thus draining the Third World of the educated
and skilled personnel it could spare least of all. It
has been estimated that by 1973 more than a
quarter of the doctors in the National Health
Service had not been born in the British Isles.
When immigrants wishing to escape the poverty
of their homeland could no longer be absorbed by
a growing British demand for their labour, pres-
sure for control of immigration grew stronger.
Now arguments were added explaining why the
‘New’ Commonwealth citizens were no longer
welcome in Britain. The 1962 Commonwealth
Immigrants Act ended unrestricted immigration,
and the exclusion of immigrants later became still
more rigorous. But the entry of new groups, such
as some 100,000 East African and Ugandan Asians
holding British passports, driven out in the late
1960s and 1970s by racial and economic resent-
ment and by greed for their wealth, the arrival of
dependants of existing immigrants, the small num-
ber of new immigrants, and the second-generation
children born to the original immigrants, all
enlarged the Commonwealth communities in
Britain from 392,000 in 1962 to 1.85 million in
1976, out of a total population in Britain of 55
million.
Would racial conflicts explode into bloodshed
as the former Conservative minister Enoch Powell
prophesied? Such dire predictions proved wide of
the mark. The vast majority of African and Asian
immigrants and their descendants are peaceable,
hardworking and assert their right to be British
in Britain’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious
contemporary society.
Britain has come a long way since American
black airmen (of the USAAF) landed in 1944 in
a Norfolk village whose inhabitants had never
seen a black man before. Britain is now a multi-
ethnic society and a new generation has been
born into it. Racial differences are commonplace,
accepted as part of life in Britain today, while
intermarriage is more frequent. Just as the rigid
barriers between Jews and Christians have broken
down and anti-Semitism has greatly diminished,
so racial prejudices have lessened. The significance
of the immigrants’ contribution to the wealth of
Britain still needs to be fully emphasised and set
against the problems. Even these are not simply
racial. In times of depression and high unem-
ployment the deprived inner cities have vented
their anger and frustration against the forces of
the establishment, whose most visible manifesta-
tion is the police. The evils of unemployment
have increased criminality and the maintenance of
law and order has been perceived by the deprived
as tinged with racism. Yet the spectacular riots
of the 1970s and 1980s are the exception and
not the rule; the violence of the few attracts more
attention than the patience of the many.
There was a broad consensus among the British
people from the 1950s to the 1970s about the
kind of society they wanted: gross poverty and
misfortune, whether through ill health or old age,
to be banished by the state’s provisions of welfare
and medical care; decent standards of housing
and education for the population as a whole; a
growing supply of consumer goods, the pleasures
of a car for every family and summer holidays
away from home; an expanding economy to
bestow these benefits; greater personal freedom of
choice in lifestyles and the shrinking of the fron-
tiers of legal sanction on questions of morality; a
move away from authoritarian ‘Victorian’ stan-
dards; and finally a decent livelihood for all, with
full employment. The maintenance of law and
order was taken for granted, respect for the law
and the police was almost universal, violence the
exception. In seeking the good things in life,
there was an expectation that they could be
attained without too much effort, by a kind of
natural progression, though interrupted from
time to time by brief setbacks.
CND was an overwhelmingly peaceful move-
ment whose respectable leaders, with Canon
Collins of the Church of England at their head,
1
BRITAIN 541
Immigrants living in Britain before the 1962
Commonwealth Immigrants Act
Pakistanis Indians West East West
Indians Asians Africans
1951 5,000 38,800 15,300 12,000 5,600
1961 24,900 81,400 171,800 29,600 19,800
