Introduction

Political conflicts triggered by native hostility to newcomers are nothing new in British politics. As we saw in Chapter 2 with the defensive reactions of 1930s Banburians to migrants moving from elsewhere in Britain to work in their town, the activation of ethnocentrism does not even require immigrants to cross national borders. But while any influx of outsiders can trigger ethnocentric reactions, the deepest divides and most lasting conflicts have come over international immigration and the rising ethnic and racial diversity that successive waves of it have generated. This chapter tells the story of why this is so and how it came to be. We examine the first wave of sustained non-white migration to Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s, showing how conflicts over this migration became mobilised into politics. The choices taken during this wave of migration set up an identity politics alignment in the electorate, and this alignment in turn has shaped more recent identity politics conflicts over immigration. The dilemma facing this earlier generation of politicians will be familiar to those following the contemporary migration debate – policymakers agreed a liberal policy regime and unwittingly triggered an influx of migrants, then faced pressure to restrict this inflow when it activated ethnocentric hostility among the white majority, while at the same time a pressing need emerged to protect the new migrant communities from this ethnocentric hostility. The choices politicians made in response to these conflicting demands had a lasting impact, aligning identity conservative voters with the Conservative Party, which came to be seen as more willing to control the ‘threat’ from immigration, and aligning identity liberal voters with the Labour Party, which came to be seen as more willing to protect the rights of migrants and minorities.

There are three parts to the story, which parallel and foreshadow events in the decade leading up to the EU Referendum of 2016. The first is a large and persistent elite–mass gap on immigration, which led more liberal and cosmopolitan political elites to introduce reforms granting extensive migration rights to a large population in order to improve Britain’s international position, while underestimating the scale and intensity of public hostility this would trigger. In the first wave of immigration, the goal was to secure Britain’s place at the heart of a post-Imperial community of nations – the Commonwealth – and open borders between Commonwealth members was seen either as a valuable goal in itself,Footnote ¹ or as an acceptable price to pay to secure lasting political influence within this community. More than fifty years later, another identity liberal-dominated political elite came to very similar conclusions when considering whether to fully open Britain’s borders to migrants from the post-Communist countries acceding to the EU. In both cases, the unintended consequence of these decisions was a surge in migration as far more people opted to exercise newly granted free movement rights than political elites had anticipated, activating ethnocentric hostilities in the native electorate who perceived the new migrants as a threatening out-group.

The second parallel between the two waves is that the ethnocentric sentiments activated by migration were successfully mobilised by political actors arguing for more radical migration restriction policies. As public opposition to immigration grew, the policy response from elites constrained by a commitment to an open borders principle and unwilling to alienate migrant-sending countries was piecemeal and slow in coming. Substantial migration continued for a number of years, and public concern remained high, but without an effective mainstream political outlet, until a new political actor mobilised ethnocentric voters behind more radical proposals and transformed the political situation. The appearance of a credible electoral threat broke the logjam, pushing one of the main political parties to embrace more radical migration restrictions, breaking with their earlier commitment to uphold open borders principles. In the 2010s, this was the story of UKIP’s rise, as identity conservatives frustrated with successive governments’ inability to control migration turned to the radical right and eventually forced the Conservatives to offer an option to exit Britain’s open border arrangements with the EU via a referendum on Brexit. The story played out in a similar way in the 1960s as identity conservative voters, frustrated with repeated governments’ unwillingness to control Commonwealth migration, turned to Enoch Powell’s radical right insurgency, which eventually forced the Conservatives to concede radical reforms which effectively ended the migration rights of most Commonwealth citizens.

The final similarity between the two periods is that both also involved a substantial counter-mobilisation by identity liberals opposed to the rise of radical right actors and seeking to protect migrant minorities from ethnocentric intolerance. In the first wave, committed identity liberals within the Labour Party were pivotal in pushing through the first race relations legislation – writing anti-racism norms into British law, and laying the groundwork for a longer-run project of re-imagining Britain as a multicultural society where minority cultures are celebrated and minority rights protected. This, too, is already finding its echo in the Brexitland political cycle, with a shift towards pro-migration attitudes since 2016,Footnote ² and the emergence of activist groups devoted to protecting the rights of EU migrants and fighting the oppressive ‘hostile environment’ rules applied to migrants by the Home Office since the mid-2010s. While these movements have not, as yet, had the kind of lasting legislative impact that the proponents of race relations legislation had in the 1960s, they have already shifted the balance of power on migration by activating and politically mobilising pro-migration sentiments among the much larger contemporary identity liberal electorate.

