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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In modern Britain, barely a day goes by without a politician, pundit, paper or pub-goer launching into a tirade about 'the problem with immigrants' and what should be done to tackle it. High unemployment, overcrowded schools, benefit scrounging, housing shortages, stretched healthcare services ... pretty much every issue facing the country today seems to be pinned on immigration - but is it really a problem at all? In this fascinating book, Derek Laud sets out to challenge the widespread misconceptions and prejudices surrounding those who have relocated to the UK. He examines the social, economic and cultural impact of immigration across the centuries, and addresses the question of why some ethnic communities struggle here while others thrive. An insightful, thought-provoking and timely examination of one of the most significant issues of our time, this is an indispensable and refreshingly nuanced contribution to the immigration debate.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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THE PROBLEM WITH IMMIGRANTS
Derek Laud
To Anne, Pat, Cicely and Charles. Thank you all for your love and support.
Then there is Ceeker too. She is the leading lady in my life and the most beautiful Jack Russell I have ever owned.
With love,
Derek
January 2015
Contents
Preface: Enoch Powell
HIS VERY NAME HAS SOMETHING of a menacing ring about it. Enoch Powell – or, to be more precise, John Enoch Powell – was a menace. He spent thirty-seven years as a Member of Parliament and three years as Minister of Health – and he was a menace to many of his colleagues. This classical scholar, author, poet, politician and, in his time, the youngest brigadier in the British Army died in 1998. It is doubtful that he will be remembered for any of those exceptional things … bar one, perhaps. It was as a politician – a Tory politician – that he made his indelible mark. Speaking in 1990 in Cambridge, he said: ‘I was born a Tory, I am a Tory … it is part of me, it’s something I cannot change’ – but he died without a Tory membership card in his wallet. Oddly enough, though, it was not the issue of race and immigration – for which he became best known – that caused the parting of the waves.
When I first heard the word ‘racist’, it was in connection with Enoch Powell. I was about eight years old at the time and, long before I knew much about anything else, I knew about Enoch Powell. I remember seeing a photograph of him. He looked intense. There was no smile. I was curious.
Politics was everything to Powell. Many think that, had it not been for the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, he would have been Prime Minister. I do not subscribe to that view myself. Powell was not temperamentally suited to office: he was a loner and could not live side by side with collective responsibility. He always needed to be right. He was also in a party, as Lord Hailsham once put it, ‘that thinks it is wicked to have brains’. For that reason too, he was always going to be the odd man out.
This isn’t a book about Powell, and I cannot give any authoritative judgement of him (I did not know him well enough). My contribution is as a bystander – who witnessed, for over a decade, many of his orations from the gallery of the House of Commons – and as an earnest young researcher – who pored over many of his past speeches and articles. There was no doubting that the man was a Tory to his fingertips.
However, the very thing Powell said – he was born a Tory – was in fact something he spent most of his lifetime opposing. He started early, resigning from Macmillan’s government over public expenditure in 1958. Then, and most infamously, came his views on immigration and ‘Rivers of Blood’. And subsequently, almost as if he were working to a deliberate ten-year cycle, the Common Market reared its head and he voted Labour in the 1974 general election as a result. He was always drifting against the prevailing tide, and there were other policy differences too.
Many thought of Powell as a dangerous figure. To them, he had too many principles (the Conservatives had always been largely pragmatic until Mrs Thatcher came along) and he seemed hell-bent on destroying his party if he could not make it in his own image. When he famously urged the voter to turn on the Tory Party and vote Labour in 1974, he created a rift he could not have known would be permanent. Powell had in fact previously voted Labour in the 1945 general election, because he had wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the Munich Agreement.
Indeed, in my view, he was not – by any means – always wrong in his endeavours to reprimand his party. I personally hate the chant ‘my party, right or wrong, my party’.
