Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [144]
The last question was the only one I could answer definitively: I had not. But the most baffling question was ‘Is it true that the whites beat the blacks with bicycle chains?’ I was nine years old and had no idea what my questioner – a smiling, avuncular figure with, he said, a son about my age – was talking about and assumed it was something to do with cycle racing, of which I knew nothing, rather than the weapon of choice for racist gangs. So I answered as nonchalantly as I could, ‘Sometimes, I think.’ What impact this must have had on the group of men travelling thousands of miles in hope of a better life is still the stuff of an occasional bad dream.
His question must have been set off by the reports of the previous year’s rioting in Notting Hill and Nottingham, when gangs of young white racists had rampaged through immigrant areas, attacking anyone with a black skin. Macmillan made many of the appropriate noises, condemning the riots and asserting the right of all British subjects to walk the streets, regardless of their skin colour. But the disturbances had shown how very empty were the claims which had been made by kings, queens and colonial governors that the empire was some sort of far-flung family. Within a couple of years Macmillan’s government was proposing radical steps to tackle not the readiness of young white men to take up chains and knives, but the fact that so many people of a different colour were arriving in Britain.
The flow of immigrants had been made possible by one of the final gestures of imperial grandiloquence. The 1948 British Nationality Act had promised free entry to the so-called Mother Country for all Commonwealth and colonial subjects, evidence of the growing belief that an association created by force might be turned into something more congenial. When 492 passengers and a dozen or so stowaways debouched from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948 they came from Caribbean islands where children bore the first names of English heroes like Nelson and Milton and from schools where many had learned to sing ‘There’ll always be an England’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. One of them was a calypso singer, Aldwyn Roberts, who performed under the stage-name of ‘Lord Kitchener’.
During the 1950s they were followed by many thousands more and the first black communities had soon been established in the big cities. But, as the race riots demonstrated, the immigration encouraged by government was triggering social tension: minds narrowed as the empire shrank. The immigrants’ perfectly reasonable retort ‘We’re here because you were there’ made plain the double-standards, and when the 1961 total of migrants exceeded 130,000 – a much larger number than had been anticipated – the government buckled. The charming idea of equality between the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of a fast-disintegrating empire was abandoned. Macmillan’s Home Secretary blustered that the effect of the 1948 law had been to entitle one-quarter of the entire world population to enter Britain. (Did anyone ask quite how this had escaped the attention of the all-knowing officials in Whitehall, when the extent of British rule had been the boast of empire for the best part of a century?) A new 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act would now create a clear distinction between ‘authentic’ Britons and those whose skin was a different colour, its unambiguous intention being to stop new arrivals and to encourage those already here to go back whence they had come.
Like just about every other piece of immigration legislation dreamed up since, the law failed to curb mass immigration. Current United Nations forecasts project a UK population of over 70 million by 2050: when the 1962 Act was passed, it stood at about 53 million. The presence of significant numbers