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Conversation
The history of movement
David Olusoga*†
,
david.olusoga@gmail.com
in conversation with Ritula Shah‡
Abstract
Emerging from the British Academy’s Summer Showcase of 2024, this Conversation between two distinguished commentators explores the history of movement, of immigration and of emigration. It addresses the matrix of assumptions around race, identity, public policy, immigration, imagination and myth-making which feed into the understandings, and misunderstandings, of the history of Britain and of Empire. A particular focus is on the ways in which both immigration and emigration were subject to the differential and shifting application of values, hierarchies, rights and historical myopia in a complex of racial identity, politics and legal definition. While these processes can be historically defined, in Windrush, in Enoch Powell and in Second World War commemorations for instance, their challenging presence still resonates in contemporary Britain. This article arises from an ‘In Conversation’ event which occurred on 12 July 2024, as part of the British Academy’s annual Summer Showcase.
Keywords
British historyEmpireraceidentityimmigrationemigrationWhen you think about the history of movement, where do you begin?
It’s so ubiquitous that there’s no story of humanity without the story of movement and migration, and particularly on these islands. I had a wonderful Twitter exchange (I try not to do Twitter for mental health reasons and because I should be working!) with somebody who was talking about the only people who should be in Britain were Anglo-Saxons and I asked him, ‘Where do you think Saxony is?’ People are so lost in this debate that they use language which they think is nativist language which is actually evidence of movement and migration. But in some ways having that argument is so obvious, it’s so fundamental, it’s so basic that it’s mundane. The question which I find myself thinking about is, what has the past 50, 60, 70 years, when migration has become a central political argument, what has that done to Britain? I mean, that period is two generations. Since the middle of the 1950s, it has been a fundamental political issue, it has been exploited, it has been weaponised by politicians, by journalists, it has been monetised by newspapers and I think that has changed us. But it was building on something deeper, a continuity in this debate, in that we have seemed at times, as a nation, perfectly willing to cause ourselves economic damage in order to try to stop migration and movement. We’ve seemed comfortable about this, and this begins in the post-war period with debates on immigration and emigration.
People talk about the arrival of the Windrush but don’t talk about emigration nearly as much.
A thing I think is really telling, and I have been doing a lot of research recently about post-war British emigration, is one of the most amazing statistics of the 20th century: that between 1945 and 1965, 1.5 million British people leave. Some go to America; most of them stay in what is the rest of the British Empire.
If you type ‘post-war emigration’ into Google, it presumes you mean ‘immigration’, and it gives you all this information about the Windrush and Asians because it just can’t believe it. When the algorithms reinforce something, what they’re reinforcing is prejudices that we have, and obsessions that we nurse. So, the debate takes place without the story of emigration. There are many astonishing statistics of the British Empire, one of the most being it 22 million people leave Britain and Ireland. Some Irish people are leaving arguably one of the greatest calamities of the British Empire, but most of them are people leaving Britain rather than Ireland and that story.
British people are one of the great exports of the British Empire. That story is almost never discussed when it comes to a debate about emigration. So, we talk about one side of the equation. When Reform talk about net migration, we never hear the emigration figures.
But to go back to the emigration in that post-war period or around the Second World War, was it something, then, that was encouraged by government? Was it a policy?
Since the 1940s we have had, and demonstrated, a willingness to cause ourselves economic harm in order to use emigration and emigration policy in a way that was economically questionable and damaging to our interests. In 1945, the British Government estimates that the labour shortage in the post-war world would be about 1.3 million. The same post-war governments, for two decades, encourage, and in some cases subsidise, people to leave. These people took with them to other parts of the world, exactly the skills that they are desperately short of. They want them to go specifically to what were then often called the white dominions—Australia, South Africa, Canada. The Act was passed as Windrush was at sea,1 but that law never had the Windrush in mind. What it had in mind was this circulation, this movement of people from Britain to these white dominions. It was the way in which Britain would remain what was often at the time called a world power in the age of the superpowers. Britain was not going to be able to rival America or the Soviet Union, but it could be a half a superpower, it could be a world power if it maintained what was left of the Empire. Africa was going to provide raw materials—peanuts and cooking oil from Tanzania and cocoa from Ghana—but the real power of post-war Britain was not going to be in saying ‘we are an island of 50 million people off the coast of Europe’, but ‘we are this Empire and Commonwealth, that we’ve rebranded the Empire and those bonds’. White people being able to move back and forth were absolutely fundamental to this project.
