Small Boats, Border Incredulity, and the Hostile Environment in Britain, 1967–1978

Between 1999 and 2020, an average of one person every forty days died trying to cross the English Channel. [1] If this statistic might stand as one measure of the current toll of the UK external border, capturing the violence that surrounds the policing of the state's territorial edges, another can be used to capture something of the violence of the internal border. In the four years following the 2014 Immigration Act, 63,786 people inside the UK were subject to actions under the Home Office's 'Hostile Environment' measures, ranging from the revocation of the right to work or to rent housing, to the refusal of health care, and deportation. [2] This is the larger picture for the cruelties that came to light in 2018 as the 'Windrush Scandal'. [3] Together, statistics like these allow us to glimpse what has systematically been kept out of the public eye: the violent rise of the border in Britain. This is the social enactment of a political culture in which borders and those who cross them are the defining issues of the day.

More than a decade ago, the historian Jordanna Bailkin noted that Britain's immigration historians have largely focused on the question of the right of access – who had been allowed or forbidden entry? For Bailkin, this obscured other key questions, most importantly who had been forced to leave. [4] Our current predicament, however, urges new questions upon us again. Beyond the issue of the shifting rights of entry or residence, we are confronted with the sheer presence of the border as a key constituent part of modern life in Britain. The border has become both socially routine and politically vital. With the rise of status-checking within the borders of the state and the growing importance of border control as a linchpin of political authority, social scientists have introduced the term 'bordering' to capture the processes that mark this growing political and social dominance of the border. [5] Our existing histories appear increasingly limited in offering a vantage from which to explain what have come to constitute the most distinctive features of the border's operation, whether its political ubiquity or its social expansion. In this article, I therefore set out the beginnings of an alternative history of the border, which takes as its starting point a period and peoples conventionally cast to the margins of the historiography.

My focus is on the period between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, when the will to strengthen the border's operation was accelerating most rapidly, and I concentrate on the efforts to thwart those migrants seen to be deliberately evading new systems of control – most prominently, migrants from South Asia. As the period after the effective close of primary migration from the so-called 'New Commonwealth', the years following the mid-1960s are frequently regarded, in the words of one historian, as 'footnotes' to a process already effectively completed. [6] The bulk of historical attention has accordingly focused instead on the means by which the rights of primary entry were restricted, firstly for aliens (with the emphasis on explaining the path to 1905), [7] and subsequently for colonial and Commonwealth citizens (with the passage to 1962 predominating, alongside a smaller but growing historiography on 1968 and, to a much lesser extent, 1971). [8]

The migrations I consider here have also been largely eclipsed in existing histories. Many historical accounts of immigration politics in Britain operate within a moral politics centred on the idea of the legitimate claims of good citizens betrayed. How, we are asked to consider, could Britain's colonial migrants or the refugees seeking sanctuary on her shores – good citizens all – be treated this way? [9] The 'bad citizens' of migration – the stowaways, the smugglers and the smuggled, the 'illegals', the evaders and overstayers, and the people travelling on false or forged papers – have largely escaped historical investigation. [10] And yet they matter not only on their own terms, and not only because there are no clear lines between the 'illegal' or 'irregular' and the legal and settled, with issues of status cutting through families and communities. [11] They matter because the rise of the border is inextricably tied to precisely these figures and their movements. The tightening of restrictions on the rights of entry were repeatedly preceded by a focus as much (or more) on those entering or residing in the country illegally as those doing so legally; and the web of internal control that was elaborated to catch those who were seen to have evaded entry controls may have addressed these people first, but it quickly came to structure lives beyond its primary, or ostensible, targets. In the long historical process by which ever more people – whether as bordered people or as borderers – have been drawn into the operation of the border since the establishment of Britain's modern immigration regime in 1905, irregular migration and reactions to it have been paramount. The period from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s was decisive in this history.

Taking the rise of the border in this era as a starting point for interrogating the politics of immigration allows us a new perspective on the operations of race in modern Britain, too. There is an irony in the fact that the year in which race definitively moved to the heart of British politics, with the Powellite eruption of April 1968, is also the year at which histories of immigration control have conventionally terminated. [12] A growing historiography charts the experiences of people of colour at the hands of the police and the social state, or as targets of racist violence and popular fascism. [13] However, this work has developed in parallel to studies of the politics of immigration rather than in dialogue with them, as if, once migrants of colour reached Britain, their tribulations shifted from encounters with state and social borders to encounters with the domestic social and state infrastructure (policing, courts, schools, and so on). [14] Thanks to the pioneering work of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others, we have a firm sense of the means by which the authoritarian turn of the British state in the 1970s both relied on and legitimized an all-too-literal form of 'policing the blacks'. [15] But our way through the 1970s is guided by their analysis of the central place of the black mugger in the racist imagination and the forms of policing that it sustained. And yet the assault on the lives of people of colour was lived always, simultaneously, as an incursion of the border into the spaces of everyday life. Once we see the ways in which border checking and disenfranchisements became worked into the territories of everyday life, with particular intensity in the 1970s, we can see that what Bill Schwarz termed the 're-racialization' of Britain involved not only 'policing the blacks', but bordering them too. [16] The figure of the illegal immigrant – cast, most frequently, as a 'Pakistani' – here operated as the mugger's counterpart.

CROYDON, 1978: THE HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT

What did bordering look like at the end of our period, in the late 1970s? In her book Imperial Intimacies, Hazel Carby recounts a story of her Jamaican father, Carl Carby, in his interaction with Britain's Immigration Service. The year was 1978. Her father wished to travel to the United States to visit his younger siblings and their families. He had not renewed his British passport since being demobilized from the Royal Air Force in 1950, and so he travelled to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon to be interviewed by an immigration officer, arriving with carefully assembled paperwork proving his citizenship.

