Looking to London

Stories of War, Escape and Asylum

Cynthia Cockburn

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786801272
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The city of London is celebrated as one of the most ethnically diverse capitals in the world, and has been a magnet of migration since its origin. Looking to London steps into the maelstrom of current and recent wars and the resulting migration crisis, telling the stories of women refugees who have made it to London to seek safe haven among the city's Kurdish, Somali, Tamil, Sudanese and Syrian communities, under the watchful eye of the security services. Cynthia Cockburn brings her lively and lucid style to a world in which hatred is being countered by compassion, at a moment when the nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in Brexit is being challenged by a warm-hearted 'refugees welcome' movement bringing community activists into partnership with London borough councils for the reception and rehoming of victims of war. This book is essential reading for all who want to think more deeply about the meaning of asylum.

1

London: Magnet for Migrants

Two things are special about London: its sheer size, and its cultural diversity. With more than eight million inhabitants at the 2011 census, London is eight times more populous than the next biggest UK city, Birmingham, and at least twice as large as the biggest in Europe, Berlin, which has little more than three and a half million. It rivals New York, the most populous city in the USA, a country with five times our national population. London’s growth over the last two centuries has been spectacular. Starting with around a million inhabitants in 1801, Greater London had reached three million by 1861, six million by 1901 and by 1931 was almost its present size. It lost a little during the Second World War, but remained fairly steady at between seven and eight million during the remainder of the century, until a notable 14 per cent hike in the first decade after the millennium.¹

The other famed feature of London’s demography is the number and variety of Londoners’ countries of origin, generating an extraordinary and inspiring range of distinctive looks, life trajectories and cultures in the streets and neighbourhoods of the capital. The census of 2011, the latest we have on going to press, tells us that almost three million (37 per cent) of Greater London’s 8.2 million inhabitants are first-generation migrants, individuals who were born in some country other than the UK and have come here during their lifetime. Of this migrant population just over half (52 per cent) are women. A language other than English is the main language of more than one in five Londoners.² In four of Greater London’s 32 boroughs, those who are foreign-born make up more than half of the census population. These boroughs are Brent, Kensington and Chelsea, Newham and Westminster. Eighteen of the world’s countries have populations of more than 50,000 in London. Six have 100,000 or more – they are Bangladesh, India, Republic of Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan and Poland. Bear in mind, besides, that a subsequent generation, children born to these adults since they arrived in the UK, do not feature in the census at all. They may well double the size of these communities.³

Any capital city, or, let us say, any town as it grows to become a capital, inevitably attracts inward migration from near and far. Some is individual, some comes in waves from particular directions, bringing distinctive cultures. In The Peopling of London, Nick Merriman reminds us that, situated as we are at the far western edge of the continent, attached to it by a land bridge during ice ages, cut off by sea during periods of warming, ‘It is possible to argue that, from early immigrants to the refugees of today, everyone living in London is descended, however distantly, from people who have come from abroad.’⁴ Some stone-age arrivals left their knapped flints and animal bones on the shores of the proto-Thames. When the Romans invaded in 43 CE and founded the walled town of London, they brought with them as soldiers, administrators and slaves people not only from their Italian homeland but from all over the Roman Empire – Greece, Anatolia, Africa. Merchants accompanied them. No doubt many Celts, the island’s predecessor-people, lived within the walls of Roman London too, and in the half millennium between the Roman withdrawal and the Norman Conquest, there came Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and eventually Vikings, from across the North Sea. The historian Bede, writing in the eighth century CE, describes London as ‘a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea’.⁵ The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought French lords and lackeys to the capital. Some of these ‘French’ were Jews, who played a crucial role financing the Exchequer and the ruling class, but were already subject to discrimination, being forbidden to own land, carry arms or employ Christians. In 1290 they were expelled from London, indeed from Britain, altogether. Was this the moment Britain put into effect a state-regulated border, as ‘racially’ motivated then as it would be 700 years later?

