigrants were allowed in.
Fifthly, they must be operated in a humane way and not be hedged about by illiberal “safeguards”.
Sixthly, they must not be framed with a cynical disregard of the effect on developing countries of accepting only those with qualifications which their own countries can ill afford to lose.
More pertinent than the control of those coming in is the position of those already here and their children born and brought up in this country. It is high time that the press and politicians stopped competing in their childish and unscientific numbers game with entry figures. This cannot, and does not, achieve its oft avowed object of making the host community more favourably disposed to those coloured people already here. Tacit official acceptance of colour prejudice as something that has to be lived with with good grace will not contain the prejudice but by appearing to condone it will make it respectable. The acts and omissions of the Government make the task of those who are doing something constructive more difficult. The Government’s three measures for integration are inadequate and misdirected. The Government, following the Conservative Opposition, has exaggerated the problems arising out of immigration when it has sought to justify the form of its controls, and underestimated these problems when it has been invited to do something positive about them.
The Race Relations Bill was originally envisaged as a quid pro quo for the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. It was
33
eventually introduced as a measure the quid pro quo for which would be further restrictions. Having surrendered to disingenous Conservative pressure to drop criminal sanctions for discrimination in a few public places, the Government then failed to extend the ambit of the Bill to embrace discrimination generally, which alone would have made the surrender justifiable. The Conservatives seized on the absence of conciliation in order to wreck the Bill; the Government should have accepted the introduction of conciliation in order to strengthen it. The Government has now, however, said that it will be at least three years before any review of the Bill can be considered. (Lord Stonham, Hansard, vol 269, col 90).
The Department of Education and Science Circular, though doubtless well intentioned, constitutes a Government invitation to introduce into education inflexible quotas based on the origin of the child or its parents.
Part three of the white paper is largely unsatisfactory. The short section on employment is platitudinous. The proposals on housing may well, as they stand, have the effect of reducing the housing available to immigrants and isolating it. At the same time, the Government is deferring any further action until the millennium when none will be needed.
The vicious circle of discrimination leading to overcrowding, and overcrowding and its attendant evils leading to discrimination, can be broken at only one point; discrimination against immigrants must be offset by discrimination in their favour. Discrimination exists; it is powerful. But the Government seem to recognise this fact only when arguing for the exclusion of those who suffer from it.
As yet there has been very little research in the field of Commonwealth immigrants and the treatment of them and their families in Britain. The Government has not taken account of what little there is; indeed, it has chosen to ignore rather than attempt to refute it.
Moverover there is an almost complete lack of liaison between the various Government departments who has responsibilities for different aspects of the problem. The appointment of Maurice Foley to co-ordinate the activities of the departments concerned has not been a success because he cannot exercise any authority over decision making in the respective departments. Further, the Government’s reduction of the number of Commonwealth immigrants to be allowed in with vouchers makes no sense in the context of the National Plan. There may be economic arguments, overriding this, against immigration; there can be no economic arguments against coloured immigration into this country.
It causes no satisfaction to the authors of this pamphlet to record a progressive deterioration in the public handling of the question of Commonwealth immigration, especially since the Government has gone with the herd, and by its actions increased the pace at which it runs. The Dutch auction of the last 12 months will not even produce the one result which, off the record, its supporters claimed for the white paper, that is winning. or even keeping, votes for the Labour Party. Those who gain are not political parties as such but illiberal elements in all parties ; those who lose are coloured people throughout this country, in every area, in every age and income group. Sir Charles Dilke warned another administration 60 years ago, when control of alien immigration was at issue, that they had “raised a devil which they will find it difficult to lay”.
One act of illiberalism should never be supported by those who know it to be wrong on the ground that worse evils are thus averted. We have tried to suggest, firstly, where a stand against further cowardly concessions should be made, and more importantly where the positive priorities for integration should lie. Hitherto they have been ignored, side tracked, or at best over simplified by the Government. Britain has always been in part a multi-racial country ; now it has become multi-coloured as well, for good.
34
It is still within our power to make it a happy and tolerant one.
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS
If control of Commonwealth immigration is to be regarded by coloured people in Britain and abroad as non-discrimina-tory, immigration from the Irish Republic must be controlled. This can be done only by regulating entry from Northern Ireland into Great Britain.
