Chapter 5 - Commonwealth Labour and the White Working Class

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter I argued that William Beveridge’s report on universal welfare had to be contextualized in relation to Baron Moyne’s report on colonial development. In this chapter, I contextualize the implementation of universal welfare in post war Britain vis-à-vis the racialized response to the arrival of Commonwealth labour. Up until this era, the deserving/undeserving distinction had a formalized nature, being embedded in various poor law provisions. With the 1948 National Assistance Act, the poor laws were formally rescinded. But the deserving/undeserving distinction was preserved through informalized “colour bars” that stretched across industry and beyond.

Those who contributed to this re-racialization of the deserving/undeserving distinction included Conservative and Labour politicians as well as trade unions. Their policies and rhetoric moulded the “white working class” into a viable constituency. This constituency defined itself not in the opposition between enfranchised English labour and its residuum, but rather in the opposition between deserving whites and undeserving Black and Asian Commonwealth immigrants. So, in this chapter I examine how organized labour was complicit in an elite exercise of political domination that sought to preserve the fraying integrity of empire even as British society took on postcolonial coordinates.

In the first part of the chapter I examine political and socioeconomic responses to Black immigration in the postwar period. After 1948, the universal provision of welfare formed part of a national compact between state, business and labour. I argue that this compact was not simply national but racialized as such, and in a paradoxical way. Britain’s postwar economic recovery required labour to be sourced from the colonies. However, this requirement raised the spectre of an uncontrollable immigration of Black and Asian peoples to Britain. I then chart how academic responses to the growing issue of “race relations” drew upon existing social anthropological work. By these means, the threat of disorder mooted by Black migration from the rural to the urban in the colonies (an issue we encountered in the last chapter) informed the perception of Black migration from the colonies to Britain’s towns and cities.