But there’s a kind of magical thinking within this because the presumption was that somebody British who left post-war Britain and rationing, and the 1947 winter, the worst in our history, would go to Australia and they would remain British. They wouldn’t become Australian—they would remain British. So, there would be this atom of Britishness that would keep Australia or New Zealand or Canada connected to this Commonwealth, connected to the mother country. Conversely, in the aggravated labour shortage in the post-war period, officials went around the displaced people’s camps and recruited people from the Baltic states. If they couldn’t get those, then Poles, but there is a very disturbing racism around the discussions about who should be allowed to come into Britain. There is a very clear preference for Nordic people, which is what they believed the people of the Baltic states to be, rather than the Slavic countries. People who had just fought the Nazis still talking about Slavs versus Nordics. And they thought they would become British, that being Latvian or Lithuanian would dissolve within ten minutes, but only if you are white.
The other element is Black people on the Windrush coming from islands, such as Barbados which were conquered by Oliver Cromwell, and that have been part of England’s sphere of influence since before the union with Scotland. Of these people, British citizens, a third of the men on the Windrush fought in the Second World War, many of them had jobs and places to live and they had exactly the skills needed in post-war Britain. However, for all their Britishness, linguistic and cultural education, somehow that was not real, somehow that didn’t matter because of race. So, you have this bizarre set of contradictions, a white person going to Australia would remain British, a Latvian coming to Britain would suddenly become British, and a Jamaican or someone from Barbados could never be British even though they culturally were. This mishmash of immigration and emigration policies is fundamental to understanding the post-war immigration story. Unless we understand it within the context of that very strange set of thinking and those big, global ambitions, in which it is more important to remain a world power than it is to rebuild the post-war economy. It is worth damaging the economic interests by making the labour shortage worse because of this big geostrategic piece of remaining a world power.
You want to be a world power. You have this idea of identity that is connected to that idea of being a world power, but also potentially a racial identity. Is it as explicit as that? Who articulates it in quite that way, that somehow we’re harking back to this fantasy of an Anglo-Saxon, of a white country, is that articulated as clearly as I’m putting it there?
There is another voice in that post-war period that believes in a ‘clean break’. The key figure here is Enoch Powell who uses that phrase ‘clean break’, which has been regurgitated and reused recently: that the Empire somehow didn’t happen, and Britain can somehow turn its back. There is a speech by Enoch Powell I’m slightly obsessed by. It is not the one most people are obsessed by, but in 1961 Powell spoke at the Society of St George on St George’s Day and I think, more eloquently, in really beautiful language, more powerfully than anybody had. It laid out the fantasy, an idea that the Empire had not been real. He said that this fantastical structure had been built around England. Powell was a unionist, but he didn’t do much to help it, because he always said England when he meant the United Kingdom. That a thrall had been swirled around England, but the spell had not worked both ways and Britain in the post-war period is emerging from what would be a dream. ‘Our generation’, he said, ‘is like one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English—generations before the "expansion of England''—who felt no country but this to be their own.’ Then he goes into fifth gear of flowery language: ‘Backwards travels our gaze, beyond the Grenadiers and philosophers of the 18th century, beyond the pikemen and preachers of the 17th, back to the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors and there at last we find them,’ there we found our true English ancestors.
