Module: HST4605 Race and the Desire for Difference
By: Ridha Sheikh
Throughout history, there have been numerous episodes of migration to Britain but those episodes were generally small and demographically insignificant until the Second World War. Following the end of the Second World War, Britain recognised that the reconstruction of the British economy required a large influx of immigrant labour. Following the 1948 British Nationality Act which granted Commonwealth citizens free entry into Britain, there was a large influx of non-white migrants from Britain’s former colonies for the first time. During the 1950s in particular, Britain’s non-white population grew significantly. In order to assess whether Britain had become a multicultural society or not by the end of this period, it is crucial to define what is meant by a multicultural society. A ‘multicultural society’ can be a society whose population has become multi-ethnic through immigration, a culturally diverse citizenry, in which case Britain would inarguably be considered as a multicultural society[1][2]. However, multiculturalism can also be used to describe both an attitude and a norm: multiculturalism as tolerance towards others; as friendly and supportive behaviour towards immigrants; as a liberal and democratic attitude which is based (among other things) on learning from the errors and fatal consequences of nationalism, chauvinism, and ethnic intolerance[3]. It can also be regarded as a political-constitutional principle; a society where there is ethnic pluralism, ethnic autonomy and more than one “state language”[4]. It is using these concepts of multiculturalism, where there is cultural integration that I will assess whether Britain had become a multicultural society by the end of the 20th century or whether the hostile attitudes which emerged following post-war immigration did not subside by the end of the century.
Post-war immigration was the first significant wave of non-white immigrants (largely from the West Indies, Indian subcontinent and Caribbean) to the UK. As large groups of Black and Asian people began to settle in Britain, racist attitudes from the colonial era began to resurface. Following the war, political establishments during the fifties refrained from restricting immigration and mentioning racial ideas due to the connotations of the racial genocide of the Hitler regime. However, the idea that Britain was a white man’s country was crystallised and galvanised by Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, delivered in Birmingham on 20th April 1968, which was followed by explicit (as opposed to implicit) racism[5]. The presence of ‘too many coloured immigrants’ provoked their deepest economic, political and cultural anxieties, and stretched the limits of their tolerance which was seen by the support Powell gained[6]. Everyday forms of discrimination – such as bars not serving non-white customers – and violent attacks such as the Notting Hill Riots in 1958 made it increasingly difficult not to address racial attitudes in Britain. As a result, both Labour and Conservative governments pursued the goal of assimilation for the majority of the 1960s and 70s; assimilation reinforced the idea that people of colour were out of place and needed to fit in with white British culture. Assimilation is not a multicultural policy as it does not aim to increase tolerance of a new culture but to reduce the role of other cultures. For example, the Department of Education advised local authorities to disperse immigrant children so they would not form more than 30 per cent of the pupils in any one school: this kind of approach was suggested to help white parents who feared that schools were being ‘swamped’ by immigrant children and to integrate non-white and white children[7]. Furthermore, the Commonwealth Immigration Acts of 1962 and 1968 were passed to curtail immigration from the Commonwealth as a way of addressing the negative attitudes of the white British population towards people of colour. This made it harder for dependents of the immigrants who had already settled here to migrate which further isolated the non-white population as they felt increasingly marginalised in society. This reduced the prospects of a multicultural society as there were distinct racial/ethnic groups in society who had minimum interaction.
Powell’s depiction of immigrants ‘swamping’ a traditionally white Britain brought immigration and race out of the shadows of the House of Commons, onto the national stage, and had struck a chord with certain sectors of the British public. For a brief moment, Powell was the era’s most popular Tory politician but in 1968, he was kicked out of the Shadow Cabinet by his Conservative colleagues who viewed his speech as “embarrassing, immoral and even illegal”[8]. There were also calls of urgency from groups such as the British Communist Party to pass legislation to combat racial discrimination and work towards equality as it became clear that people from the Commonwealth, particularly the West Indies, were subject to institutional racism[9]. This signified a key turning point in the 20th century where politicians began to recognise that ethnic minorities deserved equal treatment and that racial attitudes were inappropriate. The 1970s was a time of progress for Britain’s non-white population. During the 50s and 60s, South Asians and Black people were treated by the dominant society in the same way so much that they could be mobilized under a single political category[10]. This began to change in the 1970s, as Afro-Caribbeans and Asians began to create their own identities. Black British culture began to gain prominence as an identity for many; there was no sense that Britishness is an ideal to which they might want to subscribe or assimilate[11]. The young immigrant community had found many different ways to make itself heard. Many black teenagers were turning to violence as a means of articulating their defiance against the increasingly hard-line actions of the state[12]. The 1977 murder of Pakistani-born Altab Ali drew thousands to the streets of London to demand an end to the racial violence committed by the East End skinheads[13]. They were showing that they were not going to continue to be subjected to racism or give up their cultural identities, but instead create their own where they could be black and British simultaneously. The Black British culture that was forming was secure in a difference which it did not expect, or want, to go away. It was still rigorously and frequently excluded by the host society, but it allowed these communities to feel more comfortable in Britain[14]. In the high moment of its assertion through reggae and Rastafarianism in the 1970s, the idea that Black people could be perfectly comfortable with their Blackness became increasingly likely. Furthermore, the stylization of Black British youth was a defining force in street-oriented British youth culture. They also largely influenced white youth culture from the 70s onwards; this showed society was becoming more multicultural as British culture was becoming enriched by other cultures, starting with youth culture.