All political parties need fearless figures like Powell. I was so admiring of him – and Tony Benn – for that same reason: the political stage is dull without them, and there are no comparable figures today. All good revolutions are intellectual and Powell provided his fair share of revolutions. We all remember Winston Churchill for his leadership during the Second World War, but, like Powell, he was independent-minded and he even changed party too. In fact, in a quote never published before – but kindly made available to me by the Trustees of the Gilmour family – Churchill had similar concerns about immigration. This is taken from Lord Gilmour’s unpublished diaries:
The next week we had a rather different social occasion, this time, no doubt, at the instance of Caroline’s mother. She and we were invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street with only the Prime Minister, his wife Lady Churchill, his daughter Mary Soames, and his private secretary Jock Colville. Although very deaf to begin with, Sir Winston became much less so after he had summoned his hearing aid, and he was as far from being gaga as anybody else present. He was given frequent messages as to how questions were proceeding in the Commons. In those days, Prime Minister’s questions did not begin at a set time, but only if, and when, ordinary questions reached no. 45. On our day, they didn’t. After a while Churchill raised the question of The Spectator’s attitude to the arrival of immigrants from the West Indies. I explained our fears that if immigration continued at its current rate there would be an explosion in Brixton or elsewhere; we therefore favoured measures to restrict it. After expressing some measure of approval, the Prime Minister said: ‘I think it is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice.’
It was a spring day on 20 April 1968 when Enoch Powell rose to his feet to deliver what might very well be the most famous and controversial speech ever made on race relations and immigration in Britain. Ever since that time, Powell’s name has been synonymous with immigration and, in particular, with racism. It is not hard to see how this impression came about. To re-read his speech is a chilling experience. To watch the video footage is distressing. The language, the intonations and the intensity are nothing short of deliberate histrionics. His small frame, pearl-like blue eyes and nasal tones make this man intriguing from the off.
An examination of the original typed text of his speech – with additions and corrections in his own hand (complete with underlining of points to emphasise) – implies, as one would expect from him, preparedness for the storm he was about to create. He must have known that he was gambling his entire career and reputation on this one speech. Powell knew what he was about – I can’t imagine he ever had much self-doubt – and he intended his contribution to be disruptive and offensive. But to whom? Was he really targeting the Afro-Caribbean community (as Churchill clearly was), or the leader of his own party (whom he desperately wanted to destabilise, if not replace)? Could Heath really have been the intended victim? I have no doubt that, among many things, Powell knew how to be Machiavellian.
Churchill died three years before Powell’s speech, but they would have sat in the Commons together. Powell would seemingly have enjoyed support from Churchill for his concern about immigration, but I doubt for his use of emotive and vulgar language. The ghost of Enoch Powell looms large whenever I think of immigration, and surely it is the same for others of my generation? The unsettled question (for me, certainly) wasn’t whether Powell was wrong or right – broadly speaking, he was wrong (of that, I am sure) – but rather whether his motives were racialist or not. On that, I just cannot be forthcoming. There are others who are more certain: I argued with the late James Baldwin about it into the early hours while staying with him in France. If he could not persuade me, then I doubt anyone else can.
Powell’s influence rapidly waned after 1968 and it was in 1974 that he made his next major move: he resigned from the Tory Party and stood for the Ulster Unionists in an election in the Northern Ireland seat of South Down.
The menace in Powell surfaced on the political landscape in a major way – across the board and always unpredictably. We shared John Biffen in common as friends. I adored John and miss him very much – this urbane, intellectual and witty man had a considerable influence on my outlook. He once described Enoch as being ‘a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad’. I think he was being characteristically kind to his friend.
Jim Prior amusingly dubbed Powell the ‘Wolverhampton Wanderer’. Prior didn’t trust Powell and hostilities intensified during the former’s period as Northern Ireland Secretary. To be frank, Powell was downright stubborn. He was egotistical and, yes, fearless to the point of wilful destruction. He was also clearly riddled with integrity and was a passionate parliamentarian. Britain is a much safer place when our elected politicians have a disposition towards a parliamentary conscious, and Powell did – I will always salute that.
