5 - British political values and race relations

Summary

From the mid-1950s, British politicians were confronted with a new and increasingly contentious public issue: the presence in Britain of a conspicuous minority of black people from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. As early as 1949, whites had attacked a black hostel in Deptford, and Reginald Sorenson's vain attempt to introduce a Private Member's Bill in 1950 outlawing discrimination in public places showed early recognition of the conditions that many black people experienced from the moment they arrived. In August 1958, there were racial brawls in Nottingham public houses, and in September, white youths in Notting Hill assaulted black people and damaged their houses. These were only more sensational and overt manifestations of white hostility, the actual dimensions and scale of which are always difficult to decide upon and measure.

Whatever the ‘real circumstances’, politicians, relying on public support, were forced to take notice of the social issues presented to them through popular means of communication such as the national and local press, radio, and television, and through party organisation. Even so, from the arrival in the late 1940s of the first black people outside of the ports and in any numbers, it took approximately ten years for party officials to recognise the potential political importance of the migration and the white electorate's reactions to it. But, over the next twenty years, their speeches, campaigns, party resolutions, ministerial decisions, and laws made relations between black and white a party political issue in its own right.