An empire mindset never really died. For some, colonial rule was a blessing given up by ungrateful people, and for many, including a prime minister, the arrival of former colonial subjects into the colonising country was regretted. By 1978, some politicians claimed that just 1.5 million black and Asian people, a third actually born in Britain, might swamp the other 55 million. National servicemen who had served overseas were, as Colin Shindler has noted, among many who regretted the ending of the British Empire. From the 1970s all political parties were in agreement that immigration from the former colonies, euphemistically termed ‘New Commonwealth’ countries, should be limited. Whereas in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries politicians, adventurers, academics and others were openly racist over colonial conquests of supposedly inferior peoples, by the mid-century, an ideology of conservative imperialism had developed to try to smooth moral dilemmas. Civis Britannicus sum (‘I am a British citizen’) and accompanying legal rights was a claim all people in the Empire could make, but it assumed colonial people would stay put in their countries. Conservative imperialism, liberal ideologies concerned with human rights and socialist notions of the brotherhood of all workers disappeared with the invited arrival of colonial workers and their families. By the 1970s notions that might earlier have been dismissed as morally unacceptable became the unspoken assumptions of all political parties.

This chapter documents the continuation of an anti-immigrant ideology and its linkage with the idea of an exclusive British identity, and the developing reactions of a younger generation becoming more race conscious.