Britain's migration policy is an important driver of the protest, riots
and ethnic violence that have erupted since the horrific attacks in
#Southport. This thread tells the story of that policy, while aiming to
provide as comprehensive and objective an overview as possible.
The story starts with the Nationality Act of 1948. Prior to the Act, the concept of a 'British Citizen' did not quite exist. Britons, like Indians, Jamaicans, or Hongkongers, were subjects of the Crown to which they owed allegiance. The 1948 Act, prompted by the accelerating changes in the Empire after WWII, effectively put those born in the UK’s Dominions and Commonwealth on equal footing to Britons. In other words, somebody from Kingston, Jamaica could live and work in the UK as freely as somebody from Kingston-upon-Thames.
Britain's politicians and civil servants grossly underestimated the number who would use this opportunity. The Cabinet Papers in the National Archives show that what started as a trickle turned into a flood. For the five years after the Act passed, "immigration from colonies remained at no more than 2,000 per year. This increased in 1954 and had reached over 135,000 by 1961.” By the late 60s, there were well over a million non-whites in Britain, up from only a handful after the war. Most had alien cultures--and often religions, too.
This posed a unique problem for England, where the majority of the newcomers settled. As Benjamin Schwarz showed in his superbly written essay, Unmaking England, Britain had remained essentially unchanged for nearly a millennium and a half--or much longer.
Genetic records show that the matrilineal ancestors of some three quarters of white Britons were already in the British Isles some 6,000 years ago. Angles, Saxons, Frisians and similar (which brought no more than 250k) essentially completed the mix. "As the dean of British geneticists, Oxford’s Sir Walter Bodmer, explains, the country’s genetic history reveals 'the extraordinary stability of the British population. Britain hasn’t changed much since 600 AD.'" To be clear, this not to make an argument for blood and soil nationalism.
Instead, it is to demonstrate the unique stability of England. For instance, in the 1960s, it was shown that English children had played many of the same games since the 1100s. Robert Tombs argues that the English have a claim to be the world's oldest nation.
This singular permanence allowed England to develop a system of law and governance based not on the whims of foreigners, or abstract ideas imposed from high, but on custom and an organically developed, shared understanding that made the people one with the law.
Ironically, Britain's stability had previously made it uniquely tolerant of eccentricity and thus highly effective at integrating foreigners and making their children English (think Holst, Handel, Disraeli, Conrad, Churchill, Elliot, et al.) The problem posed by the immigration of the 1950s and 60s, therefore, was the scale and speed, which inevitably led to the formation of ethnic immigrant enclaves, making integration impossible.
In 1968, two of Britain's greatest politicians offered competing solutions to this predicament.
Roy Jenkins was perhaps the most consequential British politician never to have been Prime Minister. An elitist and a liberal, Jenkins was highly intelligent, an assiduous worker, a greatly esteemed biographer and a man of letters. He was also the intellectual force behind much of Britain's liberal shift since the 1960s. Jenkins argued in a 1968 speech that the country should not become a 'melting pot', turning out everybody in a common mould. Instead, immigrants could keep "their own national characteristics and culture." Thus integration would not mean flattening assimilation, but "equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity." This, then, is the core of multiculturalism, which has little to do with race, and is instead the idea of many cultures living in parallel and tolerance.
Enoch Powell disagreed. An ambitious and curiously intense man, Powell was perhaps the finest intellect to serve in Parliament since the war. He knew thirteen languages, was then the second youngest man to make professor (after Frederick Nietzsche), and had during the war had been promoted from Private to Brigadier. Crucially, he had fallen in love with India during the years he spent there, and had been horrified by the inter-ethnic violence he saw. He had also travelled to the USA in 1967, where he had seen first hand the bloody conflict between African-Americans and the police. He believed that the multiculturalism that was de fecto emerging in Britain would inevitably lead to the same outcome. He therefore favoured ending immigration coupled with a programme of voluntary repatriation.
In April 1968, Powell gave a speech in Birmingham to set out his case. What became known as the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was one of the most notorious incidents in British political history. Powell's prose was peppered incendiary language, including racial pejoratives. Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, and the rest of the Cabinet were appalled by the speech, and Powell was sacked the next day. The speech was so inflammatory that Powell was cast to the backbenches forever, and advocating for reduced immigration became next to impossible.
Yet, that same year, the government pushed through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to curtail migration. In 1971, the Immigration Act did likewise. Both generally worked, holding net migration low until the late 1990s.
In 1997, Tony Blair's 'new' Labour was elected. They immediately set out to raise immigration levels in a deliberate effort to make Britain truly multicultural; to make Jenkins's vision of a diverse Britain real. In 1997, they removed the Primary Purpose Rule, which required those marrying foreigners to prove they had not wed in order to secure British residency. In 1998, they removed border exit checks to all destinations, making it impossible to know who was in the country and who had overstayed their visa. In 1999, they expanded student permits. In 2000 they relaxed work requirements. In 2004, they expanded post-study work visas. All of these steps (sometimes taken outside Parliamentary scrutiny) led to significant increases in immigration, as the below charts from @MigrationWatch show. Added to this immigration came even more from the EU.
In 2004, the EU expanded with the accession of the so-called A10 countries, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Given eight of these countries had recently been members of the much poorer Soviet Bloc, many existing EU members harboured concerns that sudden access to the EU’s freedom of movement rights would lead to a surge in migration. The Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg thus placed restrictions on migrant workers from the 'A8' countries, including quotas or 2-5 year transition periods. Not Britain. The Home Office estimated that only 5,000-13,000 immigrants a year would arrive from the 'A8’ members, and it therefore saw no need to apply restrictions.
In reality, average immigration from the A8 nations into Britain was 72,000 per year, eight times more than the middle of the Home Office’s forecast range. The same thing happened with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2014: by 2017, there were 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain, implying that some 90,000 had immigrated every year since the beginning of 2014--three and a half times the government’s estimate. Labour's policies led to a monumental increase in migration, as the chart below shows.
In 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU, in part because freedom of movement within the single market made controlling migration near impossible. Yet while Conservative governments have ended free movement, they have *increased* overall immigration. In 2022, Britain In 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU, in part because freedom of movement within the single market made controlling migration near impossible. Yet while Conservative governments have ended free movement, they have *increased* overall immigration. In 2022, Britain believe that Britain's immigration system is one of the most liberal in the world.
Migration policy since 1949 increased in the proportion of the non-white British population, from 0.1% in 1951 to near a quarter in 2021. Rightly or wrongly, this has been unpopular.
ENDS
In tweet 20 of this thread, I incorrectly identified Edward Heath as Prime Minister. At the time, he was Leader of the Opposition. Powell, therefore, was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, not, as I wrote, from the Cabinet.