My father, then fifty-seven, was interviewed by a young woman who not only insulted and intimidated him but also accused him of lying, of being 'an illegal immigrant', one of those who had 'sneaked into the country, landing at night on the Essex coast with a boatload of other illegals'. This representative of the British immigration service declared that all his records, including his RAF record and original passport, were probably forgeries. This was an absurd accusation. I knew that in the face of this racist rant my father would have maintained his dignity, making no demands to see a superior official, not complaining or raising his voice. He just bent to pick up his papers, which the interviewer had swept off her desk onto the floor in a wild gesture of incredulity. Once gathered, he did not look at her again but stood with his head held high, turned his back on her, walked out of her office and left the building. [17]

Carby has drawn parallels between this event and the details of the Windrush Scandal victims. [18] Interpreting the incident, she suggests that it was 'just an exercise in humiliation', a lesson for us in 'the pleasures reaped by Home Office bureaucrats in the course of their day'. [19] She is no doubt correct in this interpretation. The excesses of the immigration officer's actions indicate that something more than a detached sense of administrative duty had governed her conduct. But there is more going on in this encounter . The idea that Carl Carby, a fifty-seven-year-old Jamaican man, might have entered the country by boat, at night, landing on the Essex coast, appears absurd. But where did this image come from? What memory was being summoned in this moment? And why might those carefully assembled documents that Carl Carby offered to the immigration officer have made apparently so little impression upon her?

Carby's story reminds us of the longevity of two dynamics that have been critical to the expansion of modern bordering: the fears of the nation's vulnerable borders, captured in the image of the small craft coming in to land outside the inspection of the nation's border enforcers; and the disbelief with which migrants and people of colour (whether migrant or not) were greeted by officialdom, a disbelief grounded in the conviction that Britain was being duped – being, in the common expression, 'taken for a ride'. In the longer context, Carl Carby's experience of bordering and border incredulity come rather late in the day. Britain's modern immigration infrastructure was established with the 1905 Aliens Act, which made immigration control, previously an emergency measure, into a permanent state practice. This legislation created the office of the immigration officer, establishing an immigration control infrastructure that grew substantially in power and reach over the following century. The legal ports of entry, and thus of scrutiny and refusal, steadily expanded across the UK coastline from 1905, and from the mid-century came to include airports. At the same time, the border reached inwards, and the situations increased in which not only immigration or police officers but doctors, registrars, employers, or landlords required people to prove their status, and might intervene to detain, deport, or withhold services. [20] By 1920, as the historian Christiane Reinecke has written, 'it had clearly become a migrant's duty to have his or her papers in order'. [21]

While this internal control focused on aliens rather than British subjects, many colonial migrants of colour were nonetheless deemed aliens and forced to produce documentation or face exclusion or removal. [22] I concentrate on Carby's story here, however, as it offers us a window into a crucial juncture in the expansion of the border, when forms of internal control that had widely been considered inappropriate to apply to Commonwealth citizens came to be wielded against them too. [23] Indeed, as a key group active in fighting the expansion of internal bordering in the 1980s noted, it was the 1971 Immigration Act, which effectively designated non-'patrial' Commonwealth citizens as aliens, that had shifted the emphasis of immigration control away from ports of entry 'to institutions and agencies inside this country'. [24]

We can see something of the effect of this expansion of bordering by asking what else was going on when Carl Carby visited Croydon's Immigration and Nationality Directorate in 1978. Eight miles away in the next-door borough of Lewisham, the local council for community relations (CCR) took stock of the situation facing people of colour at that time. Four people each month in Lewisham were being picked up by police on suspicion of being 'illegal immigrants'. The police conducted regular dawn raids. Just recently, a man who had 'settled quite legally' in the borough in the early 1960s had been taken in and questioned. Another, whose passport was stamped 'Born in Britain', 'was told that this was not sufficient proof that he was British'. 'If the police woke you up one morning by knocking on your door and asked you to prove there and then that you were British' the Lewisham CCR asked readers of the South London Press, 'could you do it and how would you give them sufficient proof?' [25] These were not isolated incidents. Just across the River Thames the Hackney Council for Racial Equality complained of 'almost daily' instances of 'black people […] questioned at random by the Hackney police and detained in police or prison cells' for alleged immigration offences. [26] The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants summed up the national picture in October 1978: hundreds incarcerated as illegal entrants and overstayers awaiting deportation; regular sweeps on restaurants, factories and homes searching for immigration offenders. Despite the Metropolitan Police issuing instructions against police officers requesting passports in relation to minor offences, people of colour found themselves confronted with such a demand even in the absence of any criminal suspicion. A Nigerian man was so requested when he volunteered bail for a friend; a Ghanaian, when he happened to call at a house that police were visiting; an Egyptian as he was sightseeing in Trafalgar Square; a Ghanaian couple as they visited a police station to report a burglary. Beyond the police, such everyday bordering practices, premised on the same suspicions, were routine: one West Indian man, resident in Britain since 1961, was refused employment because he could not produce a passport; a Bristol-born black British girl was refused admittance to a school until her passport could be produced. And on, and on. [27] Deportation orders had seen a three-fold increase since 1974, and the removal of alleged illegal entrants had increased five-fold over the same period. [28]

This was a hostile environment, to be sure. 'To be black in Britain', wrote the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, meant not only being 'constantly spied upon by the State' and 'facing harassment and arrest' by police, or being liable to be imprisoned through the 'racist judicial system'. It meant harassment, also, by the border: 'It means that a black woman going into hospital can be denied treatment by a doctor if she fails to show her passport, […] or a black family raided by police and immigration officers, arrested on suspicion of being "illegal immigrants" and deported without being given any explanation'. [29] The practices of border checking – the system of 'internal control' – had been steadily worked into many dimensions of state and civil activity by the late 1970s, and along with this extension of the border was the rise of incredulity directed at those who were to be bordered: the conviction that, whatever their evidence to the contrary, they might not be who they said they were; that they might be non-citizens.

In what follows, I provide a historical contextualization of Carl Carby's predicament. It aims to account for how Carby became caught by the logic of what I have termed border incredulity and to detail the manner in which Britain's border regime was tightened up in the period following the end of large-scale primary New Commonwealth migration, as border crossers and those suspected to be border crossers found themselves increasingly subject to intervention, refusal, detention, and removal. First, I consider the image of the boat landing. This was a common motif in discussions of the 'evasion' of immigration control, which became increasingly prominent from the second half of the 1960s. Its ubiquity belied the reality of the situation, with only a minute number of people actually entering the country by this method. But symbolically it became a cornerstone in the governing logics of immigration control, communicating the idea that the legislation to control immigration had failed; that it had failed in the face of an unscrupulous body of migrants for whom matters of law, rights and responsibilities meant little; and that this failure was further evidence that the rot had set in for post-imperial Britain. Second, I turn from the symbolism of the evader to the legislative changes brought about to deal with him (as he was conventionally gendered). Re-reading the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act to draw out the moral politics surrounding its passage, I propose that we can interpret it as a key moment in which the figure of the 'evader' was presented as the counterpoint to the deserving Commonwealth migrant, and a disciplinary regime established with which to punish him for his transgressions. Third, I turn to the other accusation laid at Carby's door: that he was the possessor of false papers. Tracing the rise of incredulity towards papers through the politics of the 'dependants' issue, I suggest that we can see a common suspicion take hold in the dealings of immigration officials with people of colour – most frequently, with this form of border control, women and children – as they sought to reach British ports, as they came through them, and indeed as they lived their lives within Britain itself.