However, the 1980s and 90s marked a general downturn for the Black communities and the Black British ‘renaissance’ came to an end. The election of Margaret thatcher proved to be detrimental for Black and Asian communities as her political agenda was not co-operative with the unity which had been developing in the previous decade. In 1978, only a decade after Powell’s speech, Thatcher gave an interview using a similar divisive tone, stating that the country is being “swamped” by immigrants who would undermine British law, democracy and culture[15]. The National Front had attracted a large proportion of votes in the 1979 election which posed a threat to Thatcher. As a result, immigration was an issue that she chose to politicize, breaking almost 15 years of bipartisan consensus, with the justification to stop people turning to extreme parties. Thatcher’s lexicon was divisive and emphasized the importance of a unified national community bound by a shared culture; insisting that Britons wanted to defend their way of life from ‘alien’ traditions/customs followed by immigrants which would be achieved through stricter immigration policies[16]. The 1981 British Nationality Act which restricted the boundaries of citizenship and closed loopholes for immigration was justified as a means of preserving British historical integrity rather than sounding explicitly xenophobic or racist as Powell did after making his speech in 1968. Thatcher’s premiership was marked by its divisiveness, between rich and poor, north and south and between whites and non-whites. Many of Thatcher’s policies tended to hit the Black communities harder than any other, leading to the 1981 riots in places such as Brixton and Toxteth. In 1981, the UK was hit by a recession, but the Afro-Caribbean community suffered particularly high unemployment, poor housing, and a higher than average crime rate. There had also been increasing hostility between the police and the community which sparked up the riots. Furthermore, the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 prompted widespread re-examination of questions of (in)justice, cultural identity, and continuing racism in British society as it concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist in the 1999 Macpherson Report[17]. This was a key turning point for multiculturalism in the UK as it turned into a time of public crisis, leading to the new Labour government to initiate processes of institutional reflexivity, targeting institutional racism within Britain's most powerful organizations of state and civil society. But, it also proved to show how ethnic minority communities were subject to racial discrimination since their arrival. The end of the 20th century however, was finally starting to look positive for the marginalized groups in society. In 1997, Blair was elected as Prime Minister; as Labour politician, he aimed to help those at the bottom of society and unify Britain once again.
To conclude, Britain was not a multicultural society by the end of the 20th century in the sense that there was not a liberal attitude towards ethnic pluralism; it was only beginning to develop at the end of the century. Although there were many progressive achievements for the Black and Asian communities in both legal and social terms, they were limited in effect. Thatcher’s premiership, which dominated a large part of the second half of the 20th century, had a reactionary effect on multicultural issues and did not allow much of the Black and Asian community to prosper the same way white people, particularly in the South, did. Racism was very much institutional which only began to be addressed at the end of the century. Also, British Black and Asian people had created identities which slightly integrated them into society, but a large proportion of White British people still did not accept them as British. Britain was multicultural in the sense that the population became multi-ethnic by the end of the century, but it would be an overstatement to say that Britain was a multicultural society where there was a general sense of ethnic pluralism and tolerance, and where British culture had been enriched by other cultures as there was a sense of British ‘preservation’ held by many. The end of the century was beginning to look up, but a functioning multicultural society had not been achieved.
Footnotes [1] Heckmann, ‘Multiculturalism Defined Seven Ways’, The Social Contract 3(4) (1993) p.245. [2] Modood and Uberoi, ‘Has Multiculturalism in Britain retreated?, Soundings (2013) pp.129-142. [3] Heckmann, ‘Multiculturalism Defined Seven Ways’, p.245. [4] Ibid. [5] Feldman, ‘Why the English Like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History’, Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (2011) pp.281-302. [6] Aydin, (2013) ‘British Multiculturalism: Diversity Issues and Development of Multicultural Education in Britain’, Multicultural Education: Diversity, Pluralism, and Democracy An International Perspective, pp.58-91. [7] Feldman, ‘Why the British Like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History’, p.286. [8] Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton; Oxford; Princeton University Press, 2017) pp.138-191. [9] Owusu, Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (Routledge, 1999) [10] Owusu, Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (Routledge, 1999) [11] Ibid. [12] Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (SAGE Publications, 2004) [13] Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History [14] Owusu, Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (Routledge, 1999) [15] Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, p.141. [16] Ibid, p.149. [17] Cottle, The racist murder of Stephen Lawrence: media, performance and public transformation (Praeger: 2004)
Bibliography
Aydin, (2013) ‘British Multiculturalism: Diversity Issues and Development of Multicultural Education in Britain’, Multicultural Education: Diversity, Pluralism, and Democracy An International Perspective, pp.58-91.
Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton; Oxford; Princeton University Press, 2017) pp.138-191.
Cottle, The racist murder of Stephen Lawrence: media, performance and public transformation (Praeger: 2004).
Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (SAGE Publications, 2004).
Feldman, ‘Why the English Like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History’, Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (2011) pp.281-302.
Heckmann, ‘Multiculturalism Defined Seven Ways’, The Social Contract 3(4) (1993) p.245.
Modood and Uberoi, ‘Has Multiculturalism in Britain retreated’, Soundings (2013) pp.129-142.
Owusu, Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (Routledge, 1999).
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