When one thinks of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government from 1945 to 1951, certain images come to mind. Some of these images, such as Aneurin Bevan launching the National Health Service, are perceived as positive, others, like members of the British Housewives League burning their ration books following Labour dragging their feet on trade liberalisation, are seen as negative. Even then, the public were highly divided over Labour’s flagship policy of industrial nationalisation, but they largely supported the fullest possible implementation of the Beveridge Report. Above all, this era has gone down in popular imagination as one of austerity.
During the freezing Winter of 1947, bomb sites littered Britain’s cities and people counted themselves fortunate to be assigned one of their local council’s new Prefab houses. Despite the victory, few could afford holidays within the British Isles. The great revolution in the acquisition of consumer durables for the home, which was to reach its peak in the era of Macmillan, was still many years away. Strangely, many of the current generation forget that this was also the moment when the foundations were laid for the complete transformation of the demographic composition of the British population. Mass immigration from the British Empire was created by the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948.
In 1945, the population of the United Kingdom was significantly over 99 per cent white British. It was estimated that only 8,000-10,000 people of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity lived permanently in this country. Likewise, the number of residents from the Indian sub-continent was approximately 2,000, with 1,000 living in Birmingham. When War was declared in 1939, it is believed that Birmingham’s Indian population was just a little above 100. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Polish population, which comprised 250,000 former soldiers and their families, vastly dwarfed those coming from the Asia and the Caribbean.
The Poles were largely welcomed by British residents for many reasons. Firstly, they had fought valiantly throughout the War in landmark theatres such as the Battle of Britain, the North African desert war, the siege of Monte Cassino and, after D-Day, during the liberation of the Continent. They had proved themselves to be brave comrades in arms. Secondly, there was widespread revulsion at the oppressive post-war Soviet occupation of Poland. Communism was imposed on Poland and those returning home from their forces based in Britain faced incarceration in Soviet labour camps.
These people were deemed by the Communists to be “cursed soldiers”, who had “fought for capitalism”. Britons felt that we had gone to war in 1939 to save the Poles from the Nazis, but allowed them to later fall under Soviet control, this despite the Poles making the greatest efforts of all the occupied nations during the conflagration. In effect, they had won the War but lost their country. Thirdly, it was widely believed that the influx of 250,000 Polish refugees from Stalin would help rebuild Britain’s destroyed cities and infrastructure. They would plug a significant gap in the labour market. The Polish Resettlement Act, 1947 was the first ever mass immigration legislation to be put before the British Parliament.
At the time that the Polish Resettlement Act was making its way through Parliament, the Government was busily drafting a bill to define who was automatically entitled to British citizenship amongst the peoples of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The perceived need for such a piece of legislation was triggered by the Canadian Parliament passing the Canadian Citizenship Act, 1946. This Act created the legal status of Canadian citizenship, separate from the status that Canadians enjoyed as “British subjects”. British Subject Status was not unique to Canada before the Second World War. In fact all Commonwealth countries, with the exception of the Irish Free State, had the same status.
Under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, British nationality was immediately conferred upon the bearer by being “born within His Majesty’s dominions”. British subjecthood could be lost in several ways, such as naturalisation in a foreign state (dual nationality was not recognised) and renunciation. Under the 1914 Act, the most numerous group that automatically lost their British nationality were women who married foreign men. Indeed, prior to 1933, British subject status was lost even if the woman did not adopt her foreign husband’s nationality. Canada’s 1946 Act broke tradition by asserting that Canada had the right to its own nationality definitions and immigration restrictions, separate to that of the Motherland. For the British, this concerningly signalled a weakening of the bonds of Empire and led to Whitehall proposing that there should be a major change in the law.
Britain proposed that the self-governing Dominions would be given the right to adopt their own separate citizenships, but the peoples of those lands would also retain their original British subject status. This was confirmed at a Commonwealth conference in London in 1947. This meant that whatever restrictions the individual Dominions placed upon settlement in their country, Britain would continue to regard all Commonwealth residents as automatically British.
The most significant provision of the British Nationality Act, 1948 was the creation of a new status: “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” (C.U.K.C.) One attained that status in several ways, but principally by being born in a territory affiliated to the British Empire and Commonwealth. The new status, introduced on 1st January 1949 (and destined to last until 31st December 1982), meant that a person from, say, Tanganyika had identical citizenship to someone born in Wakefield. At this time, there was no restriction on the right to abode in the U.K. for C.U.K.C.s, so if you fancied living, working and settling permanently in Britain, you were perfectly entitled to do so.
The attractions to those dwelling in the then colonies were huge. By and large, jobs in the U.K. were better paid, public transport was good and sanitation was immeasurably superior. Also, in time, one would be entitled to free education for one’s children, free healthcare, social security payments, state pensions and access to council homes. Thank you, Mr. Attlee!
Commonwealth immigration, comprised overwhelmingly of economic migrants, stood at just 3,000 per year in 1953, the year of the Queen’s Coronation, but had risen to 46,800 per annum by 1956. By 1961, the number of entrants stood at 136,400. It is estimated that around half a million Commonwealth migrants entered the U.K. between 1949 and 1962. Unsurprisingly, despite the Government’s insistence that unrestricted immigration was good for economic growth, this rapid increase led to public disquiet.
Britain had never experienced a population flow on this scale before, and many communities changed character permanently. As a result of public concern, Macmillan’s Conservative Government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, under which only Commonwealth citizens with work permits were allowed entry into the U.K. Labour’s then leader, Hugh Gaitskell denounced the abandonment of free migration as “cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation”.
For a while, the 1962 Act succeeded in significantly reducing immigration. In 1963, it fell for the first time to 57,000, but it soon rose again as residents of newly independent colonies (such as those in East Africa) decided to come to Britain. In addition, U.K. businesses willingly granted work permits, as they found that it was more economical and productive (particularly in an age of trade union belligerence) to employ Commonwealth arrivals. The average rate of immigration settled into a pattern of around 75,000 entrants per year for the remainder of the Swinging Sixties.
The Attlee Government deserves to be remembered as the architect of mass immigration, as well as that of the Welfare State. The two policies fed off each other. The Welfare State encouraged people from poorer nations to settle in Britain and the British Government increasingly employed these people to run the agencies of the Welfare State.
This observation is not to criticise the new entrants’ professionalism. West Indian nurses in the N.H.S. were rightly highly praised from the 1950s onwards. Some will point out that Empire immigration was free to increase after the passage of the 1914 Act, but it didn’t. What was different after 1945? Answer: the inception of a “cradle-to-grave” Welfare State based upon universality. Unrestricted mass immigration resulted as a direct consequence of Labour’s post war political strategy. The British Nationality Act, 1948 deserves much wider recognition than it currently receives.