SANDWICH BAY, 1967: LANDING AT NIGHT

The idea that Carl Carby might have landed on a beach at night with 'a boatload of other illegals' did not come from nowhere. The numbers of people arriving in the country by this method are unlikely to have been high. Nonetheless, the image of the boat landing was firmly implanted. Politicians would refer often to immigrants arriving by 'boatload […] on a beach outside the limits of a recognised port', [30] of men with 'sand on their boots', [31] 'padding up every beach on the South Coast of England'. [32] They usually mobilized such imagery in order to contest the idea that this was a common phenomenon, [33] but they knew, all the same, that everyone would understand what their words would mean. It is a fantasy that we can date quite precisely.

At 8.30 am on 23 August 1967, eight Pakistani men, dressed formally in blue and brown suits, had landed in dinghies from a thirty-foot cabin cruiser at Sandwich Bay, Kent. They landed in thin mist and were spotted by a local walking his dog. This man, the improbable Mr. G. E. Castle of Coastguard Cottages, called the police, who detained the men as they made their way towards Sandwich town. The landing at Sandwich Bay was the first such occurrence to make the news, although rumours of night time 'illegal' landings by 'Commonwealth immigrants' were already well-established in the local area. It was assumed to be these men's mishap that, through some problem or other, they had arrived after daybreak. Within hours David Ennals, MP, the Minister responsible for Commonwealth immigration, had travelled to Canterbury prison to interview the men. Declaring them victims of a 'racket', he urged public sympathy for their plight, but nonetheless issued assurances that they would not be allowed to remain in Britain. [34] (Fig. 1)

The Sandwich landing began a new moment of citizen vigilance. [35] Only a day later, police were called to Sandwich again, after reports of three men coming ashore from a boat. The incident was put down to a false alarm, with the men concerned probably bait-diggers. [36] Another call the following day saw police in Sandwich scramble again on a false alarm, while further down the coast in Dungeness they were called to investigate a report of four 'Pakistani' men 'seen wandering around shrouded by a heavy sea mist'. It turned out to be a party of Spanish tourists from the nearby holiday camp. [37] By the end of the week a French fishing party had been stopped by police in Sandwich following another tip-off on suspected 'Pakistani' landings, and a further false alarm brought police to nearby Folkestone on sighting of a dinghy in the fog. [38] Despite these unpromising beginnings, within three months reports were coming in of police infiltration of a smuggling network that ferried Pakistanis onto Kent beaches – the final stage of a long two-month journey by train and bus across Asia and Europe, which cost each migrant around £1,000. [39] By early February 1968, as plans for new immigration legislation gathered speed, the Kent police were appealing to the Home Office for more resources to monitor small craft crossing the Channel. [40] The idea of the illegal boat landing had become sufficiently common currency to be turned into a 'rag stunt' by students from Manchester University: four Indian and two English students drove a van to Minnis Bay, near Margate, and flashed their headlights out to sea, duly triggering a call to the police with warnings of more suspected 'illegal Pakistani immigrants' coming in to land. [41]

News of boat landings were quickly joined to other tales of clandestine arrival. In a round-up of news coverage in late 1967, the Institute of Race Relations recorded newspaper stories of absconding Pakistani seamen, blank passport thefts, and the trial of eighteen Pakistani men in Bradford who had landed secretly from Calais after having been refused admission at Dover. [42] Such stories flourished in the local and the national press. The boat landings, according to the Sunday Times, were a response to the tightening of airport security in 1967. As the paper was keen to emphasize, the vast majority of illegal immigrants entered not 'with wet feet on a British beach' but by air, on forged papers. [43] The Sunday Times devoted a five-part exposé to illegal immigration by air, tying their reports to a public letter issued by thirty-nine immigration officers at Heathrow in support of Enoch Powell, in which they complained of the 'corruption and deceit' of immigrants seeking to evade controls. [44] Illicit landings, however, also continued to hold the attention of the press, with a steady stream of reports through the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s of boats tracked or intercepted. Police in Bradford, where forty Indians hiding in a basement were arrested in the summer of 1970 following tip-offs from neighbours, recorded 'many letters [and] telephone calls' from watchful citizens. [45] Boats on beaches were matched by other stories that became stereotypes for conceptualizing clandestine immigration. In 1970, a routine police traffic stop on a lorry in Birmingham led to the arrest of four Pakistani men 'found squeezed into a "secret" compartment […] normally used for storing tools'. [46] A year later, Ray Convine, a farmer from Stow Longa in Huntingdonshire, became an overnight celebrity after he rammed his truck into a light aircraft that had landed Pakistani migrants at a disused airstrip. [47]

Government officials were always careful not to be drawn on figures for illegal immigration, and estimates varied wildly. [48] While the numbers were ultimately unknowable, however, the idea of the illegal entrant became firmly fixed in the public discussion of immigration. I have relied, in the above paragraphs, on the slew of press reports on boat landings and rumoured boat landings, which made such good copy for journalists across the tabloid and broadsheet press in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. If we are looking for what fixed the idea of the boat landing in the imagination, however, we could turn to the cartoon pages of those newspapers. Here the scene of the night-time landing became a stock image, used, indeed, as a lens through which any manner of contemporary event could be explained, debated, or laughed at (in the cruel comedy that was, and remains, the custom for many British newspaper cartoonists). [49]