Powell raises more questions to which I can provide answers. I was once, like Powell, a man for whom politics was everything. I admired him from afar. I have always been economically Powellite, but departed from the manner in which he expressed his views: I don’t believe in using fear as a justification for policy-making, which is what he was doing in his 1968 speech. That is also what our current second-tier politicians do while snatching our liberties from under our noses as if it were a plaything. The dangerously ambitious and suspect Home Secretary Theresa May is one to be watched.
What would Powell make of today’s London, a financial capital of the world economically fuelled by a significantly foreign workforce? The company where I am a partner employs people from at least twelve different nationalities; between us, we speak eighteen different languages. Our capital city is diverse and we are benefitting from such diversity in many ways, not just economically.
I wish I had made more effort to get to know him, but I suspect that would have been in vain. Powell and I first eyed each other in the ‘corridors of power’. We were on nodding terms long before we actually spoke. We tipped hats towards each other outside the Houses of Parliament on early winter mornings, and, although I had heard stories about how notoriously difficult Powell was with small talk, that didn’t deter me – I wanted to meet him. Something told me the moment would come. I brushed up on my Latin and Ancient Greek (with Cicely’s invaluable help and patience) in readiness for the occasion. When the moment arrived, I was seated on the right of Powell and we were breaking bread on a long table. Enoch Powell was in talkative mood. He asked about my ancestry and my route into politics. We spoke about horse riding and our shared passion for hunting. I felt no nervousness – in stark contrast to expectation. I made no slip of the tongue and felt I came through the experience unscathed. I will never know what he made of me, but I long ago gave up caring what others think.
Trying to fathom what was in Powell’s highly intellectual mind when he combined crude language – ‘grinning picaninnies’ – with the majesty of classical citations – ‘like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood’ – remains an unresolved question, even more than forty-six years later. The explicit target and excuse he gave for his speech was the impending Race Relations Bill. The clause that related to the racial discrimination provision was in his sights, and he didn’t like it. He implied there was no need for anti-discriminatory laws. It’s important to remember the time and context in which he was making this speech: Britain was, and still is now, an overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon nation. He was speaking for the majority, as he saw it. However, to my mind, this did not justify the use of exaggerated metaphors. It is astonishing that he seemed not to attach sufficient importance to the sensitivity his subject matter required. I see a reoccurrence of this today. Michael Fallon, the usually sure-footed Cameron foot-soldier, reignited the ‘swamping’ metaphor in the same terms as Margaret Thatcher did in the 1987 general election. It seems all Tory leaders feel the same about immigration. John Major, the man from south London (for whom I worked), couldn’t resist making immigration an issue in his 1992 general election campaign. I had expected better from John.
Powell’s speech was excessively gloomy on immigration. Broadly speaking, he might have been right about the numbers here in today’s terms, but he was wrong to forecast the ‘foaming of much blood’. His predictions of racial riots simply have not materialised. He failed to completely understand that integration could work (although, in fairness, he did say it was not impossible), or that tolerance was much more in the human grain than racial hatred or community conflict. I personally have found this to be true. I have enjoyed both a rural and urban upbringing. I felt at home in both places, although the differences between rural and urban communities are vast. In Suffolk, Norfolk, Hampshire, Leicestershire – to name some of the rural parts of England I have lived in or visited regularly – I was always made to feel welcome. Indeed, the Italian who was a finalist in last year’s X Factor reminded us every week that we have made him feel just the same.
In 1988, I was asked to judge the bonny pony competition while staying with friends in Lincolnshire. There were at least thirty entries coming from places far and wide. I gave first prize – and the obligatory rosette – to a boy who must have been all of five years old. I suspect it was the first time he had ever seen a black man, some twenty years after Enoch’s speech. I doubt much has changed in Lincolnshire since that visit and I doubt the existence of a black person in that village today. I trust that boy is now a successful young man in gainful employment. I hope he will remember me for awarding him his first ever rosette. I forget his name now, but I think he might have been a John. Entirely unbeknown to me, I had just given the Rt Hon. John Enoch Powell’s grandson first prize. The irony has kept me giggling to this day, even if my parents can’t quite share in the laugh.
