Butler’s colour-bar bill mocks Commonwealth

Abstract

This article reproduces a front-page opinion piece in the West Indian Gazette, Vol. 4, no. 11, November 1961, by its editor. In it she explains why the proposed controls on Commonwealth immigration under Conservative Home Secretary Rab Butler (the first immigration act, passed in 1962) are discriminatory: a colour bar or form of apartheid. The bill has to be opposed because it will open the door to other forms of discrimination. The piece is prescient in that the bill proved to be a watershed, setting future British governments on a course of increasingly draconian immigration legislation and thereby embedding a pattern of state racism which, over half a century later, is still targeting migrants. The bill is, the author claims, a tactic to divert attention from the real issues of the day – living standards, wage freeze, credit squeeze and the threat of nuclear war. It makes a mockery of the idea of a multiracial Commonwealth and the way in which Commonwealth workers have helped to build up crucial areas of the economy.