This was an appeal to imagine that everything that happened from 31 December 1600, when the East India Company is given its charter, up until the beginnings of the end of Empire in the 1960s, had somehow been a dream and that the real Englishness could be found by pretending that all of those centuries had not really happened, that they hadn’t really changed Britain. I always think it’s a bit like you can always tell when a long-running soap has run out of ideas because suddenly in an episode someone will wake up and series 5 was dream and a new set of writers have imagined what happened to these characters, and those who got killed off suddenly re-emerge. Powell’s speech was an invocation to pretend the Empire hadn’t been real and it hadn’t changed anything. Its eloquence belies just what an insane idea that was. Even as he was saying it, Elizabeth II was on her way to Sierra Leone to oversee the ceremony for the end of the first British colony in Africa and the West Indian population of Britain was already counted in tens of thousands. The NHS, which was then about fifteen years old, was enormously reliant upon doctors from the Indian subcontinent and nurses from the Caribbean. Post-war multicultural Britain had already happened. Powell was not talking just about that, ‘The savage racists have fallen away’, as he said at one point in that speech. It was a dream that, by pretending the Empire hadn’t happened, we can go back to how we were in 1599.
But are you suggesting then that fantasy endured, because of course if you fast forward to 1968, Powell makes his Rivers of Blood speech, he is dismissed from government—did his vision endure within government thinking, within government policy? If you look at Race Relations Acts and so on, you could argue well, no, Powell had a view but it wasn’t the one that ultimately prevailed.
It existed in a strain of British thinking that we see flashing and bubbling up from the swamp every now and then. It’s within some of the thinking and ideology and some of the unscripted things that have been said by Reform candidates, for instance. This idea that there is a Britain to get back to. if you are masochistic and want to turn on social media, the number of people who will say, ‘This is not my country.’; people say, ‘I go to London, it’s not Britain anymore.’ This idea that a capital city looking like it had been the capital city of a multi-ethnic empire is somehow an aberration of history rather than a consequence of history. That strain is still powerfully within British politics and within British discourse. But you have to weigh them against the Race Relations Acts which are an enormous achievement.2 I live in Bristol. We should be proud it was the Bristol bus boycott that was the first of those acts.3 We have to weigh them against the Immigration Acts, and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act,4 which at the time was described as a racist piece of legislation. That law allowed for exactly what the 1948 Act had failed to prevent—it allowed them to say yes to white migrants from the white dominions of the Commonwealth and no to Black migrants from India, Pakistan, Africa and the Caribbean. It used a points system. There are documents we can see at The National Archives, in which the politicians and civil servants who drafted the legislation say ‘it’s wonderful, this law will “ostensibly” [the word they use] be about skills, and whether applicants pass these thresholds, into which category they fall. But the legislation will have the effect of allowing in only white migrants.’ This is in 1962, at the same time as these two laws are being passed, and so in some ways that was the settlement of the 1960s. We will become a less racist nation, we will make racism illegal, we will make discrimination in the workplace, in housing, and all of these places illegal, but we’ll turn off the tap. We’ll prevent people from coming. This has been the sort of uneasy compromise that we’ve had for the past 50 years.
Just to bring it back to the present day for the moment and we can go back in time again, do you have sympathy with the political view that’s much discussed right now that the pace of immigration has simply been too fast? That actually no country, no culture, can absorb the numbers of people that have come into the country?
The scale of post-war immigration is unprecedented in British history. But that is also true of a great many other countries. When 80 per cent of the press is owned by five oligarchs, the power for those newspapers to frame the terms of the debate is extraordinarily underdiscussed and underappreciated. Looking at the way those debates with immigration are framed, number one will be housing, and the myth of the migrant family being put to the top of the council house waiting list. The real problem is that the Thatcher laws that allowed the right to buy also prevented councils from using the receipts and the payments for those council houses (which were sold under those laws at a huge discount), to use those receipts to build new council houses. The failure meant a failure to meet what housing needs, a level of house building comparable which was achieved between the two wars. Those realities aren’t allowed to enter into this debate. So many things which are actually about structural failures and economic failures are framed within the debate about immigration. You can discuss almost anything wrong with Britain and there are people who will be determined to discuss that within the framing of immigration—rather than talk about the fact that we have lower levels of doctors, hospital beds, of policemen than most comparable countries. That the failure to build housing is a choice: that we are the most urbanised country in Europe; that we have vast amounts of land that we don’t use because we have one of the tightest concentrations of land ownership in Europe. These background structural economic realities of Britain are silenced. So much of the debate about Britain and politics is framed within the story of immigration and I don’t think that would happen if we had a press that was more honest and more healthy.