Powell colours the race debate, even now. Many today are striking Powellesque poses, even if they may baulk at being called Powellite. But he is not the reason I have written this book – that is better explained in the first chapter – rather it is the writing of this book that puts me in mind of him again. It would have been marvellous to have asked him to write this preface for himself, so writing about him is the next best thing.
But now that I am thinking about him, what interests me today is the fact he changed his party. I take a little satisfaction from the thought that Enoch Powell and I – for very different reasons – both spoke out when we needed to, and were not afraid to move on. If only I could speak to him again…
Chapter 1
Surfing the wave
EVER SINCE I WAS YOUNG, certain phrases have been ringing in my ears, ringing like ritual incantations: ‘bloody foreigners’; ‘send them back’; and, most common of all, ‘the problem with immigration’. It is the nature of these incantations – in fact the very point of them – that they trip off the tongue almost without consciousness; sacred, reassuring truisms rubbed through repetition into the way of the world, day after delusional day.
The perception that I had – that any young black person could have – was that ‘we’ were a problem. Maybe even the problem. It’s no wonder that integration came so hard, especially for those arrivals from the New Commonwealth. Britons talk as if this ancient island has had little or no immigration until relatively recently. This is, of course, untrue.
In this book I will retell the story … many stories, in fact – some anecdotal and many more factual – as a personal survey of Britain’s long and almost ancient history of introducing foreigners to our shores.
This is not an autobiography, but a few words of personal introduction are probably in order. I was born of Jamaican and Indian heritage. My father is half-Indian. My parents came to England from Jamaica in 1960 when they were in their early thirties.
In the idyllic rural Jamaican parish of St Catherine’s, they had a substantial house in the mountains and were the owners of a thriving family farming business. My father’s family were living a comfortable existence. One day, believing what they had heard, they embarked on a world-shattering journey. They precariously boarded a plane for the first time in their lives. What my parents left behind was considerable, but the sense of future ‘gains’ persuaded them to make the journey. They both came with much trepidation in their hearts and it was said you could hear it in their voices too.
Immaculately dressed and handsome in looks, the newlyweds were horrified by, as well as out of place in, the ‘ugly’, styleless urban jungle of post-war London. The rural life they had loved – in a village mainly comprising small cottages painted in clashing colours of bright red, yellow and green – was nowhere to be seen on London’s Clapham Common. They knew few people here and only one of their relatives followed them.
My uncle was a teacher in Jamaica (his son is now a professor in the United States) and there he stayed, despite temptations from the British government to lure him to their own island life. He held the view then that the education system in the UK would not be as good as the schools in his own country or as beneficial to the immigrant communities. He was a man of extraordinary foresight. Today, more and more Afro-Caribbean children are being sent to Caribbean islands for their education because their parents have completely lost faith in British education – here, they might easily leave school unable to speak English properly, read, write or do simple arithmetic. Many immigrants who came from the New Commonwealth were university-educated and qualified professional people, especially in the field of medicine, although this made no difference to their job prospects in post-war Britain. They found obstacles put in their way when applying for professional posts. They were employed for manual work and mainly in the lower echelons of the health service or nationalised industries. So many more stayed in the Caribbean than left for Britain.
For those who did come, it took them a long while to settle. Life was hard, cold and grey – like someone had switched off all the lights – even at midday. All they ever longed for was to return home to their missing loved ones. As this book will explain, the vast majority of post-war immigrants from the West Indian subcontinent had never intended to stay, but Harold Macmillan, unintentionally, made it difficult for them to return.
My own grandparents I did not know – they never came to England. I only know them through stories and photographs as I never went to Jamaica in their lifetime. But it was not long before I was to find a new family and one that included a ‘Granny’. The greatest influences on my early life came from Anne and Cicely Meehan. I have known them since the age of three years old. They taught me the values of hard work and compassion. Anne is a lifelong socialist and Cicely a liberal intellectual. They boxed my ears when I placed a Conservative poster in the front room window with Margaret Thatcher’s face on it. We had achieved a ‘balanced’ ticket in our house, and one of my childhood memories is learning the fine art of how to disagree without falling out.
