Amid what was a heavy news day yesterday, one early report stood out, which had ex-chancellor Philip Hammond opine that the UK should relax its immigration rules in order to deal with the mortgage crisis.
Having learned nothing in his over-long life, the idiot argues that the ability to hire cheap foreign labour will drive down wages and thereby help contain inflation, thus reducing the pressure on interest rates and allowing cheaper mortgages.
By coincidence, this the same day had the 75th anniversary of the landing of HMT Empire Windrush all over the papers, the ship that brought with it, on 22 June 1948, 492 men from Jamaica and Trinidad intent on starting a new life in the UK.
This was the event “celebrated” in certain quarters as setting the UK on the path to becoming the multi-racial state that it is today.
My immediate thought was to write on the lines of history repeating itself, following the narrative pursued by the Guardian and others that the Windward “pioneers” were heeding the call to travel to the UK “to help with labour shortages in the postwar years”.
Here, on the face of it, we had the same thoughtless dynamic of bringing in cheap foreign labour to solve a domestic problem, without taking into account the social impact, the effect on the infrastructure and, in the longer-term, the character of the nation.
To add depth to what I started planning as a piece, I spent the best part of the day revisiting Cabinet papers from the ’50s and ’60s, ending up downloading over 30 documents, which I supplemented with a number of contemporary Hansard reports, all aimed charting accurately the events of the period.
What the study of the documents told me is something that I should have expected, that the Guardian narrative – shared by so many progressive sources – holding that the West Indians were responding to a call for help from the mother country – was almost entirely fictional.
The accessible documents of the 1948 period are sparse, but the background to the Windrush landing is adequately explained by a then secret Cabinet memorandum of 18 May 1950 (now referenced CAB-129-40), from the secretary of state for the colonies – then Labour’s Jim Griffiths, a former trade union leader.
Quaintly headed “Coloured people from British colonial territories”, such a title used now (and even the contents) could have the author headed for the courts charged with hate crimes. But the title was at least honest, the memorandum covering “the problems arising from the immigration into this country of coloured people from British Colonial territories”.
From a pre-war level of about 7,000 coloured people in the UK, just short of two years after the Windrush landing, the community of “colonial people” and their families in this country was estimated to have reached between 20- 30,000, a figure that was quite obviously causing some concern.
For the most part, we were told (or weren’t told, as the document was marked “secret”) these persons lived in Liverpool, Cardiff and Manchester, on Tyneside and in the East End of London. There were smaller groups in other centres, notably in Birmingham, Leeds, Hull and Bolton.
Read more: Immigration: not wanted on voyage
