Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

Chapter 5 reveals how Hong Kong’s freedom of expression was defined and confined by changes in the China strategies of Britain and other world powers. The diplomat Murray MacLehose assumed Hong Kong’s governorship in 1971 with an express mandate from London to build civic pride and raise living standards in Hong Kong to maximise the British bargaining position in negotiations over Hong Kong’s future with a post-Mao regime. In addition to the well-known expansion of social services and efforts to combat crime and corruption, MacLehose’s governorship also featured a hitherto understudied loosening of media control. Yet behind the overt building of a free city were the covert surveillance of political activists and unchanged draconian laws of political censorship that were used to crack down on anti-government dissent whenever it overstepped the government’s political red lines.

What happens when we insert refugees into a history of twentieth-century Britain? As we might expect, exploring the entry, reception and resettlement of refugees reveals a good deal about British attitudes towards vulnerable strangers, belonging and identity. Yet the book argues for the value of using the arrival of refugees to consider a far wider set of historical problems. Focussing on refugees’ relationship with British society and institutions allows us to historicise, not only the changing experiences of refugees themselves but how Britain also changed over time. Assumptions that refugees fleeing Nazism were solely the responsibility of voluntary organisations, as much as the expectation that 20,000 Hungarians within a few short weeks in the winter of 1956-1957 would be found employment, or that Ugandan Asian arrivals in 1972 might need protection from the National Front, all speak volumes about profound shifts in British society across the twentieth century. Unpicking the historical processes underpinning these assumptions leads us, for example, to think about the changing nature of the welfare state, the relationship between voluntary organisations and government, the role of pressure group politics and the relationship between national employment levels and the reception of foreigners.

The end of the twentieth century saw a significant change – quantitatively and qualitatively – in refugees coming to Britain. As the post-Cold War world saw growing numbers fleeing a constellation of state collapse, civil war, environmental disaster and economic stagnation, 1990s Britain saw an absolute increase in the number of asylum applications. It also saw a shift away from the entry of distinct blocks of refugees towards the piecemeal entry of individuals seeking refuge. These two trends came together, combining with Britain’s continued restriction of extra-European immigration, to ensure two things. First, that Britain’s stated commitment to refugee rights via the Refugee Convention became undermined by a determination to reduce the number of successful asylum applications. Through repeated legislation, the burden of proof an individual needed to make a successful application became ever greater. Second, despite assertive grassroots activism, new measures – dispersal, detention and ever-more restricted access to welfare support and legal employment – all served to marginalise asylum seekers from the mainstream population. While these sought to underline the difference between, and the competing claims of, asylum seekers and the ‘hard working poor’, in fact both faced the consequences of a retreating state, shrinking affordable housing and the erosion of universal welfare.

Britain in 1972 was different in many ways to the Britain of 1956. The post-war years of full employment were gone; poverty had been ‘rediscovered’; unemployment was rising; the 1960s had simultaneously seen the emergence of ‘affluence’ and countercultural challenges to it; racism and anti-immigration sentiments were a visible and endemic part of daily life and were slipping into the political mainstream; and Britain had lost most of its empire. And yet the anti-racist politics and radicalism of the 1960s and Britain’s increasingly established Black and Asian populations were showing that there were new ways of being British. This chapter explores how these shifts affected the reception and resettlement of the Ugandan Asians. It shows that the expellees – sometimes treated as ‘refugees’, sometimes as ‘immigrants’ – while welcomed by the government-led Ugandan Resettlement Board and a diverse and energetic voluntary initiative, often faced a Britain experienced by its poorest inhabitants. A place of slum housing, rack-renting landlords, a byzantine welfare system and low pay, intensified for the expellees by institutionalised and casual racism. At the same time grassroots activists, race relations workers and the sustained efforts of the expellees themselves to establish new lives in Britain demonstrated that Britain was also being re-worked from within.