These two white sisters never married, and they were pillars of the local community. Church, work and ‘Love thy neighbour’ is how they led their lives – and still do today. Cicely read Classics at university and Anne was a music scholar, as well as my first teacher. I spent much of my time with them and became an ‘adopted’ member of the family. I cannot forget Patricia (Pat) – she was the youngest of the three sisters but got married in the 1970s to a leading surgeon, who later became a Professor of Medicine at Cairo University. I loved her letters from Egypt; she had a grand life, moving among the intellectual elite and a house staffed by ‘servants’. The sad thing was, back in those days, we didn’t see very much of her – although when we did, I was always struck by her natural warmth.
There was Charles and Dorothy too, who were natural siblings born into a Jamaican family like me. When their mother could not care for them due to illness, Anne and Cicely took the children in when they were just three and five years old.
Dorothy and I were joined at the hip. We did everything together: shopping, swimming, walking and talking. Anne and Cicely’s mother was still alive then and we all called her ‘Granny’. She had the most trenchant views and was an old-fashioned Tory to the core. She believed more in ‘sending them back’ than anybody else I have ever encountered, but when Anne and Cicely would retort, ‘What about Charles, Dorothy and Derek?’, she would always reply, ‘Oh, not them – they can stay.’ It amused us no end.
Cicely loved the English countryside and that is where my love of it came from too. We went for hearty walks in ‘sensible’ shoes with our much-loved dogs. She fell in love with Norfolk and bought a house there, and we spent our weekends and holidays weeding the garden, visiting nearby stately homes and fine-dining on special occasions. We never saw another black face in Norfolk. I can vividly remember the stares when we went to the market town of Fakenham to do our shopping. I knew something wasn’t right.
I also remember an early biking holiday in Suffolk. I was staying with the splendidly grand and very clever James Pilkington, from the Pilkington Glass family, and I peeled off from the others to explore more adventurously. Local walkers were amazed to see me: ‘How did you get here? We don’t see many of your type around here.’ Thus I grew up confronted daily by race as seen through the eyes of others.
With that background, I could not help but be interested in this subject. More than most, I understood what it was to be different – and I always understood, too, that the contribution immigrant communities have made to Britain has been immense.
However, I never would have thought that David Cameron would give me cause to write this book. I have known him for twenty-eight years. I know, perhaps even better, the family he married into, and I introduced the younger David to a good number of political players who would later dominate party and government thinking.
When the time came he lobbied hard for my support in his bid to become party leader. Surprisingly, that was not an easy decision for me as I also had a lot of time for both David Davis, and the popular, but less likely leader, David Willetts. The former was conspicuously consistent on civil and human rights, and, I must say, has continued to be since. The latter has a beautiful soul and is one of the most civilised people I have known; it was a pleasure to properly work with him later. Of course, they all wanted to appear the moderniser, for which my endorsement – fresh from success on Big Brother – meant a good deal. Eventually it was to be Cameron whom I supported, publicly and in the numerous private conversations that are at the heart of such campaigns. I believed his promises, although it is a fairly settled question now who was the more authentic moderniser.
It matters no longer. Not since the ‘Go Home’ ads. I was appalled, truly appalled, by this cynical campaign, designed entirely to stir up controversy in order to maximise free publicity in newspapers. In more than thirty years of active participation in politics, I have never used the ‘racist’ charge against anyone. I do now. David Cameron’s intention in approving that ad was essentially racist. He knows it. We all know it. Few in his own party will say it, but the Conservatives have clearly decided that to win another election they must revert to type. To win, they need to outdo others on immigration and Europe. Out again comes the dog-whistle politics, forgetting again how much good it didn’t do Michael Howard. And booted out the door of No. 10 went Afro-Caribbean politician Shaun Bailey. He served a purpose – it was crude and it was nasty – but that is how the Tories have always been. They like keeping black people in one place – or in their place, as the Tories see it. My history with that party is littered with countless examples of this, and, one day, I shall tell you about those too.
