Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

tute racial discrimination, and thereby provide the breeding ground for fascism, the mosaic of unities and organisations
would resolve itself into a more holistic, albeit shifting, pattern of black unity and black struggle.
By 1955 the first wave of immigration had begun to taper off: a mild recession had set in and (he demand for
labour had begun to drop (though London Transport was still recruiting skilled labour from Barbados in 1956).
Left to itself, immigration from the West Indies was merely following the demand for labour; immigration from
the Indian subcontinent, especially after the restrictions placed on it by the Indian and Pakistani governments
in 1955 was now more sluggish. But racialism was hotting up and there were calls for immigration control, not
least in the House of Commons. There had always been the occasional call more for political reasons than economic;
now the economy provided the excuse for politics. Pressure was also building up on the right. The loss
of India and the impending loss of the Caribbean and Africa had spelt the end of empire and the decline of
Britain as a great power. All that was left of the colonial enterprise was the ideology of racial superiority; it was
something to fall back on. Mosley’s pre-war British Union of Fascists was now revived as the Union Movement
and was matched for race hatred by a rash of other organisations: A.K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists,
Colin Jordan’s White Defence League, John Bean’s National Labour Party, Andrew Fountaine’s British National
Party. And in the twilight area, between these and the right wing of the Tory Party, various societies for
‘racial preservation’ were beginning to sprout. Racial attacks became a regular part of immigrant life in Britain.
More serious clashes occurred intermittently in London and several provincial cities. And in 1954, in a small street
of terraced houses in Camden Town [London], racial warfare was waged for two days, culminating in a petrol
bomb attack on the house of a West Indian. (4) Finally, in August 1958 large-scale riots broke out in Nottingham
and were soon followed in Netting Hill (London), where teddyboys, directed by the Mosleyites and the White
Defence League, had for weeks gone on a jamboree of “nigger-hunting’ under the watchful eye of the police.
The blacks struck back, and even moderate organisations like the Committee of African Organisations, having
failed to obtain ‘adequate unbiased police protection’, pledged to organise their own defence. The courts, in
the person of a Jewish judge, Lord Justice Salmon, made amends by sending down nine teddyboys and establishing
the right of ‘everyone. irrespective of the colour of their skin... to walk through our streets with
their heads erect and free from fear’. He also noted that the teddy-boys’ actions had ‘filled the whole nation
with horror, indignation and disgust’. It was to prove the last time when such a claim could be made on behalf
of the nation. Less than a year later a West Indian carpenter, Kelso Cochrane, was stabbed to death on
the streets of Notting Hill. The police failed to find the killer. It was to prove the first of many such failures.
The stage was set for immigration control. But the economy was beginning to recover and the Treasury was known
to be anxious about the prospect of losing a beneficial supply of extra labour for an economy in a state of expansion —
though the ongoing negotiations for entry into the EEC promised another supply. Besides, the West Indian colonies
were about to gain independence and moves towards immigration control, it was felt, should be postponed till after the
British plan for a West Indian Federation had been safely established. Attempts to interest West Indian governments in
a bilateral agreement to control immigration failed. In 1960 India withdrew its restrictions on emigration. In 1961 Jamaica
withdrew its consent to a Federation. In early 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill was presented to parliament.
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