Racial Exclusionism and the City
eBook - ePub

Racial Exclusionism and the City

The Urban Support of the National Front

Christopher T. Husbands

Share book
  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Racial Exclusionism and the City

The Urban Support of the National Front

Christopher T. Husbands

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

First published in 1983, this book reports on the results of a survey in thirteen areas of England where the National Front (NF) had previously gained significant levels of electoral support and examines the social and political histories of these areas to reveal not only who and was voting for the NF in the 1970sbut alsowhy.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Racial Exclusionism and the City an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Racial Exclusionism and the City by Christopher T. Husbands in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politik & Internationale Beziehungen & Politik. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135685638

1
The Political Background to the Growth of the National Front and the Development of the Party from 1967 to 1982

It would be far too glib to analyse the National Front only as a product of a particular political mood in Britain. Yet it is none the less true that the NF was able to take advantage of a virtual consensus in British politics during the 1970s on the subjects of race and immigration and also that many of its successes (electoral and otherwise) coincided with periods when these issues were especially salient on the political agenda. Its formation, growth and development, and its various electoral surges, cannot be appreciated in isolation from the development of immigration policy and of relevant public attitudes since at least the middle of the 1950s.
There are certain paradoxes about the manner in which policy and opinion on this subject have developed in Britain. New Commonwealth labour was brought to this country in the first place for the simple functional purpose of supplying labour power in sectors and industries incapable of meeting their postwar requirements from the indigenous working population. This fact is widely known in academic writing, where its implications have been much discussed. It has even prompted the authors of one of the most extensively read books of recent years upon labour migration (Castles and Kosack, 1973) to treat immigrant labour in Britain within the same theoretical framework as migrant labour in other Western European countries, giving particular emphasis to its political economy. However, there are substantial differences between the British experience and that of many other countries. Immigration into Britain from the (then) Empire in the early days after the Second World War was associated very directly with a form of imperialist paternalism; immigrants immediately received the benefits of bourgeois citizenship and were thereby encouraged to identify with the Mother Country. Thus, the blunt fact of their economic function was obscured, in part from the immigrants themselves but particularly from the indigenous white population. There has therefore been remarkably little understanding by the wider public about the reasons for the presence in Britain of New Commonwealth settlers and there has been a corresponding readiness by many to resort to explanations of this social phenomenon that are based upon the supposed deviousness of immigrants themselves. This situation is very different from that which exists in most Western European countries that have placed heavy reliance on migrant labour, such as the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Switzerland and even the Netherlands (as far as migrant labour from such countries as Spain, Turkey and Morocco is concerned). For example, in France — as Freeman (1979) has documented at length — there has existed both in public policy and popular understanding an explicit consciousness of migrant labour's economic function. Thus, the French right tended to be more favourable to an 'open-door' policy on labour migration than the French left. At least until the late 1960s the right in France wanted minimum control on migration because of the associated benefits of cheap labour and possible wage dilution.1 Correspondingly, the French left generally opposed labour migration during the same period, even if there was some ambiguity about the precise reasons for its attitude. The left's position was ostensibly based on opposition to the exploitation to which migrant labour had to submit when working in France, although it would be naive to suppose that part of this opposition was not simultaneously motivated by a wish to prevent wage dilution and consequent vote loss among its own traditional supporters. Indeed, in the 1981 Presidential election an anti-immigrant-worker position was explicitly adopted by the French Communist Party. Its candidate, Georges Marchais, indulged in precisely the sort of rhetoric used in this country in 1978 by Mrs Thatcher, and local Communist-controlled municipalities around Paris have engaged in several actions directed against foreign workers.
In Britain there has long been considerable public sensitivity to the presence and supposed effects of any large number of immigrants or foreigners. This anti-alienism is an aspect of British history and politics that long predates the postwar period. As Foot (1965, pp. 80-102), for example, has documented, successive arriving groups — whether Huguenots, Irish, Jews, or the more recent West Indians and Asians —have been victims of considerable hostility, a now well-known historical fact that seems in no way to tarnish the inexplicable reputation for tolerance which the British have among numerous foreign observers and which some of the former believe about themselves. Garrard's (1971) work and Gainer's (1972) book on the passage of the Aliens Act 1905 provide the history of one of the more distinctive episodes of anti-alienism at the turn of the present century. For reasons that are discussed at various places in this book, much British culture is deeply parochial and lacks the adaptive capacity to respond to a cosmopolitan challenge. This is a subject with numerous facets and a phenomenon that takes various forms in different social and geographical contexts. Its depth and persistence within such contexts may likewise vary, but its presence in some shape within large sections of the indigenous population is unexceptionable.