Entry preference must not be given to aliens over Commonwealth citizens, as will be the consequence of the white paper.
Immigration control must not be slanted towards accepting primarily those people whom their own countries can least afford to lose.
The degrees of dependants admitted freely before the white paper should continue to be admitted freely.
Tribunals should be set up to hear appeals from the decisions of immigration officers.
Only those over 21 convicted for the second or subsequent time of an offence punishable by imprisonment, and, in fact, sentenced to imprisonment by a High Court Judge or Commissioner of Assize, should be eligible for deportation. Magistrates should, however, have powers to recommend deportation where it is proved to them that someone has obtained entry to the country by fraudulent misrepresentation.
The scope of the Race Relations B'ill must be extended forthwith to cover discrimination in housing, employment, insurance and credit facilities.
All discriminatory clauses in contracts should be rendered unenforceable.
Advertisements with a racial restriction should be banned.
The Race Relations Board should be
made a clearing house for information on discrimination.
Conciliation Committees should have powers to compel attendance, to subpoena witnesses and documents, and to take evidence on oath.
education
We support the government’s policy of increasing teacher quotas in areas of high immigration, but call for more attention to be paid to the training and recruitment of the teachers to fill the posts. This means awakening and equipping the institutes and colleges of education to face the new educational problems of a multi-racial society and of non-English speaking children. The teaching of English as a second language should be fully recognised as an important specialist branch of education.
There should be increased grants to education authorities in areas of high immigration to supplement and improve buildings and equipment, especially where immigration and general overcrowding of schools are associated.
Work to spread inter-racial and integra-tional understanding through general British education, especially the social studies, should be more centralised and better recognised.
Where non-English speaking immigrant children are concerned, practical steps must be taken to teach English as rapidly and intensively as is consistent with the need for the pupils to participate normally in school life. .We particularly recommend the system of specialist teachers, whether peripatetic attached to one school or working at a centre, teaching part time classes withdrawn from other lessons for the purpose, as opposed to full time separate instruction.
There is no justification for dispersing children according to the so-called immigrant status alone. It is not only wrong but also impossible to define and redirect children on that apparent basis. Undue
35
concentrations of immigrants must ultimately be relieved through housing measures. The great variety of local determining factors undermines the significance of any nationally recommended quota as a basis for dispersal in any case.
Where non-English speaking children are so accumulated that the requirements of special language teaching demand some reduction, every effort should be made to effect this by the redefining of catchment areas in good time.
Qualified immigrant teachers should be sought out and employed wherever possible, though not specifically for specialist teaching of immigrant children.
Where young children from culturally very different backgrounds are concerned, there is a need for a satisfactory number of welfare assistants in schools and for the organisation of all inclusive preschool play groups.
housing
Residential qualifications for council housing lists should be progressively abolished, and higher priority be given in points schemes to the occupants of overcrowded dwellings and to key workers.
Direct Government assistance should be given to areas with immigrant concentrations.
Local authorities should give greater support to housing associations, especially those with multi-racial objects.
The jurisdiction of the conciliation committees set up under the Race Relations Act should be extended to cover discrimination in private housing. They should be given powers to compel the attendance of the alleged discriminator, to subpoena witnesses and documents, and to require evidence to be given on oath.
There should be compulsory registration or licencing for estate agents, a central compensation fund, as in the case of
solicitors, and a separate clients’ account for deposits.
A full investigation must be made of the extent to which estate agents control the pattern of settlement of immigrants, and also into racketeering by estate agents. These matters should be dealt with as part of the terms of reference of a government appointed committee of inquiry.
Local authorities should be given powers to enable them as far as practicable to prevent overcrowding (not just where there is some physical reconstruction contemplated, but particularly where there is not). However, it is imperative that such powers should be framed so that they cannot be used intra vires to create what have been called “supervised municipal ghettoes” (Sunday Times, 15 August 1965).
health
The medical arguments confirm the urgent need to improve the housing conditions of immigrants, and of all other people who are newcomers to the areas in which they live.
Hospital building, and particularly the provision of maternity beds, should be accelerated, and more closely related to the housing conditions of the areas involved.
