Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

to register themselves and clock in with officials if they were going to move; all the while the possibility of deportation loomed over them.²⁷ This signalled what was to come in the following decades; the racial categories created during colonialism underpinned the debate and they would continue to do so for years to come.

      Desperate to retain global status as the British Empire was crumbling in front of them and determined to continue an economically exploitative relationship with colonies and former colonies where possible, politicians embraced the idea of the Commonwealth. Through this organisational vehicle they claimed that the Empire was naturally evolving into a multiracial collection of countries.²⁸ In this telling of history, colonial independence could be cast not as a radical change driven by anti-colonial movements but as a planned transformation that signalled the UK’s benevolence and adaptability. The 1948 British Nationality Act was part of this plan.

      Clement Attlee’s Labour government cobbled together the legislation that would keep a semblance of imperial unity through open borders. This, the first definition of British citizenship, gave people from colonies and former colonies British nationality rights; they could be known as either British subjects or Commonwealth citizens. It didn’t hand out any new privileges, but wrote into law the rights these people already had and created a check against any withdrawal of them.²⁹ What the government really wanted was to make it easy for people to move between the euphemistically named ‘old Commonwealth’ countries – otherwise known as the ‘white dominions’ – to come to the UK even if they were developing their own forms of citizenship laws. That is, to allow white people from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to move to the UK.³⁰

      And so despite the supposed ‘open door’ policy, people of colour from the colonies and former colonies weren’t welcome in the UK. Politicians outsourced the border regime. Through the 1950s, Labour’s official position was opposition to ‘controls’, but at the beginning of the decade, Attlee’s government brought together a cabinet committee to look into how the immigration of ‘coloured people from the British Colonial Territories’ could be checked.³¹

      By 1952, both Tory and Labour governments had implemented clandestine processes to keep out people of colour. They intervened in the market to raise the price of low-cost tickets on transatlantic crossings and they pressured colonial governments to limit who they issued passports to – a practice used even during the height of Empire, when the government was working with agencies abroad to make it harder for people to get the travel documents they needed to enter the UK.

      When Jamaica refused to fall into line, the UK government made a film to be aired in the Caribbean, which took footage from the bitterly cold 1947–48 winter edited with images of out-of-work immigrants living in poor accommodation, to discourage people from coming. In India and Pakistan, the UK High Commissioner publicised the supposed difficult conditions of life in the UK in newspapers.³²

      So, when Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Essex, in 1948, eleven Labour MPs wasted no time in registering their unhappiness. ‘An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impact the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned,’ they wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Attlee soon after the boat’s near 500 passengers from the Caribbean disembarked on British shores. Neither brought nor invited by the government to work, the sight of this number of people deciding themselves to make journey to the UK alarmed some politicians. While some people welcomed new arrivals, who were able to carve out a life for themselves in the UK, these MPs demanded ‘control’: ‘we venture to suggest that the British government should, like foreign countries, the dominions and even some of the colonies, by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people.’³³

      One of the reasons ‘controls’ weren’t introduced in these years was that politicians and different parts of government were divided over the best policy to adopt. Some, like those in the Colonial Office, worried controls would undermine the idea of the multiracial Commonwealth and the remnants of Britain’s imperial power along with it. But there were other parts of government, such as the Ministry of Labour, that kept advocating for overtly controlling immigration. Conservative MP Cyril Osborne was one of the most vehement in his opposition, claiming that people of colour coming into the country had a ‘different standard of civilisation’.³⁴

      The Second World War had left the UK in economic decline; it lost one quarter of its wealth and plummeted from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. Post-war reconstruction required workers, and the official line was that the country at the centre of the Commonwealth would take anyone willing and able to work, regardless of colour. This wasn’t how it played out. Industrial giants like Ford, Vickers, Napiers and Tate and Lyle, in large part supported by the trade unions, implemented a colour bar.³⁵ But at the end of the 1940s, through the European Volunteer Workers (EVW) scheme, the government brought in Eastern Europeans, and though they were met with hostility, not least from some trade unions, they were thought to be racially suitable in a way that Jewish people, who were intentionally excluded, weren’t.³⁶ An independent research institute declared in a 1948 population report ‘the absorption of large numbers of non-white immigrants would be extremely difficult.’³⁷ Empire might have been caving in on itself, but its organising principles – race and its hierarchy of humanity – stubbornly persisted.

      But as Windrush showed, people of colour who lived in colonies and former colonies decided to make the journey to the metropole anyway – and although most other Britons were not and might still not be aware, these new arrivals to UK shores came as citizens, not migrants. Some made the choice to take a chance and move with no definite job waiting for them; others came as part of certain company’s recruitment drives, like the kind that existed in the NHS.³⁸

      Prior to the war, nurses and hospital workers from the Caribbean were recruited to work in the health service, and this policy continued when the NHS was established in 1948. Even Enoch Powell – Tory health minister from 1960 until 1963, who would become notorious for his virulently racist views – appealed to doctors in India and Pakistan to come to the UK as part of a plan to expand the NHS.

      The catch was, they weren’t necessarily expected to stay long. ‘They thought we would come in, run the buses … do the nursing and all the other things that we did and we would go home at night,’ former nurse Maria Layne-Springer, who came from Barbados, remembered. ‘And somehow miraculously wherever we came from we would fly back in the following morning to continue our shifts … How we lived in the interim was of no concern to them.’