Principally, the image of the boat landing became a way of joking about British 'decline', providing an index for wider statements about a government losing control – of the economy, of the labour force, of rebellious sections of the population. Thus, in January 1968, the Daily Express's Cummings depicted a boat (the 'Pakistani Rose') landing a party of men near the White Cliffs of Dover, to be greeted by a beleaguered Harold Wilson: 'I'm not here to arrest you – I'm here to thank you for paying me the compliment that you actually want to LIVE in a country I'm in charge of'. [50] The Evening Standard, not to be outdone, depicted a similar landing, this time of a Pakistani family, greeted by a suburban English family hoping to secure a passage out of the country ('you have 14 Upper Pinner Road, we take the boat, and the best of British luck to you!'). [51] In the Daily Mail, the idea was carried further, as the boat appeared now on a palm-treed beach, with Englishmen in bowler hats disembarking as men in turbans observed them. 'More illegal immigrants, things must be bad in Britain'. [52] In the Sun, shortly after, Keith Waite depicted three men in turbans begging a boatman in a small rowing boat to take them back across the Channel. [53] In The Times in June 1968, Kenneth Mahood offered a three-part sketch in which a bulging rowing boat speeds towards the White Cliffs, the men disembark to a newsstand full of headlines of strikes, unemployment, inflation and protests, and just as quickly they are back in the boat, rowing in the opposite direction (Fig. 2). [54] Such jokes continued apace in the 1970s, as police inspectors greeted immigrants with pleas to smuggle them to Pakistan, and as psychiatrists clutching newspapers reporting Britain's 'gloom' and 'despair' waited on beaches to question the sanity of the men wading ashore. [55]

It is little coincidence that the boat-landing cartoons so often served to articulate decline, discussions of which became 'apocalyptic in tone' at the end of the 1960s. [56] Declinism, as Jim Tomlinson has argued, reached its peak in the 1970s, but the turning points in its rise were the dual crises of devaluation in November 1967 and withdrawal East of Suez in January 1968. Together these crises 'compounded the image of a defeated nation pulling up the drawbridge', reinforcing a popular sense of 'prolonged national humiliation'. [57] For Stuart Hall writing in the 1970s, the closing years of the 1960s were a watershed, in which 'the whole fulcrum of society turns, and the country enters, not a temporary and passing rupture, but a prolonged and continuous state of semi-siege'. [58] While historians of declinism have concentrated predominantly on its resonance and impact within intellectual and policy-making circles, [59] in this broader sense it was an idea that was expressed every day in the vernacular, given life in cartoons like these ones. As it was worked into a populist sensibility – one capable, through politicians like Powell, of triggering substantial political ruptures – its connection to the politics of race and immigration was dominant. [60] Connecting the scene of the illegal boat landing to the escalating economic and political crises of the era, in other words, could work to amplify its popular charge.

Seeing these cartoons as a regular dimension of the press's visual culture in this era, however, also underlines the simple ubiquity of the scene of the illegal landing itself. It became sufficiently routine that it could be called to mind with the fewest of details. The sea, a beach and (always) a turban were all that was needed to locate it. The turbaned men never appeared as empathetic figures. They were universally racialized – reduced, indeed, to a racial caricature, all prominent noses, dark beards, and bulging headwear. When they were not there to be laughed at, they were there to be reviled. A pop crime book of 1973 captured the attitude precisely as the author Guy R. Williams, more often to be found penning special-interest volumes on toy cars, turned his powers of description to the evidence photographs of the 'illegal immigrants racket' in New Scotland Yard:

There are (for instance) photographs of a small dark locker in the bows of a ship, cramped and concealed in which a number of Pakistanis were brought up the Thames. There are photographs of a large boiler, carried by road, from the interior of which some of their compatriots crawled when these dark invaders of a foreign land were forced, by pressure of circumstances, to emerge to urinate – the men from New Scotland Yard, waiting by the boiler, took them into custody almost before they had had a chance to undo their buttons. [61]

Williams's interest in such photographs points us to a wider appetite for stories of immigrant boat landings that takes us further into understanding their imaginative resonance. These landings quickly became a plot device, too – particularly popular, it seems, in the children's literature market. Several prominent children's writers took up the theme, first with Barbara Goolden's Top Secret (1969) and Nina Bawden's The Runaway Summer (1969) – the latter developed, in 1970, into a BBC television serial – then with Arthur Catherall's Stranger on Wreck Buoy Sands (1975). Each a variation on the childhood adventure formula set in place by Enid Blyton's Famous Five series, these novels involved young heroines and heroes stumbling upon an illegal boat landing during their school holidays, injecting a shot of adventure into the otherwise humdrum life of an English seaside village. Their moral politics were uncompromising. The smuggled Pakistanis (as always they turned out to be) might be objects of pity, but this did not mean that they should be allowed to jump the queue: 'laws have to be kept I'm afraid', as one character in Goolden's Top Secret puts it. 'And we can't for any number of reasons, keep open house, as it were, for all the unhappy people in the world'. [62] The English collaborators who organized the smuggling were either hardened criminals (as in Catherall's gun-toting Major Orry from Stranger on Wreck Buoy Sands) or idealistic fools (as with the predictably long- haired Kim Lydham of Goolden's Top Secret).

CLOSING 'LOOPHOLES': THE 1968 COMMONWEALTH IMMIGRANTS ACT

For all that the numbers were small, then, the 'boat landing' was a well-established theme in immigration politics by the late 1960s. By February 1968, it became the target of legislation in the new Commonwealth Immigrants Act. This is an act more readily remembered as a response to the Kenyan Asian crisis, but it marked also a turning point in the criminalization of clandestine arrival and 'evasion' of immigration control. It is worth returning to this less-studied dimension of the 1968 legislation, because it is in its passage that we can see how a consensus around immigration politics was able to form even in the year of its biggest divisions. It was in this moment that the idea of tackling illegal immigration as the cornerstone of good race relations policy was set in place – a turn that would prove decisive in setting up the hostile environment that even settled, legal citizens like Carl Carby would have to face in the coming decade.

