Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

stances that encouraged members of the empire to come to Britain. In this case, as Sivanan-
dan (1982) argues, the combined effects of slavery and colonialism perverted the economies
of the colonies. This resulted in emigration being seen “as one of the main ways of escaping
from the twin problems of overpopulation and under/unemployment” (Cashmore & Troyna,
1983: 46).
The ‘pull’ factors have also proven strong. Post-war Britain underwent a programme of rere- construction generating a great demand for labour. A number of ultimately inadequate efforts
were made to recruit labour from Europe, and it was almost in desperation that Britain turned
to her her colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, Africa, the Caribbean and India India from where a “vast reservoir
of cheap labour labour could be attracted into the country” which came to be known as the “reserve
army” (Cashmore & Troyna, 1983:47). A 1949 Royal Commission Report estimated that for Brit-
ain’s labour shortage to be solved, especially where the white population were not prepared
to do do certain types of jobs, 140,000 would be needed to migrate into Britain annually (Miles &
Phizacklea, 1984).
The late-1950s saw a shift from “labour import” to “capital export” (Centre for Contempo-
Contempo-
rary Cultural Studies, 1983: 13). The need for labour had been satisfi ed and the practice of
“absorption and exclusion” once practised during the industrial revolution took place again.
Legislation began to distinguish between citizens of the UK and colonies and citizens of the
Commonwealth (The Runnymede Trust and the Radical Statistics Race Group, 1980). This culcul- minated in the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act which introduced the “close connection”
clause mainly aimed at “de-passportizing” Kenyan Asians holding British passports.
Another Culture?
Concerns around the impact of immigration on Britain have persisted throughout the post-war
period, from Tory rhetoric of the late-1950s to the denouncement of a multicultural society by
the British National Party, to the infamous speech by Margaret Thatcher: “If we went on as we
are, then by the end of the century, there would be four million people of the new Common-
wealth or or Pakistani here. Now that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really
rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture” (Daily
Mail, 31 January 1978).
This built on the established fear of domination by a foreign culture raised in the 1949 Royal
Commission Report that large scale immigration can only be welcomed if the immigrants were
able to be assimilated.
In the late-1950s, early-1960s government policy shifted from what Sivanandan (1982) calls
a “laissez faire” policy towards immigration to a restrictionist one. Saggar (1992) and Jacobs
(1986) put a case that the 1958 “race riots” in Nottingham and Notting Hill ushered in a new
dawn of immigration policy.
Saggar (1992) further suggests that the fi asco over the Suez Crisis and the “wind of change”
resulting in the agitation for nationhood from British colonies marked the breaking of the Brit-
ish Empire. These processes questioned the wisdom in continually importing ‘coloured’ labour
82 Racism and Young People in the United Kingdom