The origins of the first wave: the entanglement of citizenship and Empire

The story of the first wave begins with the British Nationality Act (BNA 1948) of 1948, one of the most liberal pieces of citizenship and migration legislation passed by a Western democracy. The BNA 1948 defined British citizenship for the first timeFootnote ³ and did so in very expansive terms. A common citizenship with identical rights was conferred on all residents of Britain and of the current and former territories of the British Empire, including the vast and populous Indian subcontinent.Footnote ⁴ Eight hundred million people across the globe acquired full British citizenship rights, including the right to settle and work in Britain, and to participate in British mainland politics from the moment they arrived.Footnote ⁵

Given this remarkable openness, it is rather surprising that facilitating mass migration was not a goal, or even an expected effect, of the BNA 1948 legislation. Instead, its Parliamentary authors aimed to cement Britain’s political status at the heart of an open and integrated Commonwealth of former imperial states. While close links with the former Empire were seen as essential to Britain’s future prosperity and influence, mass immigration was not expected to be part of that equation, nor were all parts of the former Empire seen as equally important. The emphasis of the political elite was on maintaining close relations with the white colonial settler societies of the ‘Old Commonwealth’ – Canada, Australia and New Zealand.Footnote ⁶ In the decades prior to the BNA, the primary circulation of people within the Empire had been between Britain and these countries, and the BNA 1948 aimed to protect this system by confirming unrestricted rights to migrate to and from Britain and the Commonwealth. It was ‘a fundamentally backward-looking document reaffirming the status quo as it had existed for decades’.Footnote ⁷ The desire was to preserve economic and political connections between Britain and the diverse global network of territories it had developed over centuries under the aegis of Empire in a new post-Imperial era of independent Commonwealth states.

It was not possible to preserve this right for the white settler states of the ‘Old Commonwealth’ while excluding the black and Asian majority Commonwealth states without writing an explicit ‘colour bar’ into the legislation, something identity liberal politicians, crafting legislation just years after a world war against a racist dictatorship, were unwilling to consider. British legislators therefore conferred a single, undifferentiated set of citizenship rights on all residents of Imperial and Commonwealth territories. The policymakers who thus opened up the opportunity to migrate to Britain to hundreds of millions of people in Caribbean, Asian and African territories did not, however, give much consideration to what might happen if large numbers chose to exercise this right. The issue of migration to Britain from the current and former Imperial colonies was not mentioned once in the extensive committee and Parliamentary debates on the BNA.Footnote ⁸ Yet, as labour shortages developed in Britain’s post-war economy, rapidly expanding numbers of black and Asian Commonwealth citizens began to exercise their rights, moving to Britain in search of better work and higher incomes. The first inflows came from the West Indies, beginning with the arrival of the famous Empire Windrush with hundreds of Jamaican migrants seeking work, just months after the passage of the 1948 Act.Footnote ⁹ As the 1950s progressed, the numbers grew and migration diversified, with flows from the West Indies augmented by arrivals from India and Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁰

Public opposition to migration in the first wave

As Commonwealth migration flows increased, ethnocentric sentiments in the electorate were activated and strong public opposition began to manifest itself. Polling is sparse in this period, but the evidence available underscores that public opposition to ‘coloured’ migration, as it was then called, was intense and widespread from the outset (see Figure 4.1). Close to 90 per cent of poll respondents supported strong restrictions on Commonwealth or ‘coloured’ migration, and around 70 per cent expressed approval of the first restrictive legislation passed by the Conservatives in 1962. The share of the public who supported the BNA 1948 policy of full Commonwealth migration rights typically sat at around 10 per cent, while substantial parts of the public were supportive of very restrictive measures such as banning family reunion migrationFootnote ¹¹ or state-sponsored repatriation of settled migrants.Footnote ¹² This opposition was, from the outset, racially discriminatory – the overwhelming focus of public attention and hostility was migration from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent – indeed ‘coloured’ migration was the issue pollsters typically asked about, rather than Commonwealth migration in general.Footnote ¹³

Figure 4.1 Opposition to immigration and support for migration restrictions, 1961–6 (percentages)

Source: Archive of historical immigration polling compiled by Professor Will Jennings.

One unusual survey conducted during this period provides a stark illustration of the discriminatory nature of public opposition to immigration. In 1967, Gallup pollsters asked the public identical questions about the benefits and harms from Commonwealth and Irish migration. Flows of migrants from Ireland were at this point as substantial as settlement from the entire Commonwealth combined,Footnote ¹⁴ and, unlike Commonwealth migration, Irish migration remained unrestricted at the time of the survey, so if public concern was driven by the actual pressures generated by migration then opposition to Irish migrants should be as high as, if not higher than, opposition to Commonwealth migrants. Yet, as Figure 4.2 reveals, Commonwealth migrants attracted much stronger public opposition than Irish migrants. Three in five voters felt Britain had been harmed by the settlement of Commonwealth migrants, while only a fifth felt that way about the Irish migrant population. Racially different Commonwealth migrants activated ethnocentric hostility in a way that white Irish migrants did not.

Figure 4.2 ‘Do you think on the whole this country has benefitted or been harmed through immigrants coming to settle here from the Commonwealth/Ireland?’

Sources: Gallup (1967); Professor Jennings historical polling archive.

