Commonwealth Immigrants Research Articles

Majority jury verdicts in England and Wales: a vestige of white supremacy?

In England and Wales, the requirement for a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases was abolished in 1967, marking a significant departure from a centuries-old legal tradition. Majority verdicts are now common practice, yet no research to date explores the origins of this sudden change to the jury system. In contrast, recent research in the US uncovered a connection between the conception of majority verdicts in Louisiana and Jim Crow era law-making, finding that majority verdicts were strategically introduced to suppress the black juror vote and facilitate quicker convictions to fuel free prison labour. The US Supreme Court later outlawed majority verdicts in a case known as Ramos v. Louisiana, amid recognition of their racist origins . Adopting the critical epistemological position guiding the US research, we consider how race and class underpinned the decision to introduce majority verdicts in England and Wales. Drawing on Home Office files and other archival materials, we find that an increase in eligible jurors from different racial and class backgrounds led to a perceived decline in the ‘calibre’ of jurors – reflective of wider public anxieties about Commonwealth immigration, Black Power and white disenfranchisement. We conclude that a desire to dilute the influence of ‘coloured’ migrants on juries contributed to the introduction of majority verdicts in England and Wales.

The 'Bogus Child' and the 'Big Uncle': The Impossible South Asian Family in Post-Imperial Britain.

Between 1962 and 1965, a broad definition of dependence allowed for the migration of Commonwealth Citizens to join working family members in Britain. This article investigates how the Home Office targeted male dependent youth as a category that could reduce unwanted immigration from the Commonwealth, particularly South Asia. Home Office officials obscured the stories of dependent migrants, constructed the figure of the 'bogus child', and denigrated male familial connections, which resulted in the denial of family reunion. Colonial assumptions about the mendacity of South Asians and the illegibility of South Asian family forms shaped British policy. The 1965 White Paper and the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act foreclosed the possibility of a broad definition of family and consolidated the legitimacy of the cisheterosexual family. Home Office discussions dovetailed with an emergent common sense circulated in newspapers and public debate about the illegitimacy of the South Asian family in Britain. This article interrogates the racist reasoning of the Home Office and this emergent common sense not only to show how immigration policy generates racialization but also to reveal the specificity of South Asian racialization in the post-imperial social formation.

‘Isolated British Europeans’: How EEC Membership Helped the Gibraltarians Secure British Citizenship, 1962–1981

ABSTRACT The ‘European’ strand of modern Gibraltarian identity, exemplified by the territory’s 96 per cent ‘Remain’ vote in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, owes much to the fact that joining the EEC with Britain in 1973 enabled Gibraltarians to bypass the UK’s increasingly restrictive immigration regime, which since the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962 had reserved the right of abode for the British-born and their descendants. In 1981, when British citizenship was redefined and split into three new categories, it was Gibraltar’s place within the EEC, and the rights associated with membership, that proved the decisive factor in securing full British citizenship, uniquely amongst Britain’s dependent territories at the time. Although this concession has been seen as a case of racial exceptionalism, this article places the Gibraltarian campaign for British citizenship in its historic context, and shows that it was not simply the result of short term political calculation but a long term recognition that European integration offered Gibraltarians a new set of rights, over and above other territories, and a means of binding themselves closer to the UK. After Brexit, Gibraltarians may once again occupy a unique position as citizens of the only British territory within the Schengen zone.

‘A Peaceful History’? West Indians, the Inner City, and Local Responses to Migration in Post-War Bristol

Abstract Using the 1980 St. Paul’s riot as a point of departure, this article retrospectively explores migration policymaking in Bristol during the 1950s and 1960s. It charts some of the deliberations, policies and practices of three local actors who played key roles in the city’s debates and developments on migration and integration: the police, charitable, community, religious and voluntary groups and organisations, and the municipality. In doing so, it exposes a complex urban policy arena comprised of varied, multifaceted and ever-changing responses to Commonwealth immigrants, and West Indians in particular. Overall, the article argues that Bristol’s migration policies and practices of the 1950s and 1960s are crucial in light of subsequent increasing inner-city tensions and the 1980 uprising, but also because they broaden our understanding of the pivotal role that cities played in the governance of migration and diversity already during the post-war decades.

