Britain's Race Problem

...Almost by definition, immigrants go where the work is...

...Britain's Race Problem By David Marquand stopped altogether, the British people would face terrible dangers...

...The measure was justifiably denounced as a concession to racialism...

...Although Prime Minister Harold Wilson recently promised "an urgent examination" to find out what help is needed for areas with a heavy concentration of immigrants, nothing is likely to come of it until the economic situation improves...

...This means that in Britain they go to the congested Midlands and Southeast—areas to which the native population is moving as well...

...But it soon became clear that it was supported by the overwhelming majority of Labor voters, and when Labor came to power in 1964 control over Commonwealth immigration was drastically tightened up...

...Most colored adults are recent arrivals...

...A complaint of discrimination was to go to the conciliation committee in the area concerned...

...Most disturbing of all, it is now apparent that racial discrimination is unlikely to disappear—or even to diminish—as the colored community adapts itself to British ways...

...and while their reaction was the most extreme one evoked by Powell's speech, there is little doubt that their attitude was widely shared among working-class labor voters...

...There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that they are not even aware of the extent to which they are discriminated against...

...At any level, more for the immigrant areas must mean less for somewhere else, and the somewhere else can be expected to object...

...Unless the flow was drastically cut down, if not David Marquand, a Labor MP, contributes frequently to these pages...

...however most of these came to join breadwinners who had arrived before the 1962 Act, so the number will decline sharply in the next few years...

...By 1967 the number of voucher-holders admitted to Britain was less than 5,000?compared with 30,000 in 1963...

...The government's attempts to tackle discrimination in the more usual sense of the term must be seen against this background...

...This was the strike that first demonstrated the feasibility of organizing poverty-stricken and demoralized unskilled workers from the slums, and paved the way for the marriage between trade-union power and Socialist ideology that was consummated by the creation of the Labor party in 1900...

...But the 1965 Act did not deal with prejudice where it mstters most...

...In addition, the whole concept of positive discrimination is profoundly alien to British political and administrative traditions...

...The second category consisted of the rest, who were to be admitted only if they obtained a "work voucher" from the Ministry of Labor...

...But positive discrimination of this sort would arouse intense political opposition...

...In doing so, they spotlight and exacerbate the problems of inadequate schools, inadequate medical facilities and inadequate social services in general...

...The pattern has been the same since the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act...

...As a last resort, the Board could then report it to the Attorney General, who would decide whether to seek an injunction to restrain the discriminator from continuing his discrimination...

...This divided would-be Commonwealth settlers into two categories...

...Yet the legislation will remain a dead letter unless it is supported by the white majority that does the discriminating, as well as by the colored minority that suffers it, and it will not be supported by the white majority until the colored minority can no longer be used as a scapegoat for the squalor and deprivation of the areas in which it lives...

...Here, moreover, this community is astonishingly moderate in its demands...

...The majority of them are not assimilated into the political system, and do not understand how it works...

...Powell was minister of health in the Mac-millan Government, and is now the chief spokesman of the extreme Right wing of the Conservative party...

...Only if the committee failed to persuade the parties involved to come to terms would the matter be reported to the Board...

...Hence the shock which went through the Parliamentary Labor party a few weeks ago, when the East End longshoremen marched on the Houses of Parliament to demonstrate their support for a speech delivered by Enoch Powell...

...In practice, though, the number of vouchers was severely limited to settlers with clearly needed skills...

...Yet the colored community in this country contains only about 2 per cent of the total population...

...Its response was to cut down the flow of immigrants—while doing nothing effective to tackle the urban poverty and overcrowding that had helped to make immigration a problem in the first place...

...As a result of these findings, the Government finally decided to extend the 1965 Act, and its second Race Relations Bill is now before Parliament...

...Finally, pressure from the grass roots convinced the Conservative government of the day that its attitude was unrealistic...

...The 1965 Act was a major step forward, and this year's legislation is still more welcome...

...But his message was simple...

...The second reason is more complicated...

...It also established a Race Relations Board, which set up a number of special "conciliation committees...

...In 1965, it passed Britain's first Race Relations Act, making it unlawful to practice racial prejudice in certain places of public resort...

...The process of tightening up was completed three months ago, when the Government extended the principle of the 1962 Act even to citizens of the United Kingdom, provided they were born outside the UK and had no recent UK ancestry...

...All too often they also become the scapegoats for these conditions...

...The social problems of the main immigrant areas can only be tackled effectively if the political authorities at every level discriminate actively in their favor in the allocation of resources...

...Then why all the argument and passion...

...The first and most obvious reason is the congregation of these immigrants in areas where the social capital was grossly inadequate before they arrived...

...But it was supported by comfortable majorities in both major parties, and there can be no doubt that it would be overwhelmingly endorsed in any national referendum...

...and although that 2 per cent is concentrated in a relatively small number of urban areas, no British city has anywhere near as high a percentage of colored inhabitants as the great metropolitan centers in the United States...

...Britain, he declared in accents of doom, was absorbing a far greater influx of colored immigrants than it could cope with...

...It was enough that they were citizens of member-states of the British Commonwealth, and that their legal status was therefore indistinguishable from that of United Kingdom citizens...

...The 1962 Act was opposed by the Labor party...

...In other words, the injustice suffered by colored Britons cannot be tackled in isolation from the injustices suffered by their white neighbors...

...Most of this heat has been directed against the Labor party—much of it by lifelong Labor supporters...

...His speech was replete with classical allusions and elegant phrases, as befitted a former Professor of Greek...

...Little has been done, meanwhile, in the way of "positive discrimination...

...Race relations and colored immigration have been one of the major themes of British politics since the beginning of the decade, generating more heat than any other issue, with the possible exception of the government's attempts to control increases in prices and incomes...

...Since then the dockers have occupied a special place in the mythology of the British labor movement as the symbols of militancy and proletarian solidarity...

...The biggest problem faced by the advocates of legislation opposing racial discrimination and favoring a liberal immigration policy is not the militancy or extremism of their colored constituents, but comparative apathy and passivity...

...In short, the massive injection of public funds required to break the vicious circle will only be forthcoming, if at all, as part of a general attack on the whole problem of poverty, deprivation and social inequality...

...This attitude prevailed throughout the '50s, when large-scale immigration began, and was preserved with remarkable sang-froid until the early '60s...

...It is hardly surprising, then, that the government's initial reaction was to turn a blind eye to large numbers of colored settlers arriving in the country...

...During the last three years, a number of expert inquiries—notably one conducted by the independent research organization, Political and Economic Planning—have shown that the legal equality of the colored community masks gross inequality in the crucial fields of employment, housing and credit...

...The first consisted of the dependents of immigrants already settled here, who were still to be allowed in...

...Indeed, there is an important sense in which the colored community as such has no demands at all...

...Legislation against racial discrimination is an indispensable prerequisite of satisfactory race relations...

...This was the message that stirred the dockers to march to Westminster...

...True, about 50,000 dependents were admitted as well...

...But if the experience of the last six years proves anything, it surely proves that in this country, at least, racial prejudice must be recognized as an illegitimate function of legitimate economic and social discontent...

...To take only one explosive example, native-born slum dwellers who have been waiting for as long as 10-15 years for decent housing, might have to wait still longer so that a colored immigrant could be housed instead...