This strength of the hostile reaction to Commonwealth migration reflects the demographics of the 1960s British electorate, which was dominated in this period by identity conservatives. White school leavers – the core identity conservative demographic group – formed a large majority of the population. These voters were consistently much more likely to express ethnocentric hostility to ‘coloured’ migrants, and to support policies which would halt migration to Britain or repatriate already settled migrants, as Table 4.1 below illustrates by showing education divides in various immigration questions. University graduates, who were at a time a tiny minority, were much less likely to express hostility to Commonwealth migrants, and large majorities of graduates opposed all the draconian migration restriction policies proposed during this period. The migrants of the first wave faced more intense and widespread racially motivated hostility because Britain in the 1960s and 1970s was a society more dominated by the ethnocentric demographic groups most prone to such hostility.

The elite–mass divide on immigration in the first wave

Political arguments about migration in the first wave, like those today, were seldom a matter of narrow economic costs and benefits, but were a clash of outlooks between more cosmopolitan political elites concerned to maintain Britain’s status in the international community and a more ethnocentric electorate opposed to the settlement of outsiders they found threatening. For Britain’s post-Imperial elite, the people living in Britain’s Commonwealth were part of an ideologically constructed ‘us’ stretching across the former Imperial territories, a community of interest defined by a common history. Britain was at the centre of a global network, so Britain should have a globalised form of citizenship which crossed continents, knitting together all those with a political and historical bond to the country.

The British public did not share this view – their sense of ‘us’ was much more narrowly defined, racially and territorially. ‘Us’ for the British public of the 1950s and 1960s was white British people born and resident in Britain. Migrants from the Caribbean and south Asia were not part of any in-group they recognised, and they saw no reason why people from thousands of miles away should have an unrestricted right to join their national and local communities. This ethnocentric opposition to Commonwealth migrants was for the most part not softened by the economic reality of post-war labour shortages,Footnote ¹⁵ or the major contribution Commonwealth citizens made to the war effort. This illustrates how immigration debates are chronically prone to activate ethnocentric concerns about groups and group conflict, which cannot be resolved with technocratic claims about economic or foreign policy benefits. In this way, too, arguments during the first wave of migration resembled, and influenced, those during the second wave.

Debates over Commonwealth migration exposed deep divides between the identity liberal minority and the majority not only over the issue of who to let in and on what terms, but also over whether migration was a political priority at all. While liberal university graduates, and much of the policymaking elite, saw the arrival of relatively modest numbers of black and Asian migrants as a trivial matter, large parts of the electorate – in particular identity conservatives – reacted with intense hostility to Commonwealth immigration from the moment it began. While most identity liberal politicians, many of whom had fought Nazi racism in the Second World War, abhorred the use of race or ethnicity to judge migrants, many of their ethnocentric constituents felt just as strongly that racial and ethnic differences were a legitimate basis for restricting migration.

These tensions between identity liberals and conservatives over immigration in the first-wave period divided the parties internally, driving a wedge between the political elites and electorates of both Labour and the Conservatives. Both parties’ ruling elites tended to have stronger attachments to the Commonwealth, an intense and widely shared social norm sanctioning racial prejudice and discrimination, and a tendency to see migration and open borders pragmatically in terms of political and economic benefits. The support bases of both parties differed in all these regards – there was little attachment to Empire or Commonwealth amongst the mass electorate, whose primary loyalty was to a narrowly drawn sense of national identity defined by ancestry and birth. Social norms sanctioning expressions of racism were weak or absent in this period – as seen, for example, in the widespread and explicit use of discrimination in rental housing (‘no dogs, no blacks, no Irish’), and in popular culture – 1970s television sitcoms regularly featured racial stereotypes and insults, which viewers would see as outrageous and unacceptable just a decade or two later.Footnote ¹⁶ The mass electorate, and the mass membership of both parties,Footnote ¹⁷ expressed a strong preference for white over non-white migration, with many wanting the latter completely stopped or reversed.

The first evidence of the political power of such ethnocentric sentiments came in the 1964 general election campaign in Smethwick, where the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker – a prominent campaigner against migration restrictions – lost his seat to an obscure Conservative candidate following a racially charged campaign, featuring leaflets using the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. As the defeated Labour MP left Smethwick town hall after the count, Tory supporters yelled after him: ‘Where are your niggers now, Walker?’ and ‘Take your niggers away!’Footnote ¹⁸ While there was growing evidence of the disruptive power of this activated ethnocentric hostility, the leadership of both parties remained reluctant to respond to it. Early politicians who explicitly mobilised such concerns, such as Smethwick winner Peter Griffith, were ostracised by their fellow MPs and shunned by the parties’ leadership figures.Footnote ¹⁹ While many MPs in both parties were privately worried about rising public hostility to black and Asian migrants, openly articulating or sympathising with such ethnocentric sentiments was taboo.