The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act passed through parliament with only minimal opposition in three days – fifty times quicker than the act of 1962 to which it was an amendment. It was passed, principally, to address the escalating numbers of Asians from Kenya migrating to the United Kingdom in the wake of the disenfranchisements of Jomo Kenyatta's Africanization programme, and the growing expectation that if they did not act soon their right of free movement to the United Kingdom would be revoked. [63] The Kenyan Asians targeted by the 1968 bill held UK passports, issued under the authority of the UK government, exempting them from the controls of the 1962 legislation. For those opposing the bill, a small but prominent cross-party alliance, the nub of the issue was that the UK was reneging on its promises to the Kenyan Asians, and threatening to leave them stateless at the moment that they needed their UK citizenship rights the most. [64] Those pushing the bill through, on the other hand, sought sometimes to present the matter as simply tidying up a 'legal loophole' (Duncan Sandys), or as a long-needed correction to the delusions of imperial duty (Enoch Powell or, in the press, Peregrine Worsthorne). [65] More often, however, when either diplomacy or the sheer human reality of the situation proved too great to ignore, the bill was offered as something regretful but necessary, 'difficult to accept' but 'the best way to achieve the idea of a multi- racial society'. [66]

While only sixty-two MPs voted against the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, however, this did not mean that it was passed in a flood of consensus. The New Statesman noted considerable disarray on the backbenches. [67] The National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants threatened a wave of resignations – though none in the end materialized. [68] Prominent public intellectuals, among them Richard Titmuss and Peter Townsend, openly withdrew their support for the Labour Party. [69] Three thousand marched on Downing Street, whereupon the police descended. [70] This was certainly not an organic crisis of the kind precipitated by Enoch Powell two months later, which saw mass mobilizations on the streets and a hundred thousand citizens taking up their pens to pledge allegiance to this new leader of the racial nation. Nonetheless, it marked a significant fracture on the left, a swing to the right, and the beginnings of a wider unease about the possibilities of a political rupture around race. The New Statesman named it 'government by Alf Garnett', printing an image of the House of Commons with Alf Garnett leering over the despatch box, tapping a copy of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill while the Labour front bench slouched complacently behind him (Fig. 3). [71] The Daily Telegraph had opted for an almost identical image three days earlier, this time with a whole army of Alf Garnetts lining the government benches. [72] These cartoons signalled a capitulation to racism (Alf Garnett, the creation of the comedy screenwriter Johnny Speight, was best known as an inveterate racist). More than this, they signalled a capitulation to populism as a submission to the crudest dimensions of Britain's political culture. [73]

The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill precipitated no political crisis, then, but it did lead to a good deal of unease. Duncan Sandys and Enoch Powell aside, the bill passed only with considerable handwringing and expressions of regret. This was a bill of five parts, however, and while one provision stirred controversy and disagreement, the other provisions, each also developed to curtail the rights of Commonwealth migrants, prompted no statements of regret, no resignations or threats of them, no public demonstrations, and no accusations of Garnettism. Clauses two to five were concerned with strengthening the powers of the immigration service in their dealings with Commonwealth migrants, and further limiting the conditions under which these migrants might make a legitimate claim to entry. Concentrating on these clauses in the following analysis, I want us to see how the escalating crisis around the position and rights of the Kenyan Asians enabled new and tighter forms of border enforcement. It was Kenyan Asians who were seen to be betrayed, even by those who apologized as they betrayed them. But the other targets of the legislation – dependants and, crucially, 'evaders' – found little public sympathy. They represented figures of consensus, for whom a more restrictive border could be proposed and enacted with barely a murmur of protest.

For David Steel, leading the opposition to the bill in Parliament, clauses two to five were 'intended to make an unpalatable pill easier to swallow'. [74] They were measures pitched at two long-standing concerns in immigration politics: the volume of dependants arriving, particularly from South Asia, and the issue of 'evasion' – again an issue marked indelibly, in all public discussions, by the figure of the South Asian, most often referred to as a 'Pakistani'. Making restrictions on dependants was the more controversial of the two proposals, and the bill's amendments refusing the right of child dependants to migrate when one parent still lived in the sending country was probably the furthest that restrictions of this nature could go at this time. On measures to tackle 'illegal immigration', however, there was little appetite for compromise. [75]

The ambition stated most frequently in calls to amend the 1962 act was to change the provisions which were seen to facilitate illegal immigration. The most prominent among these was the so-called '24-hour rule', which exempted from control any migrants who avoided examination by an immigration officer for twenty-four hours. [76] The 24-hour rule received much attention in the closing months of 1967, in the wake of the Sandwich Bay landing. It was greeted at each turn with expressions of disbelief. Baron Gardiner, introducing the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill to the Lords, voiced a sentiment common across both houses when he said of the 24-hour provision that nobody knew 'why so short a period was chosen'. [77] It was, as other parliamentarians put it, a 'crazy' provision, an 'extraordinary anomaly', 'absolutely ludicrous', 'manifestly absurd', 'quite incredible', and a 'scandal'. [78] It was commonly described, simply, as a 'loophole' in the legislation. And yet most of these politicians were in their seats when the 1962 act was passed, and none had raised an objection at the time. [79] When the 1962 legislation was drafted, its explanatory notes stated only that 'a period of 24 hours would allow time for the examination of a person who had tried to evade the control by landing without coming immediately to the notice of immigration authorities'. [80] The possibility of evasion was certainly realized, but it was not considered to be an issue of great importance. [81] Indeed, to the extent that this was legislation with recognized 'loopholes', these could be welcomed as confirmation of the liberalism of the English:

It is precisely because there are loopholes in the Act, because there is the possibility for a certain amount of evasion, that the Act is tolerable […]. If the Act were tightened and were to be made foolproof it could be done only at the price of an intolerable invasion of the very precious and basic liberty of all Commonwealth citizens to visit the mother country freely and with the minimum of interference. A certain amount of evasion, I think, is worth paying for the preservation of this freedom. [82]

These sentiments, voiced by the Conservative MP Norman St. John-Stevas in his maiden speech in November 1964, were widely approved at the time. A short three and a quarter years later, there was not a soul willing to speak the same. When the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill replaced the 24-hour window with a twenty-eight-day one, the only objections were that this was too mild a revision. [83] Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1971 removed the twenty- eight-day limit, leaving any 'illegal entrant' indefinitely subject to executive action removing them from the country, with no right of appeal from within the United Kingdom. [84]