The Prime Minister’s modernisation agenda did not last that long, though: what doesn’t come from the heart never does. It’s no good using words like ‘kids’, or appearing without a tie in public, and expecting everyone to believe that makes you modern. New suits, or no suits, but the same old mind. That is what we have today and it will not do.
Now, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party (‘British jobs for British workers’) are fighting over the same turf. Labour are gently knocking at the same door, as if to say, ‘let me in’. They are losing support from their traditional working-class base, and the party advisors attribute this to immigration. I beg to differ. They just don’t like you, Mr Miliband. It’s the oldest trick in the book: blame someone else for your own problems.
Immigration is always getting the blame. The language is always negative. It’s all about the problems, the controls, the swamping… The exception to this patter has usually been the Liberal Democrat Party. Impressively, they have resisted the pressure to join in the bashing spree. Indeed, they can be heard reminding people about the benefits to Britain that cultural diversity has brought and how it has enriched our island. They have stood their ground on what is right, which is not always popular, and that is the truer leadership.
And right it is, because the language of demonisation doesn’t come anywhere close to the real heart of this matter. The reasons people migrate are many and come from the very roots of the human condition. It’s a last option – desperation. It’s for refuge – hope, aspiration, inspiration, admiration. It’s for protection of family – opportunity, acceptance, recognition, tolerance. They come from fear of torture, in flight from religious fanaticism, in despair of secular despotism; seeking respite from an illiberal world, they just want what others have. They gratefully accept what has usually been freely offered to them. As our emigrant and more successful American cousins know better, migrants migrate for ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. They are seldom in it for the laughs. Did anyone ever seriously make this leap in order to claim social security benefits? For that is lately the kernel of the Tory narrative. True, not every dream works out. Not every enterprise succeeds. Things don’t go to plan. People need help sometimes, even the best of us. But uprooting everything in order to claim benefits? That phenomenon exists only in the small minds of small men – and the greasy pole-climbing of Theresa May. No. Migration is driven by freedom from persecution, opportunity and love.
Persecution was the case for the 3,000 Chilean asylum seekers who fled General Pinochet’s oppressive regime and arrived in Britain between 1974 and 1979. It was also the case for the influx of people from Eritrea and Somalia in the 1990s. Does everybody know this? Perhaps not, but everyone knows that Somalia is where Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah came from. How many people proud of his elevation of British sport on the international stage can locate Farah’s country of origin on a map? When the stadium crowd roared him round the final lap on the final day of the 2012 London Olympics, it was ‘Go Mo’ not ‘Go Home’. When the nation rose to its feet and took to social media, it was not to tweet at Gabby Logan to demand the runner’s immediate repatriation. The waving in the streets was not, I think, to helpfully point him to London City airport. He was the best of us then – the positive face of the open and inclusive society that we were so proud to present to the world. Mo Farah’s face was a great, British face.
How quickly we forget.
Economic opportunity is another immigrant motivation. The ambition to realise a better standard of living for the immigrant and their family has led Britons to seek warmer economic shores, Australia being an inviting opportunity for many. In the year ending June 2013, 320,000 emigrants departed the UK for greener pastures. So why wouldn’t people from other countries seek to take their place? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, after all. While some Britons feel they are escaping a sinking ship due to tax hikes and declining services, many from the developing world and poorer EU states view the UK as a land of great opportunity. Kaushik Basu, the World Bank’s Chief Economist, observed correctly that migration and remittances offer a vital lifeline for millions and play a major role in an economy’s take-off. They enable people to partake in the global economy and create resources for overseas development and growth. Many Middle Eastern, central African and Indian employees remit money home to ensure that relatives in politically unstable territories and impoverished communities are able to meet their basic human needs. It helps them transcend their disadvantaged lives in the longer term.
Strange then that when we speak of our pride in maintaining our overseas aid programme it is usually a reference to spending abroad, despite the fact that inward migration via remittance of earnings is probably our main development aid – and one of the most effective. Mandarins and the quasi-mandarins of the mega NGOs routinely struggle with development aid programmes – how to ensure the money avoids capture by corruption while reaching the people who need it on the ground. Meanwhile, migrant families have long solved that one – they call it Western Union Money Transfer.
