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Border Controls 27
be a blessing for African slaves to be provided with masters and regular work
and consoled themselves with the idea that ‘Negroes have far duller nerves
and are less susceptible to pain than Europeans.’ Poverty in Africa and the
Indian subcontinent was ascribed to the supposed laziness and incompetence
of the natives. An Englishman in 1820 found the cause of Indian poverty ‘in
a natural debility of mind, and in an entire aversion to labour’. Africans were
thought to possess a ‘worse than Asiatic idleness’. Thus the imperialists, who
at first admired and were even overawed by the more advanced forms of civilisation
they found in Asia, Africa and Latin America, gradually built up
theories of racial superiority (see Teresa Hayter, The Creation of World
Poverty). They came to convince themselves that they were on a civilising
mission, bringing the Bible and other gifts of civilisation to benighted natives.
Hostility towards non-white immigrants was at times expressed with
brutal clarity. A leading right-wing campaigner for Commonwealth
immigration controls, the Tory MP Sir Cyril Osborne, is quoted as follows by
Paul Foot in Immigration and Race in British Politics:
This is a white man’s country, and I want it to remain so.
Daily Mail, 7 February 1961
Those who so vehemently denounce the slogan ‘Keep Britain White’ should answer
the question, do they want to 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
I do not like to regard the Irish as immigrants. I regard the Irish as British as I am.
When I fought in the First World War, I was glad to have a good Irishman by my side.
House of Commons, 23 March 1965
Another Tory MP, Sir Martin Lindsay, referrring to ‘coloured immigration’,
said in the House of Commons on 5 December 1958 that: ‘A question which
affects the future of our own race and breed is not one we should merely leave
to chance.’ Mainstream politicians at times adopted the crude racist
language of the extremists. Mr Angus Maude, a Tory MP reputed to be an
intellectual and a liberal, said in a speech in February 1965 that: ‘It is not
unreasonable for a white people in a white country to want to stay a white
country.’ Sir Winston Churchill, quoted in The Times of 20 March 1978,
explained his concern about immigration to Sir Hugh Foot, governor of
Jamaica, as follows: ‘We would have a magpie society: that would never do.’
In 1954 Lord Salisbury, an advocate of immigration controls and Conservative
leader in the House of Lords, thought that an address sent to him by
the Conservative Commonwealth Association (Liverpool Group) was
‘extremely moderate and sensible’. The address (quoted by Spencer in British
Immigration Policy) read in part as follows:
Rooms in large dilapidated houses are sub-let at high rentals to coloured immigrants
who exist in conditions of the utmost squalor. Vice and crime are rampant and social