It was the very opposition between the good citizens of Kenya and the criminal evaders from 'Pakistan' that allowed sentiments like those of St John-Stevas to be so quickly forgotten. The moral centre of immigration politics had moved. David Steel is a case in point. Seeking to defend the right of Kenyan Asians to come to Britain, Steel would point out that these were 'more desirable immigrants than those from some other countries': they were 'reasonably educated', often with 'a considerable amount of money', and 'not the kind of unskilled people whom we bring in from India, Pakistan, the West Indies'. This was a point that Steel immediately followed by reminding the House that restrictions on Kenyans should not be conflated with amendments such as that to the 24-hour rule and the extension of the time that illegal entrants would be subject to administrative removal – provisions which should be 'widely welcomed'. [85] All efforts should be maintained, Steel later insisted, 'to distinguish between the different characteristics of the categories of immigrants', lest one should believe instead that 'all coloured immigrants were uniformly illiterate, undesirable, and probably illegal'. [86] East African Asians active in the opposition to the legislation were similarly keen to distance themselves from the image of the illiterate, illegal immigrant. Praful Patel of the Committee of United Kingdom Citizenship, the central East African Asian organizing the fight against the 1968 bill, would tell The Times of the distress that Kenyan Asians felt at being 'lumped together with illegal immigrants'. [87]

In the press, the expressions of regret with which the impending restrictions on Kenyan Asians were met found no parallel in measures to curtail any rights afforded to 'evaders'. A representative editorial in the Daily Mirror insisted that Britain could not 'rat on the pledge to the Asians in Kenya', even as it supported the legislation's intention to limit the migration rights of Kenyan Asians through the establishment of a quota system. But, for the Mirror, upholding even these truncated rights should be accompanied by a dramatic reduction of the work vouchers offered to other Commonwealth migrants, a greater scrutiny of those intending to migrate as dependants – 'to prevent bogus relatives' – and the abolition of the 24-hour 'loophole'. On these final points regarding 'illegal immigrants', the Mirror was without mercy. Illegal immigration, the paper wrote, 'must be squashed'. 'The British people, thank God, are not a nation of Alf Garnetts. But […] unless illegal immigration is stamped out […] there will soon be an Alf Garnett candidate in every constituency from Wolverhampton to Brixton'. [88] In these moves, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill could shift, through the just campaign of punitive punishments against the evaders, from a manifestation of Alf Garnett within Parliament to the best means of keeping him out.

We can return to the imaginative literature of the boat landings to push this point further. Nina Bawden's The Runaway Summer was a novel which sought to tackle both issues – Kenyan Asians and Pakistani boat-landers – at the same time. Bawden was, at this point in her career, celebrated for the raw realism of her children's books, which abandoned sentimentality and romance in favour of 'tough stuff'. [89] In The Runaway Summer she offered a story of a disaffected young girl, Mary, staying with her grandfather on the south coast, who witnesses an illegal boat landing and decides to harbour the young boy, while the two men from the boat are whisked away by the local police. Compared with Goolden's or Catherall's offerings, this was a story that humanized the 'illegal migrant'. The boy moves from an object of pity and excitement into a friend, and Mary bristles at the thought that he too might be taken by the police. We glimpse the possibility that, the law notwithstanding, those people arriving on the beaches in desperate conditions may have a claim on dignity and rights. But this is a move that is mitigated by an unlikely plot twist. The 'illegal immigrant' at the heart of the story – a young boy named Krishna – turns out to be the son of a respectable and wealthy Kenyan Asian family. He arrives by boat only because his initial hope of arriving legally by air is foiled, and he misses the window to arrive in Britain before the 1968 act comes into force. He is tricked and then coerced by some far less respectable Pakistani men ('peasants'), who pretend they will help him find a replacement flight to allow him to land legally, but then use his money to pay for their own and his illegal passage across the Channel. The book abounds with sympathy for the Kenyan Asians and the 'disgraceful' way in which the government has treated them. As such, Krishna may have arrived by illegal means, but he has a moral right to make the journey – and because Mary harbours him for more than twenty-eight days, he escapes the lengthened window for administrative removal introduced alongside his curtailed entry rights in the 1968 legislation. Krishna's salvation, however, is made possible by all that distinguishes him from the unnamed, shadowy Pakistani men – the real 'illegals' – who win no such claims to rights and citizenship.

For all sides, then, the moral politics of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill relied on this distinction between the Kenyan Asians (good citizens, literate, wealthy and ready for integration) and the illegal entrants (illiterate, poor, criminal and, always, 'Pakistani'). And yet this was a distinction prone to collapse in on itself. On the weekend before the bill faced its second reading in Parliament, the Sunday Telegraph published a cartoon depicting a turbaned man holding up his British passport (Fig. 4). Below the coat of arms, the traditional phrase 'Dieu et mon droit' had been amended – 'Et votre slightly attenuated droit aussi'. This, clearly, was a depiction of a Kenyan Asian. Curiously, though, the name suggested something else: 'Mr A. Pakistani'. [90] It was not uncommon, though it was largely inaccurate, for Kenyan Asians to be described as 'Indians and Pakistanis'. Pakistani, however, was in this moment being pulled ever more toward a description of illegality itself. The slip was significant.

'THE NATION IS ENTITLED TO KNOW THE TRUTH': THE RISE OF INCREDULITY

We have concentrated, so far, on the first accusation levelled at Carl Carby: that he had 'landed at night' on the south coast. We turn now to the second: that his documents were 'probably forgeries'. This was an accusation also of its time. Incredulity dominated the politics of immigration in the 1970s. For those pushing for tighter restrictions – and these were the people who would win their cause most frequently – there were multiple incredulities at play: incredulity at government figures for immigration, legal and otherwise; incredulity at the numbers that they suspected (against the official accounts) continued to arrive, despite immigration control having been steadily tightened; and incredulity at the immigrants themselves, and indeed anyone who, through dint of their skin colour, might be suspected to be an immigrant – that they must have got in by false pretences, that they were not who they said they were. These concerns dominated immigration politics from the second half of the 1960s on.