Immigration is also about people in love, and we know what happens to them: they get married, poor devils, and, shockingly, seek to live together. Fat chance of anyone stopping that.
The immigration story runs deep through all of our histories, but politicians are weak and have vested interests in a ‘them and us’ narrative. They like to speak as if immigration is a new thing. It isn’t. They encourage people to wish it would go away. It won’t.
Many people, oh-so British people, think it is nothing to do with them, but – when they properly trace their own roots – it usually does have a lot to do with them too. In more cases than people care to admit, it’s not whether they came here, but when. In truth, there is no ‘them’ and there is no ‘us’. In truth, we are all in the same boat, and we all eat the same bananas.
It is this one journey, and the history of that journey, that I set out to recount in this book. In reality, the countless individual journeys, from all places, in all centuries, have contributed in many, many ways to making our country great. It is one of the wonderful things about being British that, because we have been immigrants ourselves in so many other places abroad and have enjoyed the unending fruits of trade and empire, we can now tap into the whole world, even while staying at home.
We owe a lot to the empire, which I notice is merely the first of many ideas that we stole from immigrants. We got that idea from the Romans so, before getting to the serious stuff, like most good stories it’s best to start with the Romans…
I would have liked the Romans. They came; they saw; they took one look and said: ‘Oh no, no, my dears – you’re doing it all wrong.’ Roman immigration, as I shall call it, changed everything. They sent centurions and stayed for centuries. They profoundly reformed our language. They married. They had ideas and founded institutions. They made the rules (some of them are still our rules). They left us with law. They brought art, architecture, wine, literature, theatre. They dabbled with disruptive and controversial new technology: roads that go somewhere, bridges that connect things, water supplies piped out of the sky … that sort of thing. They thought outside the box. To be fair, they smashed a few boxes and local politicians regarded them as dangerous reformists. But they led the way. Most important of all, they taught the woad-wearing classes a thing or two about looking good – and they liked a nice Bath.
My kind of immigrant, the Romans. And, on that evidence, I am convinced that long before I was Anglo-Indo-Caribbean, I must have been Romano-Nubian also.
They caused much change, those Roman immigrants, but most of it was for the better. It was hugely beneficial, which is why, of course, we still remember it – all of it. But so it has been with a lot of immigration since then, which we don’t always remember entirely – and sometimes not at all. Or maybe we choose not to.
That’s the story of this book – some counting, but mainly recounting. Of course, the story of immigration is one of chaos. Immigration is not always planned. It’s often relentless. It can be appalling – sometimes shocking for all concerned. It has unintended consequences. It’s trouble – for those who look for it.
But it’s also glorious. It’s liberating – for us as well as them. It’s been necessary. It’s the too-well-hidden secret of a lot of our success. It’s the creative fusion within which innovation thrives. It’s diversity itself – the guarantee of our future success. Quite frankly, it’s amazing. And it’s us.
Chapter 2
The fusions that formed the national fabric
OVER MANY CENTURIES, WAVES OF invaders – Romans, Vikings and Normans – have arrived, conquered and settled on the British Isles. In the process, they have defined present-day indigenous ethnicity, cultural mores, religion and language.
It starts at the top. Although apparently British to the bone, our royal family are, in their marrow, the direct descendants of a German bloodline via their eighteenth-century ancestor George Louis, Elector of Hanover, who was crowned King George I in 1714.
Historic French, German or Scandinavian lineages and surnames are so common as to be regarded as the quintessence of Englishness: Gascoigne, Merson and Scholes are merely the first three I can think of.
And what is true at the palaces remains true all the way to the terraces. The nationally treasured trio of Pauls – Gascoigne, Merson and Scholes – are the quintessence of Englishness too … and of patriotic football prowess. Their surnames are testament to the lineages of historic immigration: French, German and Scandinavian.
The black thread in the Union Jack
Sixteenth-century pay day: the Exchequer roll of 1507 records the first payment to John Blanke, a black trumpeter at the Tudor court.