But on the other hand, we have just had a Hindu Prime Minister, we have a Black Foreign Secretary. Many people would argue this is a reflection of how far this country has come. What do you think the effect of the history you’ve described is on the immigrants who live in this country, the people of immigrant origin, of which I would very much count myself—I was born here but my parents emigrated here. Does it give a conditionality to their status, to their identity, to their citizenship?
In some ways it speaks again to that post-war 1960s settlement that Britain would be officially opposed to racism, but it would also limit it and make immigration a racialised issue. White people could come because we passed laws that allowed for this—the 1962 Immigration Act is a racist law pretending not to be a racist law. People said that at the time and those drafting the law were clear, that it was designed to have an effect based on race. Since then, we’ve had this duality where we’ve patted ourselves on the back and said, we’re the least racist country in the world, with lots of reasons to say that. Yet at the same time we’ve been happy to pass a series of racialised immigration laws. So I think we do both. But the reality is that Britain is arguably the best country in the world to be a non-white migrant. I was talking to a television producer, a French television producer, who knew me from television work that I do and he said, ‘The equivalent of you wouldn’t exist in France.’ France would not have a migrant, somebody born in Nigeria or Senegal in their case, presenting French programmes about French history. You could do South African history but not French history.
Just not French enough …
We’ve had remarkable successes. One of the most interesting statistics is that the majority of people in the fifties and sixties were opposed to mixed race marriages. Now, it’s a tiny, tiny fraction and when you get down to people in their teens and twenties, it’s negligible. In all sorts of ways, in attitudes, things have improved enormously. I get nervous sometimes that there are some people on the left who are comfortable with the enemy and the struggle being the same. They don’t want to think or admit that things have got better and something we should celebrate. Rather, it is seen as somehow letting the country off and not dealing with the racism that remains. But every time we have a success, every time we can look at a metric and say, ‘Britain has improved’, that metric is then used to say, ‘Well there’s no problem.’ It’s what epidemiologists and public health experts call the paradox of prevention. If you prevent an epidemic from breaking out, people will say, ‘Well, there was never a problem, you’ve made us do all of these healthcare interventions and there was never an issue, you created this problem.’ Whenever we have successes with integration, with diversity, within being comfortable with who we are, that’s used to say there was never an issue. So, the right are determined to claim that the success of Black African children in British schools, particularly in London, is proof that there’s no problem, that racism is over. But those African kids are doing really well, they’re going to university and then they leave to face the double unemployment rates of Black youth, as opposed to white individuals. We don’t want to look and follow that story through. But I think there’s something you are getting at which is can you claim Britishness, can you claim these identities.
And not just in France but Germany as well.
Yes, the most worrying thing is they have convinced them. And there is a huge gender split here, it is much more young men than it is young women, people in their twenties, who vote and support the far-right. We’re not seeing that here and I think that is a really positive development because nations inevitably move towards the attitudes of the young rather than the old. If we started seeing Reform use this—and one of the reasons why they are so focused on Twitter is because they understand this themselves, intimately—if we see them winning over significant numbers of people in their twenties, then I think we’re at a tipping point. Demographically there’s a lot to take comfort in at the moment.
The question which I think is in some ways more fundamental and more worrying is, do we feel allowed to take or claim certain identities? There’s a really interesting sort of paradox when it comes to English identity. I think 15 per cent of White British people, in the last survey by British Futures, felt that Englishness was a racial identity and not a civic identity and that you could not be English if you were not white. Very few people felt that Britishness was an identity that was racial rather than civic. So there’s much more flexibility in Britishness. That to some ways speaks to its future. It is an identity that really emerged in the early 17th century in Ireland with Scots and English settlers trying to create a new identity in opposition to the Indigenous Irish. But interestingly the other thing that came out of that survey is that Black people are the highest level—the higher statistic, percentage, in feeling that they are not allowed to call themselves English. I wrote a book called Black and British,5 I would have felt really uncomfortable writing a book called ‘Black and English’. I was born in one English city and brought up in another and my ancestors were Scottish, but I wouldn’t have felt allowed, wouldn’t have felt welcomed. It would have felt dangerous to write a book called, ‘Black and English’, even if that was what the subject was about. So there is a certain resistance to people of colour claiming certain identities. There’s also a self-censorship in that we feel we are not allowed to, and when we feel we are not allowed to, the statistics would then suggest that people are opposed to this idea. David Lammy’s point was interesting to point out, there is no Black and English on the census, and there’s not going to be another census, but I think it’s telling that there was no box like that on an official document.