Australia’s Minor Concessions to Japanese Citizens under the White Australia Policy

This paper explores concessions made by Australian authorities concerning Japanese immigration during the era of the White Australia Policy in the early twentieth century. Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act was introduced in December 1901. As the major piece of legislation in the White Australia Policy, the act made it virtually impossible for non-Europeans to migrate to Australia. However, Japanese people enjoyed a special position among non-Europeans under the White Australia Policy thanks to Japan’s growing international status as a civilised power at the time, as well as its sustained diplomatic pressure on Australia. While the Commonwealth was determined to exclude Japanese permanent settlers, it sought ways to render the policy of exclusion less offensive to the Japanese. In the early 1900s, two minor modifications to the Immigration Restriction Act were implemented in order to relax the restrictions imposed on Japanese citizens. Moreover, in the application of Commonwealth immigration laws, Japanese people received far more lenient treatment than other non-Europeans and were afforded respect and extra courtesies by Australian officials. Nevertheless, these concessions Australia made to Japanese citizens were minor, and the Commonwealth government maintained its basic policy of excluding Japanese permanent settlers from Australia. This paper shows that, despite continued diplomatic efforts, Japan was fundamentally unable to change pre-war Australia’s basic policy regarding the exclusion of Japanese permanent settlers.

Brexit Where It Comes From: Reading Caryl Phillips’ Foreigners: Three English Lives; Its Historical Reality Replaced with Brexit Focused on Britain in 1969s and 2016 with Enoch Powell’s 1968 Speech, ‘Rivers of Blood’

This paper looks back at some aspects of where Brexit comes from. In so doing, this essay analyses Caryl Phillips reportage, Foreigners: Three English Lives and investigates Britain in the 1960s, focusing on Leeds over the years. Taking different provocations of Brexit, this paper views Enoch Powell’s 1969 Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham as a backdrop to Brexit since the speech’s implications and its percussions regard an instigation of racial issues politicised and police hostility to coloured races more often than British political issues. Along with Powellian views on immigration, this essay examines David Oluwale’s death and the involved events, prompted by the boldfaced racism that proliferated the 1960s. This essay looks at various immigration-control related Acts in 1962, 1968 and 1971, revised and repealed to restrict the number of Common Wealth immigrants flooding in. Accompanied by the Acts, Joseph Hunte’s Nigger Hunting in England in 1966 was published, and the Monday Club concerned about immigration was founded in 1968. Powell’s catalytic statement came across as gunpower amongst these resentments. This essay thus argues that ‘Rivers of Blood’ is well reflected on Oluwale’s being drowned in River Aire Leeds, and offers a rather lengthy reading of the story and moves on to establishing the influence of Powell’s in late 1960’ on wards and its spasmodic and powerful impact on British politics that led to Brexit in the midst of controversial debate that Powell was right. The EU referendum was offered in order to soften immigration issues, and ensure David Cameron’s security in his premiership in the boiling Tory Party. This paper thus proffers that the results of the referendum was partly a soft-core hate crime, since sharply rising from the June 2016 EU referendum.

Popular History in the Black British Press: Edward Scobie’s Tropic and Flamingo, 1960-64

ABSTRACT This article uses Edward Scobie, the Dominican-born journalist and historian, as an entry point for recovering histories of the Black British press and popular history. Examining two commercial Black magazines from the early 1960s, Tropic and Flamingo, it identifies the political utility of Black British history. Reflecting on presentist and populist approaches, this research acknowledges the reparative potential of history. Reconstructing untold and marginalised histories, from abolitionist activists to Black composers, these history features were a direct riposte to the anti-immigrant and racist cultures that were being emboldened by state-driven policy, such as the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. By focusing on popular magazine histories, this research challenges us to think about what counts as historical scholarship and where it is produced.

Behind the Rhodes statue: Black competency and the imperial academy

Recent criticisms of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) Oxford campaign have problematized the presence of Black bodies within British higher education by reference to an ideal image of the impartial and discerning academy. In this article, I historically and intellectually contextualize the apprehension, expressed in the debates over RMF Oxford, that an intimate Black presence destabilizes the ethos of higher education. Specifically, I argue that much more than Rhodes’ statue implicates the British academy in the Empire’s southern African interests. I excavate a genealogy of academic debates regarding the effects of an increased proximity of Black presence to empire’s white spaces. These debates were initiated by social anthropologists in the interwar years primarily (albeit not solely) with regards to studies of southern Africa’s urbanizing spaces. What is more, such debates were highly influential to the study of ‘race relations’ in Britain’s postwar era of Commonwealth immigration. Critically, all these debates problematized the cognitive competency of African/Black peoples to inhabit white cultural spaces – including the academy – in ways that were not destabilizing of imperial order. Current campus campaigns such as RMF should not be evaluated against an ideal image of the academy. Rather, they form part of a continued confrontation with the afterlives of academic dispositions that were implicated in the imperial project that Rhodes was integral to.

British Black Power: The anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism

The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.