The political activation of ethnocentrism: Enoch Powell and ‘Rivers of Blood’

The dam finally broke when, for the first time, a prominent member of the Conservative Party elite – Shadow Cabinet member Enoch Powell – broke the taboo and articulated in full the identity-based hostility to migration widely shared in the electorate in the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968, which used emotive rhetoric and lurid imagery to attack liberal Commonwealth immigration policies:

Powell was fully aware that such an open and visceral violation of anti-racism social norms would provoke a strong reaction from his colleagues: ‘I can already hear the chorus of execration … how dare he say such a thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings …?’ However, he defended his stance by arguing that the growing opposition of white ethnocentric voters to migration was both legitimate and too important to ignore: ‘The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so … I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What [my constituent] is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking …’Footnote ²¹

The chorus of execration Powell anticipated was indeed swift to arrive. Conservative leader Edward Heath repudiated Powell’s position, sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet, and never spoke to him again.Footnote ²² This move was overwhelmingly supported by his senior Shadow Cabinet colleagues – four of whom threatened to resign themselves unless Powell was dismissed. Heath cited the ‘racialist tone’ of Powell’s speech as the reason for his sacking, which he called ‘unacceptable from one of the leaders of the Conservative Party’ and ‘liable to exacerbate racial tensions’. The Times, newspaper of record for the British ruling class, denounced Powell’s speech as ‘evil’, calling it ‘the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our post-war history’.Footnote ²³

The public response was quite different – two-thirds of voters said Heath was wrong to sack Powell, and over 75 per cent said they agreed with his views on immigration.Footnote ²⁴ Powell received thousands of letters in support,Footnote ²⁵ and overnight became the most widely known Conservative politician after Prime Minister Heath himself.Footnote ²⁶ Polling in the months before the speech already showed a large majority believed controls on immigration were not strict enough, while a substantial minority backed a ‘total ban on coloured immigration’. Support for both policies rose in the wake of Powell’s intervention (see Figure 4.3). There was also lower, but still widespread, public support for Powell’s more controversial and draconian proposals – including banning family reunion and the repatriation of settled migrants.

Figure 4.3 Support for Powellite positions on immigration before and after ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968

Source: Jennings, Opinion polls database, 2018.

Enoch Powell transformed the debate over immigration, mobilising ethnocentric identity conservatives and driving a wedge between liberal anti-racist political elites and the mass electorate. Powell’s interventions were also the point at which a lasting divide emerged in the parties’ reputations on immigration. Before Powell, the two main parties were seen by voters as rather similar on the issue. New migration restrictions in 1968 had been introduced by the Labour government, and the Conservative leadership – which had distanced themselves from Powell’s stances – showed little initial interest in further action. But after ‘Rivers of Blood’, it was Powell who made the running in the migration debate. Powell continued to sit as a Conservative MP, and his association with the Conservatives led voters to see them as a party favouring strict and racialised immigration control. Powell’s strident and hostile language also forced a stronger response from Labour’s leadership, pushing the party into stronger defences of ethnic minorities’ rights. After Powell’s interventions, voters saw a clear divide between the Conservatives as the party of migration restriction and opposition to diversity, and Labour as the party of liberal migration policy and multiculturalism.Footnote ²⁷

We can trace the emergence of this divide in the British Election Study (BES) surveys. In 1964 and 1966, a majority of respondents, when asked which party was more likely to stop immigration, said ‘neither’, suggesting most voters had noticed the cross-party identity liberal consensus against strict immigration control. This changed in the wake of ‘Rivers of Blood’. Nearly six out of ten respondents to the 1970 British Election Study saw the Conservatives as more likely to halt immigration, compared with just 4 per cent who named Labour.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, thanks to Powell, voters in 1970 saw the Conservatives’ immigration policy as a great deal more restrictive than it actually was. This is illustrated in Figure 4.4, which shows the share of voters whose perceptions about the parties’ immigration policies were more restrictive than reality, accurate or less restrictive than reality. Some 58 per cent of voters in 1970 inaccurately claimed the Conservatives’ policy was either to totally halt further immigration (36 per cent) or to repatriate settled migrants (22 per cent), whereas only a fifth correctly identified that Conservative policy was to ‘allow immediate families and a few skilled workers’. As the share of voters who personally supported such restrictive policies was higher still (50 per cent backed a total halt, 20 per cent backed repatriation), these misperceptions, driven by Powell’s rhetoric, were electorally valuable, enabling the Conservatives to attract support from ethnocentric identity conservatives. Indeed, the party was able to have its cake and eat it on immigration: Powell’s widely reported polemics on the issue signalled a restrictive stance on migration, but by holding him at arm’s length the party leadership could avoid fully committing itself to a strongly anti-immigration stance that would violate elite anti-racism norms and jeopardise relations with the Commonwealth. The balancing act worked,Footnote ²⁹ bringing big gains for the Conservatives among the most ethnocentric and pro-Powell voters,Footnote ³⁰ despite the party leadership’s official disapproval of Powell and continued opposition to his most draconian proposals.

