Subject: No foreigners please, we're British
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 19:53:27 +0200


27th July 2000

Dear List,

I understand Joseph Flanagan III's point that the immigrants who
came over to Britain after WWII were British, on paper at least,
but I think what I wrote in my previous e-mail about the
evolution of immigrants, generations and attitudes to them is
worth a bit of thought. As I said, I would be grateful to hear
opinions from British Asians to see whether I've got the right
end of the stick.

Obviously, given the mindset of the time, white Britain found
itself with a dilemma. Owing to various principles of fair play,
South Asians were entitled to be given British passports. Then
suddenly the bureaucrats woke up and realised that this could
mean a large number from the Indian subcontinent coming to
Britain. It's all very well looking back with the more
enlightened (?) views of 2000, but in those days it was a
potential culture shock of huge proportions for a country which
has always been rather inward-looking with regard to the
purported superiority of everything English. Large numbers - and
this is the key point, large numbers - of people from a very
different culture (with a bit of colonised-British veneer)scared
the politicians of the time shitless. It's no good pretending
otherwise. A couple of decades later, Hong Kong citizens also
felt cheated when Britain started fiddling about with passport
entitlement, with some rubber stamp saying "British Citizen"
making your passport much more "real" than one with "British
Subject" or some other such wording stamped into it.

But the crux of the matter is: how many people with a different
cultural background can you let into your country without
causing ethnic unrest? Whatever the country, whoever the
immigrants. Look at Fiji, the quietist place on Earth till a few
weeks ago. But under the surface, something had been brewing.
Indigenous people versus smart immigrants, in this case. Don't
people ever see these things coming?

Enoch Powell (was he not an immigrant himself, by the way?)said
in emotive and tactless terms what Middle England wanted to
ignore. Ignorance breeds fear, but ultimately people don't want
to outnumbered in their own towns and villages. Whether the fear
is irrational or not, many people the world over think like
this. Keeping people out by bureaucratic trickery may not be
very noble, but in some parts of the world they use the massacre
as the ultimate solution to such problems. I hope that Europe at
least has learnt something after six million Jews and one
million Armenians have been sacrificed - and what for?

The ultimate tricky question is: assimilation,
part-assimilation, or pockets of foreigners who the majority
leave alone, in a live-and-let-live pact. And coupled with this,
how big can a minority become in any town, county or country,
before the indigenous people involved perceive a threat?

If the immigrants are from two counties away, there is less of a
cultural problem, partly for language reasons. But when the
Lithuanian immigrants came to Scotland between about 1880 and
WWI, coming to work in the Lanarkshire coalmines, they were
treated with the same amount of cold-shouldering as Pakistanis
in the West Riding of Yorkshire, much later. Their skin colour
was pretty much the same as that of the local Scots, but if you
read the comments published (partly in the Scots language,
incidentally) about how the Lithuanians were treated, you'd see
that it's not all a question of skin colour.

(North Americans may note that the Archie Bunker series was
really a re-make of the British series "Till Death us Do Part"
where a Jewish Cockney from the East End from London sounded off
in a racial comedy. I never watched it myself, but I understand
it was pretty controversial at the time.)

Best wishes,

Eric Dickens





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