Migrants, Asylum Seekers and British Identity

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Accommodation for the new arrivals was found in a disused air raid shelter beneath Clapham Common, near Brixton, commencing this suburb’s unique status as the heartland of black culture and identity in Britain. I am indebted to Richard Weight for this information and for the snapshot of Lord Kitchener. See Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, Macmillan, London, 2002, pp 136–9. 2 Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, p 67 3 Weight, op cit, p 141 4 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45, Panther, London, 1969, p 20 5 Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997, p 85 6 Michael Balcon, Kinematography Weekly, 11 January 1945, p 163 7 Richards, op cit, p 135 8 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–63, British Film Institute, London, 1986, p 11. Though as Hill notes, this vision of affluence was largely an illusion, a political manoeuvre intended to bind the working classes into the social compact through a utopian vision of consumer comfort while concealing the persistence if not widening of traditional inequalities. See Hill, pp 9–10. 9 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1958, p 203 10 Hill, op cit, p 15 11 Hill, op cit, p 16 12 As John Clarke and Stuart Hall have observed: ‘Troubling times, when social anxiety is widespread but fails to find an organised public or political expression, give rise to the displacement of social anxiety on to convenient scapegoats.’ See John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts, Resistance Through Rituals, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, 1975, pp 71–2. 13 John Hill argues that Dearden’s postwar films are concerned with ‘the exploration of the conditions necessary to the construction of a new community or consensus appropriate to peacetime’, Hill, op cit, p 69. 14 Hill, op cit, p 70 15 Hill, op cit, p 83 16 Hill, op cit, p 70 17 Jacko, she complains, made love to her ‘as if it was a quick drink’. 18 According to Geoff Mayer, Nell’s response ‘invests the film with an almost Gothic repulsion against sexual cohabitation between black and white’. Geoff Mayer, Roy Ward Baker, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004, p 36. 19 Geoff Mayer notes how this concluding frame evokes the melodramatic device of the tableau. Mayer, op cit, p 78. 20 Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy, Pimlico, London, 2001, p vii. Scruton’s work was one small contribution to an outpouring of millennial (and millenarian) appraisals of the state of Britain in the seeming throes of dissolution, and a renewed interest in what this would mean for England. For other accounts see Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, Michael Joseph, London, 1998; David Cannadine, Class in Britain, Penguin, London, 1998; Maureen Duffy, England: The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square, Fourth Estate, London, 2001; Robert Colls, Identity of England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002; Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–2000, Penguin, London, 2004, pp 440–3.