Figure 4.4 Voters’ perceptions of Conservative and Labour immigration policies, 1970

Source: British Election Study 1970. The study offered respondents four options on migration policy: repatriation of settled migrants and stopping all existing migration were coded ‘more restrictive than reality’ for both parties; allow immediate family and a few skilled workers was coded as ‘accurate’ for both parties as it is the closest analogue to the proposals both made; while allowing new workers and families free entry were coded as ‘less restrictive than reality’ for both parties as both intended to keep in place the strict quotas on labour migration imposed since the mid-1960s, while the Conservatives proposed further restrictions on top of this.

While the Conservative leadership was initially uncomfortable with Powell’s high profile and fiery rhetoric, they were unable to resist the pressure for migration restriction produced by his campaigns. The party pledged to introduce new immigration restrictions during the 1970 election campaign, and Heath fulfilled this pledge within a year of taking office with the passage of the 1971 Immigration Act (IA 1971). This maintained the concept of Commonwealth citizenship, but stripped it of practical meaning by creating two classes of Commonwealth citizens: ‘patrial’ citizens, with an unrestricted right to abode in Britain; and ‘non-patrial’ citizens, who had no such automatic right. Patriality was awarded to all those with a British-born parent or grandparent, a provision that, in effect, introduced a ‘colour bar’ while avoiding explicit recognition of race in immigration policy. Patriality ensured continued access to Britain for most white Commonwealth citizens (who typically had at least one British-born grandparent), while excluding most non-white Commonwealth citizens. However, to head off identity liberal criticism of racial discrimination, the Act also awarded ‘patrial’ status automatically to all Commonwealth citizens who had lived in Britain for more than five years, along with their families. Most already settled Commonwealth migrants of all ethnic origins therefore retained full residence rights, though in practice no effort was made to formally document such rights and thus secure them against future challenge, storing up problems which would emerge decades later in the form of the ‘Windrush’ scandal.Footnote ³¹

Heath’s 1971 legislation attempted to address the anxieties of identity conservative voters, and ensure their continuing support for the Conservatives, by stripping most black and Asian Commonwealth citizens of their migration rights. However, the legislation failed in its political goal before it was even implemented. On 7 August 1972, Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda issued a decree giving tens of thousands of south Asian residents with British Commonwealth citizenship just ninety days to leave the country.Footnote ³² While the previous Labour government had abandoned Kenyan Asian Commonwealth citizens when they found themselves in a similar position four years earlier, leaving them stateless, Edward Heath opted to uphold the anti-racist and pro-Commonwealth principles espoused by the pre-Powell political elite, in defiance of public opinion and despite vehement opposition from Powell himself. Heath pledged to fully honour the passport rights of Ugandan Asians to settle in Britain. He defended the choice as a matter of principle: ‘[We have] no choice but to stand by Britain’s obligation …’Footnote ³³ A massive airlift was organised to safely remove Ugandan Asian citizens with British passports, and the Heath government pursued an intensive diplomatic effort to ensure those without such passports would find a safe haven in other countries ahead of Amin’s deadline.Footnote ³⁴

Nearly 30,000 Ugandan Asian refugees were admitted to Britain in a matter of weeks. The unexpected and rapid arrival of large numbers of ethnic Indian refugee migrants was a scenario likely to provoke an intensely hostile reaction from ethnocentric white voters, and Enoch Powell wasted no time in looking to once again mobilise such sentiments, this time against his own party. Powell led the political campaign against the Ugandan Asians, repeatedly attacking his own government’s policy – for example, accusing the Attorney General of ‘prostituting his office’, for supporting their claims.Footnote ³⁵ Heath, like his Labour predecessors, discovered that Powell’s speeches were more important than Westminster legislation in driving media headlines and public perceptions on immigration. Although Heath had passed the restrictive IA 1971 just a year earlier, the Ugandan Asians crisis and Powell’s renewed anti-immigration campaign turned ethnocentric voters against the Conservatives, who were now seen as being ‘soft’ on immigration. Heath gained no credit for his restrictive reforms from ethnocentric voters, who instead were now being mobilised against him by one of his own backbenchers.