Nor was it ever just Europeans coming here, but the more diverse historic migrants get written out and forgotten. How many are aware that a black woman, an Iberian Moor named Catalina de Cardones, faithfully served the English Queen, Catherine of Aragon, for twenty-six years as her lady of the bedchamber? And how many Brits were taught about John Blanke during their Tudor history classes? The Afro-Iberian trumpeter regularly performed at the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. In 1511, Blanke had a distinguished role in the Westminster Tournament celebrations, which commemorated the birth of Prince Arthur. The Exchequer roll of November 1507 illustrates John Blanke’s pay day; the wage of 20 shillings (£654 in 2014 value) indicates that he probably worked every day of that month.
How many twentieth-century Brits, working alongside Commonwealth citizens in the post-Blitz spirit of reinvigoration, were aware that the African population of London in 1596 was so large that Queen Elizabeth I informed the Lord Mayor of London that ‘there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are already here to manie’?
What is more, how many are aware that, while many impoverished northern families sent their sons to work down coal mines during the 1870s, many elite west African families were meanwhile sending their sons to redbrick British universities to study? Sierra Leonean Christian Cole even graduated from Oxford with a Classics degree in 1873.
Another Sierra Leonean, with roots in Nigerian soil, named Dr John Randle, graduated from Edinburgh University as a Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery, going on to be awarded the gold medal in Materia Medica in 1888. He later married Queen Victoria’s African goddaughter Victoria Davies – who herself was educated, and excelled, at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
The Kru – west Africans from more humble origins – worked alongside Englishmen as ship labourers and seafarers in port cities including Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool, thereby greatly contributing to Britain’s colonial trade with west Africa. Ships’ masters sought to employ the Kru due to what they perceived to be their ‘better discipline and greater energy’, particularly during tropical voyages.
Diverse Sierra Leone as experiences of empire: Victoria Randle with her children Jack (father of Adekunle Randle – p. 119) and Beatrice.
Hogarth’s The Industrious ’Prentice plate.
The major waves of immigration did not start in 1945 – there were many previous absorptions into the country: in the late seventeenth century, in the form of the Protestant, and predominately Calvinist, French known as Huguenots; in the nineteenth century, in the form of the famine-stricken Irish; and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the form of the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in tsarist Russia.
Probably around 50,000 French Huguenots fled to this country following Louis XIV’s 1685 move to revoke the Edict of Nantes (which thereby declared Protestantism to be illegal). As a result of this dramatic step, around half a million French Protestants left the country for more sympathetic havens in (non-Catholic) northern Europe as well as further afield (including South Africa). Many of them crossed the Channel to England, while some made it to Scotland and even Wales. In the years that followed, they recreated a life for themselves based on their weaving skills, which proved much in demand in the booming silk and textiles industries. Spitalfields in the East End of London emerged as a hub of Huguenot activity in the late sixteenth century. A further Huguenot wave reached London in the early 1700s, as the new French immigrants sought to avoid the restrictive regulations applied by the medieval guilds within the parameter boundary of the City of London. This reflected their entrepreneurial acumen, bypassing the incumbents’ strategy of placing daunting barriers to new entry. An official government study reported that, in 1687, there were as many as 13,050 Huguenot refugees living in and around Spitalfields and the neighbouring, new, expanding communities of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End. These would be the new towns of the eighteenth century. Persecution overseas had fuelled a boom in British industry and subsequently boosted the British gene pool. It would be interesting to ascertain the percentage of London’s historic white English population who have a Huguenot ancestor; the Bow Bells may no longer ring, but the Y chromosomes remain.
Religious persecution was also the driving factor in a later wave of immigration to Britain, namely the influx of Jewish refugees escaping pogroms in Russia and the Baltic states in the late nineteenth century. Britain’s Jewish population had finally been awarded full emancipation by Parliament in 1858, albeit this reform was implemented only after decades of interminable wrangling. Benjamin Disraeli became Britain’s first Prime Minister of Jewish descent ten years later.