If you think, though, about those European politics, if you think about climate change, if you think about poverty, conflict, it is the idea of mass migration from other parts of the world, driven by all kinds of other forces now, today, that’s unstoppable. I remember Paul Collier writing about this twelve or thirteen years ago.6
We’re seeing it in fiction. If you want to see the future, look at novels. John Lanchester’s book, The Wall, presents a realistic and conceivable European future, where Africa becomes uninhabitable.7 We’ve already seen mass movement and areas of desertification, areas where people are moving their animals at night because it’s too hot to move them in the day, and places where it hasn’t rained for years. The potential that the Sahara will expand, and contract both the forest belt of West Africa and the habitable Sahal region in North Africa, causing tens of millions of people to face either starvation or migration. I think that is an entirely plausible scenario and a real nightmare scenario for everybody. The age of climate migration has already begun.
Being a little bit more positive—a lot more positive!
You couldn’t get much less negative!
It’s quite a depressing thought! We talk about the downsides of migration and that is what you and I have focused on, but actually it does beget a kind of cultural and economic success which we perhaps don’t talk about enough, don’t acknowledge enough. Why do you think that, again, we’re not celebrating the successes, but we focus on the difficulties?
Well, maybe I would say this because I’m an historian—I think it’s in part because we’ve created an historical back story, an historical myth that doesn’t have space for those stories and those communities. I think at the heart of British nationality is the Second World War, not the Empire.
Some of the hostility experienced by anyone who writes about the Empire is in part because there’s a resistance to talking about it because people know it’s a complicated, messy, and very often inglorious story. Whereas there is a belief that the Second World War is morally an almost perfect story that gives us a workable national myth. Now, there’s lots of problems with that—we have to forget about the saturation bombing of German cities, we have to forget about the famine in Bengal and we also have to take minority groups out of the Second World War.
The biggest army that Britain put in the field in the Second World War was the 2 million strong volunteer army of India. There are two cartoons which are really telling about this moment, both from the summer of 1940, one which is very famous by the cartoonist David Lowe and one which has been forgotten by a cartoonist called Fougasse, who did his cartoons in Punch. The David Lowe cartoon is included in almost every book on the Second World War. It is a soldier in a tin hat with an Enfield rifle standing on the coast of England just after Dunkirk and he says, ‘Very well alone.’ This is fantastic, you know, unreliable allies, to hell with them, we’re going to win this war by ourselves. Within weeks, the other cartoon emerged and it’s in some ways so similar. Here two soldiers, again by the English coast, again it’s just after Dunkirk, and one soldier says again, ‘So we’re alone against the Germans’ and his comrade says, ‘Yes, all 400 million of us’, meaning the Empire. During the war, the fact that Britain could field these vast imperial armies was an enormous propaganda coup. It was something you could say to a nation who was facing the might of Germany and Italy by itself, you know, we’re not alone. That idea was that this was the Empire joined together to defend the motherland. Every possible ounce of propaganda was drawn out of that at the time. But we remember one of those cartoons, one of those sentiments—the myth of alone—and we’ve forgotten the fact that during the First and Second World Wars the mobilisation of the Empire was a huge success.
Have we forgotten it or has that contribution been almost actively erased?