‘Strangers in their own Country’: Epideictic Rhetoric and Communal Definition in Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech

This article treats Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech as an example of the epideictic rhetoric of blame and exclusion. Drawing on a framework proposed by Celeste Michelle Condit, the analysis explores the functions of the address for the speaker and for the audience. Of particular concern are Powell's self-presentation as a statesman and prophet; his account of the impact and consequences of unrestricted immigration; and his portrayal of a community where ordinary, decent English people were being displaced and victimised by Commonwealth immigrants—a process in which he claimed the authorities were complicit. For the audience, the speech gave public expression to their concerns about immigration, though Powell's predictions of a dystopian future also aroused sentiments of anger and foreboding. Despite the controversy that ensued, the impact of ‘Rivers of Blood’ was far-reaching, and its influence is still apparent in contemporary debates over immigration.

Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo, by Paul Jackson

While investigations into the British far right have continued to boom over recent years, one aspect which has been under-examined, in contrast to the numerous studies of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, is neo-Nazism. Through his study of Colin Jordan, easily Britain’s most influential and longest-serving neo-Nazi, Paul Jackson has made an important contribution by producing an impeccably researched monograph which stands out in an increasingly crowded field. As Jackson notes, it is both a biography of one of Britain’s most notorious neo-Nazis as well as an examination of the post-war far right within which he operated. While it is undoubtedly more comprehensive in achieving the former, its implications for the study of the far right more generally are plain to see. Jordan’s political career, from his early activism at Cambridge University’s Nationalist Club during the 1940s to his role as independent neo-Nazi elder statesman during Tony Blair’s premiership, is shown to be one of repeated failure and marginality. Yet his influence on the far right’s most extreme fringes, both in Britain and abroad, is significant. Jordan’s career reflects the tensions that exist today on the extreme right over the best course of action to sell a Hitlerian vision of society to a public utterly repulsed at the prospect. Jordan initially appeared to recognise the futility of engaging in democratic politics in the 1960s when leader of the National Socialist Movement. Buoyed by palpable public dissatisfaction with Commonwealth immigration following Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, he then flirted with democratic politics and winning support at the ballot box as leader of the British Movement from 1968 to 1975. This was to prove fruitless. His only impact on British politics was fleeting notoriety in the media. Jordan, refusing to compromise one inch on his violent utopian vision concluded that fighting elections was a losing strategy for the far right. Following this, until his death in 2009, Jordan acted largely alone, spreading his anti-Jewish conspiratorial ideas and seeking to create a revolutionary Nazi vanguard. Jordan came to believe that the only way national socialism could attain power once again was by cultivating a small elite of true believers who will seize power by force.

Reading Anita and Me: :The Problem of British Multiculturalism and Racism

In the genre of multicultural children’s literature, Anita and Me gives an insight into traditional Indian culture and describes an immigrant’s longing to assimilate and become part of her new society. Meena Kumar, an Indian immigrant, longs to be a white girl, imitating Anita Rutter who is a “passport to acceptance” into white society. However, Meena ends up realizing the relationship between ‘Anita and me’ is one of condescension and deception, not acceptance, which reflects on a wider scale the problems of Britain’s multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, by definition, embraces cultural diversity without any prejudice against minority cultures, accepting all cultures as equal. However, right from the start, the multicultural policies advocated by the British government have been ambivalent towards immigrants, as demonstrated by the contradictory enactment of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and the Race Relations Act of 1965. Multicultural literature, as an educational tool, tries to appreciate or give a voice to the marginalized and silenced minorities. However, multicultural literature can sometimes fall victim to hackneyed stereotypes and find itself reproducing, instead of improving, present social inequalities. Anita and Me tries to overcome the limits of multicultural literature by representing and then satirizing the stereotypes of, or subverting the romanticization of Indian culture. As it does so, it reflects on the problem of multiculturalism and warns about white supremacy or racism hidden behind a condescending and familiar mask.

Creating a ‘Suspect Community’: Monitoring and Controlling the Cypriot Community in Inter-War London

Abstract This article offers a critical assessment of British policing and government monitoring and controlling of a ‘suspect community’ in inter-war London, which was also the subject of emigration control, the only colonial group to be thus treated prior to the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. The case is that of the Cypriots, who began to emigrate to the imperial metropolis in significant numbers in the late 1920s and largely settled in and around Soho. Their concentrated geographical location made them easy to police, monitor and control once their criminality and deviant communist politics made them a ‘suspect community’. They were also subjected to immigration control at their homeland by the Cypriot Colonial Government. There was significant co-operation between the Home and Colonial Offices to achieve the controls in both London and Cyprus. The immigration controls served as a prototype for the subsequent restrictions on other groups after the Second World War (namely those from India and Pakistan) and formed the basis of the Commonwealth Immigration Act.

Multiculturalism and Creative British South Asian Films

Globalization has enabled countries such as the UK to attain multiculturalism; however, there is no investigation in relation to the advantages of multiculturalism at the film industry level. Multiculturalism is related to the Commonwealth immigration after the Second World War period. The introduction of new cultures into the UK has enabled the growth and development of successful global industries such as the British Urban Music and British Asian Film, which have prospered over time and have now become mainstream export-led industries. Why is cultural diversity significant towards the generation of competitive advantages within the British South Asian film sector? We will explore the country specific advantage of multiculturalism in the UK and their impact on creativity of screenwriters that has contributed to successful films in the industry.