The consequences of this backlash are clear in the 1974 British Election Study. As we have seen, most voters in 1970 thought Conservative immigration policy was more restrictive than it actually was, thanks to Powell’s anti-immigration polemics. Now, with Powell campaigning against his own party for being too soft on immigration, public sentiment swung the other way, as Figure 4.5 illustrates. The share of voters who thought the Conservatives favoured the strictest migration control policies – repatriation or a total halt to immigration – fell from 58 per cent in 1970 to 36 per cent in 1974. Conversely, the share who thought Heath’s Tories favoured large-scale new migration or uncontrolled entry of migrants – options never entertained by the Heath government – tripled from 8 per cent to 24 per cent. Meanwhile, the share of the electorate believing Labour favoured liberal migration policies fell, despite the party’s strong support for Heath’s stance on the Ugandan Asians and its opposition to the IA 1971, particularly the discriminatory ancestry rules.Footnote ³⁶ The Conservatives’ electoral advantage on immigration restriction largely disappeared, even as the Conservatives’ immigration policy shifted in a restrictive direction. What Powell gave, Powell could take away. With the electorate again overwhelmingly in favour of strong restrictions on migration (73 per cent favoured repatriation or a total halt to migration in 1974), the loss of this restrictive reputation was costly. The Conservatives’ 1970 lead among the most ethnocentric voters disappeared in 1974. While immigration was far from the only issue on the agenda in the turbulent mid-1970s, it is quite possible that Edward Heath’s principled act of generosity to the Ugandan Asians, and Enoch Powell’s fiery criticism of this generosity, contributed to the Conservatives’ narrow defeat in the two elections of 1974.

Figure 4.5 Prevalence of misperceptions about Conservative and Labour migration policies in 1970 and 1974 (percentages)

Source: British Election Studies, 1970 and 1974. See note to Figure 4.4 for details of coding.

After Powell: the consolidation of an identity politics divide

With the Conservatives no longer perceived as committed to immigration control after the Ugandan Asian crisis, space opened up for new parties to exploit ethnocentric sentiments. In another parallel with the politics of the second wave of immigration, the radical right surged in the late 1970s by attracting identity conservative voters who had lost faith in the government’s ability to control immigration. The extreme right and openly racist National Front, emerging as Britain’s fourth largest party in the mid-1970s,Footnote ³⁷ foreshadowed the later turn to the BNPFootnote ³⁸ and UKIP following a similar loss of public faith in the government of the late 2000s.Footnote ³⁹ In both cases, Conservative leaders sought to win back migration sceptics with new and stronger promises of control – David Cameron’s ‘tens of thousands’ pledge and Theresa May’s ‘red line’ on EU free movement echoing the earlier bid by new Conservative opposition leader Margaret Thatcher to win back ethnocentric voters in the late 1970s.

Thatcher, elected as leader in 1975, was influenced both by Enoch Powell’sFootnote ⁴⁰ views and by the public reaction to them. She recognised from the outset the disruptive political power of immigration, and the rewards the issue could provide to politicians able to articulate and mobilise ethnocentric anxieties. Her reflections on the issue in her memoirs are worth quoting at length:

Thatcher’s thoughts bring together several aspects of the identity politics conflict over immigration. She, like Powell before her, was aware of the strong anti-racism norm among the political elite but, again like Powell, she did not believe such norms were shared by most voters. She attacked those propagating such norms as hypocritical – demanding acceptance of migrants while living in areas unaffected by their arrival – and defended the hostile sentiments expressed by those who she argued had to live with the disruptive consequences of migration. This account, written in 1995 and reflecting on political disputes from decades earlier, seeks both to legitimate the political mobilisation of ethnocentric sentiments and to undermine those who sought to stigmatise such mobilisation as a violation of anti-racism norms. It could easily have been delivered by a UKIP politician or Brexit campaigner defending ethnocentric opposition to mass migration twenty years later.

Mrs Thatcher’s sympathy with the ethnocentric sentiments of identity conservative voters was also evident when she was leader of the opposition. In a widely reported interview with Granada’s ‘World in Action’ programme in January 1978, Thatcher expressed sympathy with British voters who were ‘rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’.Footnote ⁴² This had an immediate impact on public perceptions, just as Powell’s interventions had ten years earlier. The share of voters who regarded the Conservatives as most likely to stop immigration, which had languished at around 30–35 per cent since the Ugandan Asians crisis, jumped to over 50 per cent after the ‘World in Action’ interview, and remained at this level through to the 1979 election.Footnote ⁴³ In the British Election Study conducted after the 1979 election this figure rose to over 60 per cent, including two-thirds of Conservative identifiers and more than half of Labour identifiers – the highest figures recorded since the studies commenced in 1964. Thatcher, like Powell, thus proved able to shift public views of the Conservatives’ immigration stance by employing strong restrictionist rhetoric, aligning herself with the concerns of electorally dominant identity conservatives. Unlike Powell, however, either due to her more careful tone or her more elevated position as Conservative leader, she was able to activate such ethnocentric sentiments without suffering a significant political cost from violating elite anti-racism norms.Footnote ⁴⁴

While Thatcher made no specific policy commitments in her 1978 intervention, once elected she moved quickly to enact fundamental reform of British citizenship and immigration policy, abandoning the framework established in the 1948 BNA and replacing it with a new conception of citizenship and national identity based on heritage. The 1981 British Nationality Act (BNA 1981) not only severed Britain’s citizenship links with its former colonies, it also ended an even longer-standing citizenship principle – the ius soli principle under which, since 1914, children born on British territory had an automatic right to British citizenship. Following the BNA 1981, children born in Britain to non-citizen residents have to register to obtain British citizenship, and can acquire citizenship only if they can meet residence or parental citizenship conditions.Footnote ⁴⁵ The provision, like the IA 1971, stored up problems for later, as there remained a widespread assumption that people born in Britain automatically acquired British citizenship,Footnote ⁴⁶ and many migrant families therefore made no effort to compile the documentation needed to secure their children’s citizenship rights later on. Children born to non-citizen parents after BNA 1981 came into force, who have lived in Britain their whole lives, have often been shocked to discover once they turned eighteen that the British state regarded them as migrants who could be subject to Home Office control and exclusion from some public services.Footnote ⁴⁷