I think in both of those conflicts, you can see a celebration and a propaganda exploitation of the mobilisation of British imperial might. Britain is not alone in this, the French did the same thing, and then, usually before the war ends, there is a slow erasure of those soldiers and those contributions from the story. Very quickly after the First World War, the British West Indies regiment, a volunteer regiment that emerged because men from the Caribbean were desperate to come to Britain and serve, and was created by the king because some people were turning up on ships on the Thames, having stowed away to get to the Western Front—that regiment is very quickly disbanded because there is a mutiny amongst one of its thirteen platoons. The African soldiers were in one of the biggest theatres of war in the First World War, that of Africa. The first shot fired by a British soldier was fired by an African in what is now Cameroon. The last engagement by the British Army in the First World War took place in what is now Zambia. The war began and ended in Africa. Indeed, there’s one earlier engagement, the Post Office cut the underwater telecommunications, so the first hostile action was carried out by the Post Office, which is not normally thought of as one of the armed forces. But the war began and ended in Africa; yet those African soldiers were not given shipping space to come to this country in 1918 , or take part in the so-called victory parade at the end of the war.
There is an even more egregious case at the end of the Second World War—and the documents are really shocking—that the British, French, and Americans conspired in 1944 and 1945 to influence how the historical archive record would record or not record the diversity of the French army. In the Free French Army, the parts of the French army raised after the fall of France in the French Empire were 60 per cent non-white, French African and North African for the most part. The documents reveal a discussion that takes place over months, in which the British, French, and Americans try to determine how they’re going to create a regiment of the Free French forces to liberate Paris, knowing this moment will be permanently filmed. It will be captured, it will be the memory—the moment that’s imprinted on the historical record, and the British and Americans and French conspire to take all of the West Africa and North African soldiers out of this unit. They create a unit that never really existed. They found the regiment with the highest number of white soldiers, used that as a basis, and took all the black soldiers out of this unit, then put every other white soldier they could find into it. They can’t find enough so they go through the North African soldiers and work out who looks white enough, who might we get away with on the newsreel? So, if you look on YouTube at the French liberation of Paris, the impression you would come away with is that the Free French army was a white army. Now, that is a falsehood that was generated even before the war was over. The extraction of people of colour from the story of the Second World War created this myth of, ‘Very well, alone.’ That myth of, ‘This is the story, this is who we are, it’s Spitfires and blighty and Churchill’, the thing that we’ve now decided was our finest hour, our new national myth, and ‘you’ weren’t part of that. The Second World War had to be made monochrome in order for this to perform this function. There was a great moment I loved. Back when far-right parties were a bit funnier and you could laugh at them a bit more than Reform, they had a campaign called the ‘Battle for Britain’ about fifteen years ago. They chose the image beloved of the far-right, the Spitfire, for its anti-EU, anti-immigration campaign. However, the Spitfire they’d chosen was chosen from the 3R3 squadron, which had entirely Polish and Czech pilots (without whom we would not have won). It had the Polish flag on it, and we knew who flew it. So, the realities of the Second World War don’t work, but the myth of the Second World War is a great myth that can say this is our story, this is who we are, and you weren’t part of this so you can’t be part of us.
Well, I’ve taken an approach to time that’s more like a podcast than a Radio 4 programme. We’ve crashed the pips or whatever we do on Radio 4. Thank you, fantastic, David, thank you so much.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Ellie Kurtz.
1
The British Nationality Act, 1948 (11 & 12 Geo. 6. c. 56). SS Empire Windrush, carrying hundreds of passengers from Jamaica, famously docked at Tilbury in June 1948. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/arrival-ss-empire-windrush
2
Race Relations Acts were passed in 1965 (c. 73), 1968 (c. 71) and 1976 (c. 74).
3
The Bristol Bus Boycott 1963. https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/civil-rights-movement/the-bristol-bus-boycott-of-1963/
4
Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 (10 & 11 Eliz. 2. c. 21).
5
David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London, Macmillan, 2016).
6
Paul Collier, Exodus Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2013).
7
John Lanchester, The Wall (London, Faber & Faber, 2019).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a15
Published on: 25 February 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 137
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Olusoga, D. with Shah, R. (2025), ‘The History of Movement’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a15 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a15Crossref
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July 2023
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