Thus, immigration and race relations are subjects that are uniquely likely to attract high degrees of popular feeling. It has usually been the Conservative party that has made the running on this matter, in part because of the presence during the 1950s of mavericks on its right wing who made the issue of immigration a personal crusade. The name of Cyril (from 1961 Sir Cyril) Osborne (1898-1969), Conservative MP for Louth, was particularly prominent on the subject. However, it would be a mistake to imply that the issue was one which, even at that time, was confined entirely to the extremes of the Conservative party, or to that party alone. For example, in his memoirs Harold Macmillan reports a throw-away comment by Winston Churchill in 1955 that a 'Keep Britain White' slogan might be an advantageous one for a Conservative party having to win an election without the supposed benefits of his (Churchill's) presence at the helm (Macmillan, 1973, pp. 73-4). Katznelson (1976, p. 126) notes that during the mid-1950s one or two backbench Labour MPs raised issues in the House that indirectly related to immigration, although most such interventions did not go as far as that of Henry Hynd (born 1900), MP for Hackney Central from 1945 to 1950 and for Accrington from 1950 to 1966, who was one of a small group of Labour MPs favouring immigration controls and who in April 1958 initiated a debate on a motion signed by members of both parties calling for 'reconsideration of the arrangements whereby British subjects from other parts of the Commonwealth are allowed to enter this country without restriction' (Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1957-58, 5th series, vol. 585, cl. 1415).
Still, it was perhaps the riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham in the summer of 1958 that raised the whole issue to one where an initiative by the government became almost inevitable. Doubtless largely as a result of the 1958 events in Notting Hill, Sir Oswald Mosley's (1896—1980) Union Movement candidacy in the 1959 General Election in the London constituency of North Kensington collected 8·1 per cent of votes cast. Furthermore, as Layton-Henry (1980, pp. 55-7) points out in the course of a useful discussion of the development of the Conservative party's response to immigration, the 1959 General Election saw returned to Parliament several new Conservative MPs from Birmingham constituencies who were prepared to use immigration as the major issue on which to base their political reputations. Although, as Peach (1968), pp. 39-50) and numerous others (e.g. Foot, 1965, pp. 11-15) have pointed out, the rate of immigration into Britain during the 1950s was very sensitive to the availability of job possibilities (at least until the rumour of restriction increased the number of arrivals beyond the level of labour requirements), the early 1960s saw the emergence of race and immigration from — in Katznelson's (1976, pp. 125-6) terms — a period of 'pre-political consensus' to one of 'fundamental debate'. The culmination of this was the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, opposed with at least formal unanimity by the Labour opposition and by the Liberals in the House of Commons. Its renewal in November 1963 occurred without more than token opposition from the Labour party (Katznelson, 1976, pp. 144-5).
The October 1964 General Election was perhaps the critical single turning point, if one can be identified, for it provided irrefutable evidence that race and immigration exercised an influence within the mainstream of mass electoral politics. John Bean, candidate of the British National Party, won 91 per cent of the vote in the Southall constituency, where there was no two-party swing from Conservative to Labour — contrary of course to the national trend. Fenner Brockway (born 1888), Baron Brockway from later in 1964, was defeated in Eton and Slough, while Patrick Gordon Walker (1907-80), Baron Gordon-Walker from 1974, was well beaten for the parliamentary seat at Smethwick (now mostly in the constituency of Warley East since boundary revisions) by a man who Harold Wilson thereupon said would be a 'parliamentary leper' and who in May 1979 became MP for Portsmouth North. As is shown by Foot's (1965, pp. 9-79) long discussion of the circumstances behind the case, Gordon Walker's defeat was the outcome of a number of processes, in particular a vigorously orchestrated anti-immigrant campaign in the locality during the preceding couple of years. All these events and later ones seemed to provide incontrovertible evidence to the 'realists' that an exclusionist policy on immigration was the only elcctorally viable one (e.g. Cross-man, 1979, p. 73). Accordingly, in 1965 the Labour government made permanent the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, starting the period of what Katznelson calls 'the political consensus' — although with the benefit of the hindsight already available by 1973 (when his book was first published) this may not be a quite appropriate designation.
The depth of public feeling about immigration was clear from other evidence too. Opinion polls from the early 1960s (GPI, November 1961, p. 37; Katznelson, 1976, p. 133) revealed the strong feelings against black immigration, and the successive studies of Buder and Stokes (1974, p. 303) reported majorities agreeing with their famous question that 'too many immigrants have been let into this country' which in the summer of 1969 reached as high as 87 per cent. Moreover, their surveys contain interesting findings about public perceptions of the two major political parties regarding immigration policy. Despite the opposition by the Labour party to the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, only a slight disproportion of the electorate regarded the Conservatives as more likely than Labour 'to keep immigrants out' when this question was asked in 1964. Twenty-six per cent answered Conservatives, 19 per cent Labour, and 41 per cent said that there was no inter-party difference. By 1966 these percentages had changed slightly in a direction consistent with expectation after Labour's continuation of the 1962 Act; 26 per cent now said Conservatives, only 13 per cent Labour, but a sizeable 53 per cent now said that there was no difference. However, by 1969 and 1970 there had been a quite dramatic change in the frequencies of responses. The 1969 percentages were: Conservatives, 50 per cent; Labour, 6 per cent; no difference, 36 per cent (Butler and Stokes, 1974, p. 462).
This change occurred despite the commitment of the Labour government in February 1968 during the Home Secretaryship of James Callaghan to a draconian piece of legislative exciusionism, when the pre-existing rights of Kenyan Asians and other Commonwealth residents holding British passports were unilaterally rescinded.2 Perhaps, however, it was Enoch Powell who most succeeded in enabling the Conservative party to capture the electorally advantageous reputation of being more 'tough' on immigration. It was not in any case an arena on which the Labour party could easily compete since, despite the content and purpose of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, a full-scale attempt to out-Tory the Tories on immigration could only have seriously divided the party. Although Enoch Powell's notorious and highly publicised 'rivers-of-blood' speech on 20 April 1968 to a Conservative meeting in Birmingham earned his dismissal by Edward Heath from the Shadow Cabinet, it was none the less one factor, and probably one of the most important, in establishing the tough image of the Conservative party on immigration and race. There seems litde doubt that Powell and his views helped the Conservatives in certain crucial seats that they won in the Midlands in the 1970 General Election (Schoen, 1977, pp. 45-68, esp. 66).3