Getting accurate figures either for 'New Commonwealth' migration or for the ethnic diversity of the population in Britain was not easy. There was no agreement on the number people of colour (the only people considered in need of counting) already in the country, and there was no agreement on how many would still come, or how many were entitled to. Numbers were uncertain in large part because of problems involved in reporting. The census collected information on place of birth, but contained no questions on race or ethnicity, and immigrants were understood to be wary of filling it in anyway. It was commonly believed that there was therefore an under-reporting of ethnic minorities and immigrants. [91] Prior to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act detailed records were not kept on migration from the Commonwealth, although immigration officers kept unofficial tallies of people of colour entering the country. [92] After the implementation of the 1962 act figures on arrivals were recorded, but these were organized by the passport issuing authority and not by ethnicity or race. While the government did use these statistics to make statements about migration and control figures, the accuracy of such statements was frequently contested, based on the way that data was recorded. [93]

In the absence of reliable numbers estimates varied wildly, driving political divisions. Already in 1965, Powell was pressing for regular head counts. [94] That same year The Times launched its celebrated investigative series 'The Dark Million', a figure readily recognized by race relations professionals as an inflation. [95] The very unreliability of statistical information, and the legitimate claim by government that their ad hoc statistics on immigration collected by different departments were irreconcilable for the purposes that the immigration debate demanded, led to a wider suspicion of a cover-up – evidence that the picture was, as far as anti-immigrationists were concerned, far 'worse' than the government was willing to admit. [96] Media coverage of immigration took what Sarita Malik has termed a 'numbercentric' approach. [97] Indeed, as the title of a BBC documentary of 1977 put it, the question of race was 'A Question of Numbers' and, as that programme noted, people surveyed on the numbers routinely overestimated, often wildly. [98]

It was in the later 1960s that the 'numbers game' came into its own. A key reason was the indignation expressed in public forums over the apparent continuity of New Commonwealth migration despite the restrictive legislation introduced in 1962. As critics arguing for further control pointed out, while the 1962 legislation had reduced the number of migrants allowed into the United Kingdom on labour vouchers, 'secondary' migrations of dependants continued to grow, quickly outpacing the labour voucher migrations, and there was no legal means of limiting them. [99] It soon became clear that these were migrations for which even fewer conclusive statistics could be offered. Two questions came to the forefront: how many people were there who could claim dependant status – or, as this was often phrased, how big was the 'dependant pool'? And how many people might be evading the system of controls, by clandestine arrival, by forgery or false representation at the border, or by overstaying the terms of their admittance? The two questions fast became intertwined, and the debate on immigration numbers became overwhelmingly concerned with the subcontinent, widely portrayed as the epicentre of a full-blown industry in illegal entry made possible through the undue leniency afforded to claims of dependance.

This debate focused on the issue of entry certificates for dependants, primarily those from South Asia. Certificates became increasingly essential for would-be migrants hoping to join their families, but a reluctance to place tighter restrictions on Commonwealth citizens than on aliens (who did not always require visas) initially kept back the intermittent demands to make them mandatory. [100] When Callaghan finally introduced mandatory certificates in May 1969, the change was intended to end the scenes of mass refusal at London Airport as would-be migrant dependants were examined by immigration officers and turned away as impostors. [101] Such scenes of refusal would henceforth be kept to the offices of the UK High Commissions and the ports of embarkation across the Commonwealth, at a distance that no doubt reassured those in the government who worried about the sympathy for the refused that such refusals might engender. [102] Within a year the Community Relations Commission was reporting on the problems that those applying for entry certificates as dependants faced at the High Commissions: suspicion towards the documents that they offered, or to their answers in interviews, with 'even the genuine applicant […] deprived of his right', in a situation in which the entry clearance officers' (ECOs) expectations of evasion reigned. [103] At London Airport, meanwhile, immigration officers continued to refuse entry despite the new system, questioning the authenticity of the entry certificates that they were presented with. [104]

The entry clearance issue reached a crunch point in the mid-1970s. In 1975 Alex Lyon, Minister of State at the Home Office, visited the UK High Commissions in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to investigate the lengthening queues for entry certificates. His concern was that the readiness of ECOs 'to assume that the applicant is bogus' both contributed to the length of the queue and led to many genuine applicants being refused. 'The system', Lyon reported, 'has become increasingly rigid because we have become pre-occupied with the elimination of doubt', such that applicants were 'treated as guilty until they have proved their innocence'. [105] Lyon aimed to rein in the ECOs, reminding them that they remained subject to the instructions of the Home Secretary, and could not take it upon themselves to defend the border beyond the instructions offered. [106] His visit was monitored in the British press and quickly drew controversy. His argument about the ECOs' assumptions of evasion, and the number of genuine applicants thus refused entry, was borne out by other investigations – indeed, the Runnymede Trust's report, published the month before Lyon's departure for the subcontinent, was material in determining his actions and resolutions. [107] Nevertheless, Lyon was quickly attacked for wishing to reduce immigration checks and thus, as Norman Fowler MP put it for the opposition front bench, make 'immigration into Britain easier'. [108] The border, for many British politicians, was and should remain a site of discipline and refusal – the queue itself functioning as a method of dissuasion. [109]

Concern about Lyon's instructions to ECOs led the Foreign Office to send their own fact finder – Donald F. Hawley, a former ambassador to Oman – to test Lyon's assumptions about the size of the 'dependants' pool' and the extent of false representation among applicants. His confidential report, quickly leaked to the press via Enoch Powell, would prove volcanic. On the size of the 'pool', Hawley accused the Home Office of gross underestimation, noting that one representative from the Bangladesh Overseas Union had told him that 'so many people wish to go to the UK that he could foresee no end'. On false representations he was equally severe. 'Bogus' applications were 'all too commonplace', and ECOs had their hands tied by Lyon's instructions. Britain, Hawley proposed, quoting a senior official from the UK High Commission, was being 'taken for a ride'. [110] Within four months of Hawley's report, Lyon lost his post at the Home Office – dismissed, as he put it, for 'trying to get justice for the blacks in this country'. [111]

Powell's leak of the report the following month put the question of 'bogus' applications, and the need for an uncompromising border in the East, at the front of public debates over immigration. In the press, the Hawley Report ran as evidence not only of the scale of evasion, but of a government unwilling to tell the truth about it to the people. The Daily Mail's frontpage declared that 'Britain is Being Deceived' – a statement simultaneously about the deceptions practised by would-be immigrants ('Britain has been duped and is being duped systematically and on a massive scale') and about what Jonathan Aitken MP referred to as 'an "Alice in Wonderland" world of make believe' prevailing at the Home Office. [112] 'The conning', the paper insisted, 'has to stop'. [113] Or, as an editorial in The Times put it, 'the nation is entitled to know the truth'. [114]