As the capital’s population grew in the second millennium of the Christian era, it was mainly by inland migration from the provinces and peripheries. But people were still coming from across the Channel too. Merchants from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Holland were characteristic inhabitants of London throughout the mediaeval period. Merriman tells of an incident on May Day in 1517 when a mob took to the streets attacking foreigners and destroying their homes and workshops. The rioters were put down, as no doubt they would have been today, by armed officers of the state.⁶ By the early 1570s the ‘recent overseas’ communities are estimated to have been between 5 and 10 per cent of London’s 100,000 population. The proportion was increased yet further by the influx during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of religious refugees from the Continent. Possibly 50,000 French Protestants – the Huguenots – persecuted by the Catholic church and state, came here in search of safety. Several thousand settled in Spitalfields and other parts of East London, making the place famous for wool and silk weaving. In the middle of the nineteenth century thousands of mainland Europeans, many of them radicals and revolutionaries, crossed the Channel in flight from the nation-building turmoil on the Continent around 1848, sometimes termed the ‘People’s Spring’.⁷ At this point in time Britain still had no governmental provision for the exclusion or expulsion of refugees. There was even a sense of compassion and justice among some locals. Witness the author of an article in the Times of 28 February 1853: ‘Every civilized people on the face of the earth must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations, and that it will defend the asylum to the last ounce of its treasure and the last drop of its blood.’⁸

TWENTIETH CENTURY: SELECTIVE IMMIGRATION

When an argument for immigration control gathered momentum in the late nineteenth century it was in response to an influx of Jews fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia and Prussia, large numbers of whom headed for Britain, many settling in London. One motivation for control was fear of cheap migrant labour competing for English workers’ jobs – the Trades Union Congress (TUC) supported border-keeping. Another driving factor, however, was anti-Semitic prejudice. The outcome was the Aliens Act of 1905. The Act tactfully avoided actual mention of Jews however. Those it termed ‘undesirable immigrants’ were cast as those unable to demonstrate that they could support themselves, who would thus be obliged to have ‘recourse to public funds’ and thereby become ‘a burden on the state’ and ‘a detriment to the public’. Curiously, exception was made in the case of applicants seeking admission ‘solely to avoid persecution or punishment on religious or political grounds’ (who were in the main Jewish). This may sound compassionate, but in practice it was not allowed to impede the Act’s anti-Semitic implementation. Astonishingly few applicants were admitted into the country under the Act – only 505 in the first year of operation and no more than 50 in any year thereafter. What’s more, some given entry may well have been thrown out again, for the courts could condemn to deportation any alien who within a year of entry was found to be ‘wandering’, ‘living under insanitary conditions’ or in receipt of parochial relief. Further alien restriction laws in 1914 and 1919 responded to various threats perceived in the context of the First World War, such as infiltration of German spies and incursions of refugees. These acts led to a new raft of border-controlling state employees that would morph into the Aliens Branch, the UK Border Agency and, since 2013, UK Visas and Immigration.⁹

The authors of the Runnymede Trust guide to British immigration control, on whom I draw in the paragraph above, stress that ‘immigration control in Britain has never been a question of a rational and coherent policy affecting everyone who wanted to settle in the UK, but has always been a matter of keeping out some people who were regarded as undesirable for whatever reason’.¹⁰ This is borne out by the next phase of control enactment, which was intimately linked to laws from the mid-twentieth century redefining ‘nationality’, as the British Empire was obliged to cede independence to more and more of its colonies. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914 had accorded the status of ‘British subject’ to everyone inhabiting the world-spanning British Empire. The fear of UK governments now was the potential for a huge influx of people of brown- and black-skin phenotype from far afield.¹¹ Certainly the labour shortage following the Second World War had to be addressed, and for this reason the arrival of many hundreds of thousands of Irish, Poles, Ukrainians and other white Europeans was not resented. But a careful redrawing of British nationality rules was set in train for the purpose of preventing large-scale coloured immigration. To this end, the British Commonwealth, as the UK, together with present and ex-colonies had long been known, was reshaped. In 1949 a declaration from London scrubbed the word ‘British’ from its title, renaming it the Commonwealth of Nations. Hegemonic among this post-war Commonwealth were the predominantly white (or white-governed) states such as Canada and Australia, which came to be known as ‘Old Commonwealth’. Newly independent countries opting to join, whose citizens were of course mainly brown or black, were distinguished as ‘New Commonwealth’.