Kennetta Hammond Perry. London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race.

The idea and practice of subjecthood in the British Empire was simultaneously expansive and restrictive. During the Don Pacifico Affair in 1850, the British foreign secretary, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, famously declared that “a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong” (Commons, 25 June 1850, Parl. Debs., cxii, col. 444). The Canadian prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, told the 1911 Imperial Conference that “a British subject anywhere is a British subject everywhere” (Maurice Olivier, Imperial Conferences, Part I [1954], 86). These liberal ideas of subjecthood form the basis of what Kennetta Hammond Perry terms the myth of British antiracism in her insightful and deeply researched London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race. Despite the rhetorical appeals to liberty and freedom proclaimed by Palmerston and Laurier, restrictions on the free movement of non-white British subjects have had a long history. Canadian governments imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants beginning in 1885 and refused entry to Indian migrants (all of whom were British subjects) who arrived in Vancouver on the Komagata Maru in 1914; the Natal Immigration Restriction Act (1897) imposed a diction test on immigrants as a transparent means of restricting non-white British subjects; and Indian migrant laborers (before and after the official end of indentured labor in the British Empire in 1917) faced a wide array of discriminatory mobility restrictions. Thus, while the more inclusive and racially inflected postwar definition of British citizenship developed through the 1948 British Nationality Act and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) marked a decisive shift in British domestic politics, it fit within a longer lineage of racially demarcated imperial citizenship politics. The latter history has been the subject of excellent studies such as Sukanya Banerjee’s Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010).

Butler’s colour-bar bill mocks Commonwealth

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.

The need for unity: an interview with Vishnu Sharma

Vishnu Sharma (1921–1992) came to Southall, West London, in 1957 as a seasoned political organiser in the peasant and trade union movements of the Punjab, who had already, under the Raj, been imprisoned for his political activities. A member of the Communist Party for most of his life, a vice-chair of the 1960s’ Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) and a founder of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, where he also worked for many years, he was involved in a number of national organisations including the National Council for Commonwealth Immigrants (from which he resigned in protest in 1968), the National Council for Civil Liberties, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and the Anti-Nazi League. He talked, in 1982, during the filming of A Town Under Siege – one of a series of films made by IRR’s sister company in the early 1980s for Channel 4 – about his early life in Southall.

‘Science must be the Basis’. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Political Parties and their Policies on Health, Science and Scientific Racism 1931–1974

This article investigates the health and science policies of the New Party, British Union of Fascists (BUF) and Union Movement, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley. Throughout his life, Mosley believed in science as a gamechanger. Health policies also mattered because the New Party and the BUF wanted a nation of ‘fit’ men and women. In reality, opportunism guided the parties in relation to these concerns. Only the BUF developed comprehensive health policies. Science was used to justify ideology, but was seldom integrated in party policies. Despite eugenics and scientific racism being available to lend credence to BUF and Union Movement attitudes, this avenue remained unexplored. Inter-war BUF racism targeting Jews tended to be cultural, though some was biological. Post-war Union Movement racism targeting Commonwealth immigrants was biological. Ultimately, however, science merely provided a convenient excuse for how the parties could promise results without making tough decisions.

Patriality, Work Permits and the European Economic Community: The Introduction of the 1971 Immigration Act

This paper looks at the introduction of the 1971 Immigration Act in Britain. It argues that foreign-policy pressures encouraged the Heath government to adopt discriminatory Commonwealth immigration policy, breaking from the non-discriminatory immigration policy that had preceded it. The need to appease New Zealand and Australia over the consequences of Britain's impending accession to the European Economic Community encouraged the British government to enact immigration measures that discriminated in favour of the ‘Old Commonwealth’ (Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

The Othered Irish: Shades of Difference in Post-War Britain, 1948–71

AbstractThe main goal of this paper is to consider white Irish immigrants within the context of immigration of colour in post-war Britain. It considers the similarities in the imperial-historical reasons for the immigration of mostly poor rural workers from the West Indies, South Asia and Ireland. The discussion explores the experiences of both white and non-white immigrants in London and Birmingham up to 1971, comparing all three groups but focusing on Irish immigrants. I aim to append the Irish experience to analyses of post-war immigration, which tend to focus on non-white Commonwealth immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia. By exploring the Irish experience, I question existing scholarship which suggests Irish immigrants assimilated into post-war Britain free of the ethnic tensions and difficult conditions that migrants of colour indisputably endured. I also demonstrate the degree to which British historians have disregarded the experiences of Irish people in Britain.