The radical reforms of the BNA 1981, and the subsequent sustained drop in migration to Britain,Footnote ⁴⁸ cemented the links between ethnocentric attitudes and Conservative support which Mrs Thatcher had re-forged.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Figure 4.6 illustrates, those expressing ethnocentric attitudes were consistently more likely to also express a Conservative partisan identity throughout the Thatcher–Major governments of the 1980s and 1990s, a link which holds even after adjusting for the other demographic and attitudinal differences between ethnocentric voters and others.Footnote ⁵⁰ Conversely, those expressing racial prejudice or other ethnocentric attitudes, such as opposition to immigration, were consistently less likely to hold Labour partisanship throughout this period. Meanwhile, the rapidly growing ethnic minority electorate showed a strong and persistent alignment to Labour, reflecting the campaigns against them and their parents by Powell and Thatcher, along with Labour’s passage of race relations legislation. This powerful and lasting alignment began to tilt previously competitive or Conservative-leaning seats in England’s largest cities decisively towards Labour as ethnic minority populations grew.Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 4.6 Conservative advantage and Labour disadvantage in party identification among ethnocentric voters

Source: British Social Attitudes, 1983–1996. Measure of ethnocentrism is ‘Do you think of yourself as prejudiced against people of other races?’ The same pattern is found with other measures of ethnocentrism (see the Online Appendix: www.cambridge.org/Brexitland).

Mobilisation on the left: entrenching anti-racism norms

Both Conservative and Labour governments passed restrictive immigration reforms during the first wave, some with black and Asian migration as the clear focus of policymakers’ attention. Unhappiness with this approach was widespread among identity liberal elites and resulted in a counter-mobilisation of those most strongly committed to anti-racist norms. Identity liberals successfully pressed Labour into passing a series of Acts writing anti-racist norms into law, through pioneering race relations legislation. This legislation steadily expanded to cover more areas of life, including housing, employment and public services, and the anti-racism political debate moved from simply outlawing racially motivated discrimination to enabling fast-growing ethnic minority groups to retain many of their customs and accommodating their religious requirements. As the political and policy debate moved towards cultural recognition and providing ethnic groups with special exemptions from usual legislation (such as wearing motorcycle helmets by SikhsFootnote ⁵²), Britain became one of the European leaders in implementing multiculturalism policies.Footnote ⁵³ Unlike many continental counterparts, but similar to the United States, British law was early to recognise indirect, as well as direct, discrimination (1976 Race Relations Act). Crucially, the choice of dealing with discrimination through the civil, and not the criminal, justice processes has meant that the burden of proof in discrimination cases has been lighter, and made it easier to raise a complaint. This choice was directly modelled on the US system of legislation,Footnote ⁵⁴ and the early entrenchment of anti-racism norms in law has played an important role shaping the subsequent path of policy- and law-making in the area of race in Britain.Footnote ⁵⁵

The emergence of a distinct identity liberal political coalition was also catalysed by events in the decades between the two waves of immigration. One flashpoint was the racially motivated murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. This case was subject to a formal inquiry headed by Sir William Macpherson, instigated in 1997 by the Labour government following a sustained and broad-based public and media campaign mobilising anti-racism norms.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Macpherson report received wide press and public attention and a generally sympathetic response. It was influential in prompting further legal protectionsFootnote ⁵⁷ against what Macpherson called ‘institutional racism’,Footnote ⁵⁸ and a sustained campaign, unusually led by the socially conservative tabloid press, to prosecute and jail Lawrence’s suspected murderers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Often dubbed the ‘murder that changed Britain’, the tragic death of Stephen Lawrence not only further entrenched legal protections against discrimination, but also catalysed the spread of anti-racism norms through society and politics. From mainstream news media revealing and scrutinising institutional racism in the police, Home Office and political parties, to parties across the political spectrum naming tackling racism as a key policy priority,Footnote ⁶⁰ the case highlighted the potential for counter-mobilisation of anti-racism norms in response to extreme expressions of ethnocentric hostility. Although, as we showed in the previous chapter, the public do not always rally behind these anti-racism norms, by the 1990s they were no longer a preserve of the political elites, as they had been during the first wave of migration.

Conclusion: why did liberal immigration policies persist for so long?