For a while after the war, the free movement of Commonwealth citizens continued. This was the situation that met the several hundred Jamaican migrants who arrived on the passenger ship Empire Windrush in 1948. More boatloads would follow, bearing black people from the Caribbean seeking work. Many settled in London, changing the face of the boroughs in which they clustered. A white backlash began. Reactionary Conservative MP Cyril Osborne found a ready audience when he ‘spoke out for the white man in this country’. In 1958 there were anti-black riots in Notting Hill. Fascist groups such as the White Defence League and the National Front, gained adherents.¹² The political response was a successive tightening of controls on entry. A White Paper in 1965 imposed an annual quota of 8,500 from the New Commonwealth.¹³ Then a far-reaching Immigration Act of 1971 gave the state total discretion over Commonwealth immigration except for a particular category now termed ‘patrials’, who would have a right of abode in the UK. The definition of ‘patrial’ and ‘non-patrial’ is complex. The Runnymede Trust explain, ‘Roughly translated … patrials were largely of British descent and therefore white. Non-patrial citizens of the UK and colonies were most likely to be black.’¹⁴ In curbing migration from the ‘new’ Commonwealth the Act softened the blow to Canada, Australia and New Zealand of the UK’s joining the European Union, which in 1972 opened wide the door to European labour. The Labour Government of 1974 to 1979 did nothing to reverse this trajectory, and Margaret Thatcher, on bringing the Conservatives back to power in the election of 1979, met little political resistance to the yet more restrictionist programme proclaimed in her manifesto. Thatcher’s British Nationality Act 1981 further reclassified and narrowed down citizenship. As Zig Layton-Henry later described it, ‘This landmark act … confirmed Britain’s intention to divest itself of its imperial legacy and obligations’.¹⁵

So what did the population of London look like in the year 1981, as the British Nationality Act clinched control of migrant flows from the former colonies? How many Londoners at that point were of the visibly black- and brown-skinned phenotypes that the immigration control measures of the last two decades had been designed to keep out? Out of a total Greater London population of 6.6 million, 144,072 were born in an African country. Adding to these the number born in Caribbean countries, gives us a total of 311,471. Thus, just under 5 per cent of the London population at that moment would have been phenotypically, that is visibly, black Londoners. In that same year, 1981, among Londoners were 139,140 born in India, 35,616 born in Pakistan, and 22,102 born in Bangladesh – a total of almost 200,000. Leaving aside other Asians, then, at least 3 per cent of Londoners were phenotypically ‘brown’ at that moment. To all these foreign-born people we can add their children, born since arrival.¹⁶ These figures are not strikingly large. What would have made these communities more visible was the fact that they clustered in certain boroughs. As regards the African and Caribbean communities, the London Borough of Brent had the biggest proportion, at 13.3 per cent of its total population, or more than one person in seven. Next came Hackney and Lambeth, with one African/ Caribbean person in every ten. The other boroughs with black clusters of 6 per cent or more were, in declining order, Haringey, Wandsworth, Newham, Southwark, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing, Lewisham and Harrow. Turning to the South Asian communities from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there were four boroughs in which these constituted 6 per cent or more of the population in 1981 – in descending order, Ealing with 8.9 per cent, Newham with 8.0 per cent, Brent (again) with 6.8 per cent and Hounslow with 6.6 per cent. Waltham Forest, Harrow and Redbridge all had a presence from the Indian subcontinent of between 2 and 5 per cent.

Interestingly, London went on to become still more colourful. If we look ahead another three decades to 2011, we see that these same communities continued to grow. The population census of that year showed the African and Caribbean population of Greater London had increased by almost half a million, and the Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani population by well over a quarter of a million. The overall growth of these selected ‘visibly black and brown’ citizenry in Greater London had been 146 per cent. Whereas they had been 7.7 per cent of all Londoners in 1981, by 2011 they had doubled, to become 15.3 per cent, or almost one in seven. In the long run, therefore, the racialized controls of the 1970s in no way achieved the effect the legislators sought. The city’s famed mixity was flourishing.

THE ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’ BRINGS A SURGE OF REFUGEES

In 1981, however, what was not foreseen was that the focus of border control was about to shift – would be obliged to shift...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. London: Magnet for Migrants
• 2. From South-East Turkey to North-East London: Kurds in Hackney
• 3. From the Horn of Africa to the Isle of Dogs: Somalis in Tower Hamlets
• 4. Home for Whom? Tamils in Hounslow and Home Office Detention
• 5. The Sudans’ Divided People Come to Camden
• 6. Syrian War, Migration Crisis and ‘Refugees Welcome’ in Lambeth
• Notes
• Index