The Development of the National Front

An extreme right had long existed within the politics of postwar Britain (Cross, 1961, pp. 195-202; Thayer, 1965, pp. 13-65; Walker, 1977, pp. 25-50; Walker, 1979; and Taylor, 1982, pp. 9-17) but it had not usually been more than a peripheral phenomenon. True, in certain elections one or more parties of the far right did succeed, as has been mentioned, in attracting something more than a tiny proportion of votes. However, Mosley's 1959 Union Movement candidacy in North Kensington and the success of the British National Party in Southail were relatively isolated incidents, although ones that presaged the future electoral viability of racist politics. In other respects the far right was remarkable more from the public order perspective; Mosley made various attempts, the last during the summer of 1962, to organise public meetings. In general, however, the viability of far-right groupings was fatally tarnished by the clear connection that they had with Nazism, either directly in the case of Mosley's Union Movement or indirectly through neo-Nazi indulgences and celebrations of Hitlerism in the case of the other movements.
However, even as early as 1966, it became clear to mainstream politicians as well as to activists on the far right that the post-1965 bipartisan consensus on immigration policy, stringent though it was, was thought to be unacceptably liberal by a large proportion of the British electorate. Opinion data in the mid-1960s make very clear how the perceptions of much of the public developed on this matter (Husbands, 1983), and it was to this disaffected section of the electorate that the National Front, when founded, sought to appeal. Other incidents also contributed to the suspicions with which parts of the public were increasingly viewing the Labour government's position on the subject: the passage of the Race Relations Act 1968 and the continuing publicity and liberal concern about racial discrimination that culminated in the publication of the Colour and Citizenship study (Rose et al., 1969) helped in identifying the Labour government as somehow 'soft' on race.
The NF was established around late 1966 and early 1967. After 1979 the exact foundation date became a matter of contention among some of the various arguing factions within the NF, each accusing the others of falsifying the history of the origins of the party for their own purposes. The constituent organisations of the new party were a variety of earlier racist and extreme right-wing groups: the British National Party and the League of Empire Loyalists probably made the greatest numerical contribution to the initial membership of the fledgling party, but the Racial Preservation Society and — though joining slighdy later — the neo-Nazi Greater Britain Movement must also be included among the initiating organisations. Walker (1977, pp. 68-107) gives an extended account of the controversial role played by the Greater Britain Movement, itself a very small party of undisputed neo-Nazi pedigree, in entering and then in assuming control of the new movement. The NF — even after 1967 — was far from being the only organisation of the far right. For example, Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement (from 1968 the British Movement) was one competitor. Like John Tyndall, who was to emerge as Chairman of the NF, Jordan and his movement can be traced back through personalities and policies to the aggressive fascism of the Imperial Fascist League of Arnold Leese, the man who called Oswald Mosley a 'kosher fascist'.4
The NF's first electoral appearance after its founding offered a premonition of its levels of future support and of the attractiveness of racist politics well beyond the limited enclaves of far-right and neo-Nazi activism. In a parliamentary by-election at Acton in west London on 28 March 1968 the NF candidate, Andrew Fountaine, won 5·6 per cent of votes cast. In the June 1970 General Election the NF ran in only ten constituencies but, even so, some of its future strongholds were beginning to emerge: parts of inner London, Leicester and Wolverhampton in the East and West Midlands respectively, and parts of West Yorkshire, although support in the actual town in this region that was fought in 1970 — Huddersfield — proved transitory because of organisational difficulties within the local NF branch there (Scott, 1975).
Elsewhere in the provinces, however, NF branches were established on a firmer basis. In Bristol a branch was founded in late 1968 or early 1969; the successful Wolverhampton branch was set up in January 1970, the Leicester one in 1969 and the Blackburn one somewhat later by early 1972.
During the period at the beginning of the 1970s, especially because the Conservatives were in power, the NF's strategists (or...

Table of contents