Given the large majorities opposed to black and Asian migration throughout the first wave, the puzzle posed by this period is not that conflicts over immigration arose, but that relatively liberal rules governing Commonwealth migration were maintained for so long. British policymakers in 1948 granted a huge portion of the world’s population rights to reside and work in Britain. It took them fourteen years to begin restricting these rights, and thirty-five years to completely curtail them. Vestiges of this liberal citizenship regime remain even today – citizens of Commonwealth countries (and Ireland) retain the right to vote and stand in British general elections from the day they arrive in Britain. This is a right very few new migrants enjoy in other developed democracies, and a right not shared by other migrants to Britain, who cannot vote in general elections without first obtaining British citizenship.

Three overlapping factors explain this persistence. The first is legal and institutional path dependence. The 1948 choice to grant Commonwealth residents citizenship rights acted as a constraint on political elites who were reluctant to ignore or unilaterally abandon the obligations the citizenship regime created. Policymakers’ refusal to write discrimination into law by creating different and unequal classes of citizens was a key factor delaying the introduction of Commonwealth migration restrictions in the 1950s, and the obligations of the state to all citizens were invoked by Edward Heath to justify his decision to assist the Ugandan Asians in 1973. We see similar path dependence emerging again some fifty years later following the EU A8 enlargement of 2004. The decision to align Britain with a large international structure – this time the EU – once again led the government of the day to forgo immigration restrictions and triggered an unforeseen influx of migrants that was opposed by ethnocentric voters. Once the decision was made, political elites again felt themselves bound by legal and normative obligations to respect citizenship rights, this time the free movement rights of EU citizens, limiting their ability to respond to rising public concern (see Chapters 6 and 7).

The second factor was foreign policy. Britain’s political elites regarded close political, economic and diplomatic links with the Commonwealth as a key policy goal. With the sun finally setting on the British Empire, policymakers saw integration and cooperation across a post-Imperial ‘Anglosphere’ as the best way to renew Britain’s place in the world. Immigration control was therefore resisted by political elites as likely to cause frictions with Britain’s Commonwealth partners in the short run and weaken the bonds between Britain and its former colonies in the long run. Their successors forty years later were similarly reluctant to make a major push for reform to migration in the EU because, once again, this conflicted with central foreign policy goals. In both periods, political elites saw domestic disquiet over immigration as an acceptable price to pay for maintaining close connections with key international partners.

Finally, elite opposition to immigration control was not just a matter of policy constraint or expediency. It also reflected deeply held and widely shared elite social norms sanctioning racial prejudice and discrimination. The political classes of the 1950s–1970s included many men who had personally fought in a global war against a racist, genocidal dictatorship. Veterans of that war abhorred the racism they associated with their Nazi adversaries, and those perceived to be mobilising similar dark forces in domestic politics were ostracised. Thus, Peter Griffiths, who ran an openly racist constituency campaign in 1964, was dubbed a ‘Parliamentary leper’ by the prime minister following his election, and never served in ministerial office. Enoch Powell, the first senior politician to mobilise ethnocentric opposition to migration, correctly anticipated that it would end his career in the Conservative leadership, but perhaps did not anticipate that it would also end several longstanding friendships with Conservative colleagues. Even Margaret Thatcher, the archetypal dominant and domineering prime minister, was successfully discouraged from public interventions on migration by the normative objections of Cabinet allies.

While such social norms did not, in the end, prevent politicians in either party from introducing and then extending racially discriminatory migration controls, they were still consequential. Anti-racism norms acted as a brake on the political mobilisation of hostile public sentiment by the mainstream parties, and slowed and diluted the policy responses to this ethnocentric sentiment. Normative concerns also motivated Labour politicians to balance anti-immigration legislation with equalities legislation, entrenching anti-racism norms in law. And such norms acted as a sign of things to come. Racial equality was already a core personal value for university graduates in this period and anti-racism norms would therefore only grow in political significance as university expansion dramatically increased the share of graduates in the electorate.

The BNA 1981, which came into force in 1983, brought the political story of the first wave of immigration to a close. This was a complex story of grand imperial ideals and unintended consequences, of noble stands and messy compromises, as governments of both parties wrestled with an issue that divided them internally, and where their political and ethical instincts often strongly diverged from the strongly anti-migration stance of the electorate. Yet the political legacy of these conflicts was simpler: a clear and lasting divide in the parties’ reputations on immigration and diversity. The Conservatives, thanks to the strident and long-remembered stances of Powell and Thatcher in particular, became seen as the opponents of ethnic diversity and supporters of tight immigration control. The Labour Party, despite inconsistent and sometimes unprincipled positions on immigration, emerged as the party of identity liberals, migrants and minorities – in part, thanks to their passage of race relations legislation, but also simply by being the main opposition to the party of Powell and Thatcher, and thus the only viable alternative for those threatened by Conservative mobilisation of white ethnocentric hostility. This partisan alignment over race and ethnocentrism was still in place when immigration once again began to disrupt politics in the 2010s and, as we shall see, it played an important role in shaping the political impact of these new disruptions.