We welcome the Government’s efforts to provide x-ray tests and bcg vaccination for tb, and hope that these facilities can be made more widely known to the public.
Attempts should be made to make more information on family planning available to immigrants. The attempts at present being made in Derby should be studied, and extended if successful.
gps and mohs should encourage the public to take advantage of the facilities for typhoid inoculation, and the Ministry of Health should give financial help with the provision of vaccine, as it already does for tb. This recommendation would
36
stand if there were no immigrants in this country at all.
More attempts should be made to inform local authorities of the impending arrival of immigrants, and immigrants of the services available to them on arrival. The scheme formerly used for immigrants from Cyprus should be revived and extended.
The Government should institute such health tests as can be defended entirely on medical grounds, and such as they can apply without hesitation to immigrants from, for example, the United States.
friendship councils
The Government’s ideas on voluntary liaison committees are in the main satisfactory, but they must be backed up by immediate and substantial financial support from the Exchequer. This is needed for training staff, paying social workers and secretarial staff, and for the provision of premises. It is unlikely that adequate financial support would be made available by all local authorities in those areas where it is most needed.
Friendship councils should attempt to influence public opinion, and to gather information which may help them to foresee and forestall possible causes of serious tension. Such information could be useful to local authorities. The recruitment for any surveys should be done locally in order to involve as many members of the community as possible. Financial help and advice might be provided by the Government, by the Institute of Race Relations, and by such university bodies as the newly formed research unit for the study of multi-racial societies at the University of Sussex.
employment
All advertisements discriminating on grounds of race or colour should be banned, and the Race Relations Bill should be extended to bring instances of
such discrimination before the courts.
Government business should be withheld from all firms which will not employ coloured staff at any level where there are demonstrably qualified applicants. This would very rapidly alter the attitude of the banks, insurance and accountancy firms. The lcc victory over Mildenhall rdc shows what can be done by resolute resistance to prejudice.
All firms employing immigrant labour should be advised to set up welfare liaison committees at once, and be given special Government grants towards the cost of this.
In view of the shortage of labour expected by most surveys, including the National Plan, over the next few years, the Government should immediately withdraw its surrender to prejudice in the white paper, and make available entry vouchers in categories A, B and C, to the number of 50,000 per annum. This would go some way towards making up the anticipated labour deficit of the coming decade, without making economic need the sole criterion of entry.
All trade unions should be asked by the tuc to prepare special courses on the assimilation and welfare of immigrant members, for branch officials and shop stewards. Immigrants should also be encouraged to take a full part in union activity, otherwise the possibility of special coloured unions rnay become a very real one. We cannot accept the white paper view that to declare oneself “unequivocally against discriminatory practices” would be enough, even if it were true.
The Home Secretary should bring pressure to bear on chief constables to secure the recruitment of coloured police cadets. Coloured policemen, and coloured magistrates, of whom there are now a few, are of great symbolic and practical importance in bringing about public acceptance of integration.
the authors
The Young Fabian Group exists to give socialists not over 30 years of age an opportunity to carry out research, discussion and propaganda. It aims to help its members publish the results of their research, and so make a more effective contribution to the work of the Labour movement. It therefore welcomes all those who have a thoughtful and radical approach to political matters.
The group is autonomous, electing its own committee. It co-operates closely with the Fabian Society which gives financial and clerical help. But the group is responsible for its own policy and activity, subject to the constitutional rule that it can have no declared political policy beyond that implied by its commitment to democratic socialism.
The group publishes pamphlets written by its members, arranges fortnightly meetings in London, and holds day and weekend schools.
Enquiries about membership should be sent to the Secretary, Young Fabian Group, 11 Dartmouth Street, London, SW1 ; telephone Whitehall 3077.
This pamphlet was drafted from the work of a Young Fabian study group, whose members included Margaret Bradley, Conrad Russell, Angela Sears, Jean Sharpies, Janet Stewart and Richard Wilkinson, by James Goudie, Nicolas Hawkes and Phillip Whitehead. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the Young Fabian Group.
Cover design and typography by Geoffrey Cannon. Printed by The Walrus Press Ltd. (tu), 769 Harrow Road, Sudbury, Wembley, Middlesex.
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