The Hawley affair, running through the early summer of 1976, served to tighten the scrutiny over migrants and their dependants. The Home Office began emergency meetings on tightening immigration control, while the government announced plans for a register of dependants of Commonwealth immigrants, despite widespread scepticism about its utility. [115] Parliament, meanwhile, established a new Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration to investigate the issue of dependants' numbers and levels of evasion. [116] This was a time of escalating crisis in the politics of race. The National Front was marching through multi-ethnic cities across Britain. On 6 June Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered in Southall, and two South Asian students were killed in East London. The racist violence of the summer of 1976, as the Asian Action Committee put it in a letter to the Home Secretary, 'arose out of the immigration debate'. [117] The Immigration Service, sensing history on their side, seized the moment to call for the Home Office to provide instructions for tighter controls on 'coloured' passengers at ports of entry, and complaints be damned. [118] While no new instructions were offered to ECOs, Shirley Summerskill, replacing Lyon, adopted a hands-off approach that emboldened the officers on the ground, sending entry clearances plummeting. [119]

The publication of the Select Committee's report two years later in 1978 heralded the high-water mark of this escalating crisis over illegal immigration. The recommendations were severe. They focused on tackling illegal entry and residence, with increased identity checks for accessing health and social security services, and for obtaining a national insurance card; new sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants and overstayers; a substantial increase in resources to the police and the Immigration Service to tackle illegal entry and overstaying; and a new independent inquiry 'to consider a system of internal control of immigration'. [120] Draconian measures by any standard, they were approved unanimously by the MPs on the committee. [121] It is little surprise that even such sober papers as the Financial Times could ask at this juncture how far Britain was from a system of 'pass laws'. [122] The drive to ever-greater scrutiny and control of the lives of people suspected to be evaders seemed to have reached its full capacity. In the event, the government rejected the majority of the Select Committee's recommendations, but the roll-back was not to last. While no inquiry into establishing a system of 'internal control' was commissioned, such control was already well entrenched – in the raids, passport checks, and refusals of access to employment, schools, or marriage registration. The 'increasing tendency towards internal control', as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants noted, was 'the product of the climate created by the racist nature of debate about immigration and shows how it undermines the status of black people settled here and even born here'. [123]

CONCLUSION: 'NO ONE WILL BE IMMUNE'

When Carl Carby visited the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon in 1978, he did so at the peak of more than a decade of rising panic over the evasion of immigration controls by Commonwealth citizens and the steady tightening of the immigration control system, externally and internally. Two dynamics were key in driving forward this tightening. Firstly, despite the introduction of Commonwealth immigration restriction in 1962, and the further reduction in the means by which working-class migrants could arrive in 1965, migration numbers from the Commonwealth did not fall as rapidly or markedly as many politicians and papers expected or wanted. As primary immigration numbers went down, the numbers of dependants exercising their legal rights to join family members in the United Kingdom increased. The 'dependants' issue moved to the heart of immigration politics in the 1970s, but most ministers, while ready to tinker at the edges of the rights of dependants, were unwilling to scrap the right to family reunification altogether. Where politicians felt readier to act was in the realm of 'evasion' – an issue that initially centred on the idea of the 'boat lander', but which was soon complemented by the idea of the immigrant arriving by false pretences (often through the entry clearance systems at Dacca, Islamabad and Delhi), thus connecting back up with the controversy over dependants. The second dynamic pushing the border forward in this period was therefore the drive to detect and end the incidences of 'evasion' by which, it was widely believed, the legislative moves to control Britain's borders were being undone. In 1978, then, when Carby went to renew his passport, the tightening of the border was centred on the mission to identify and expel the 'illegal immigrant', a mission buoyed by the widespread conviction that the country was awash with deceivers, and that even greater numbers of would-be deceivers were massing at the gates. This, in other words, was the decade of border incredulity: an incredulity at the apparent failure of controls since the early 1960s to deliver the reduction in migration numbers that many felt those controls had promised, and a resulting incredulity directed at anybody identified (through, we must insist, their pigment) as an immigrant, existing or potential. Britain, once the power that had directed the life chances of the darker-skinned people of its colonies, was now being 'taken for a ride' by these self-same people. This had to stop.

The consensus for bringing the weight of the state against the suspected evader was built because it could be presented as a move in the service of good race relations, rather than an undermining of them. There is a considerable distance travelled between St. John-Stevas's statement to the Commons in 1964, met with considerable approval, that 'a certain amount of evasion' was a price 'worth paying' to preserve the liberties of Commonwealth citizens to visit and live in the United Kingdom, and the position of the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration in 1978, that 'Any level of illegal immigration […] should be prevented by all possible means'. [124] There were politicians who held the St. John- Stevas line. Alex Lyon would repeatedly insist that, as far as entry clearance procedure went, he would prefer to see some false applications get through than to see genuine ones refused. These sentiments, however, could not hold, and Lyon lost his post. The movement away from St. John-Stevas's line was possible because it was based not only on hatred, but on good intentions. It wielded moral authority. Nowhere was this conviction more secure, by the 1970s, than in the axiom that good race relations required the catching and punishment of evaders.

The problem, however, was that the rise of border incredulity extended that incredulity towards anybody who might have crossed a border, or looked as if they might have done. As far as the Select Committee were concerned, recommendations for a further tightening of the border were measures that should be of little concern to the migrants or people of colour in the country legally. [125] But even their own evidence had pointed to the fallacy of this idea. If employers were to be punished for employing illegal immigrants, what was to stop 'a situation in which there is prima facie suspicion that any applicant for work who does not look like an Anglo-Saxon has got something a bit suspect about him, and in which the safer course really is not to offer him a job in case he turns out to be an illegal immigrant'? [126] Or, as the Indian Workers Association put it at the beginning of the decade, in protest about the 1971 Immigration Bill,

how can any black person be safe from police harassment when some of his brothers are going to be at risk. There is no way of immunisation from police checks, questionings, harassment as the history of Pass Laws in South Africa shows. Short of branding all black people with the date of their entry no one will be immune from the shadow of the police. [127]

This, indeed, is exactly the predicament that Carl Carby found himself in.

Recounting a history of the hostile environment and border incredulity through Carl Carby's experience in the late 1970s allows us to see the longer historical process by which the rights of Commonwealth citizens and, crucially, all people of colour in the United Kingdom came to be undermined, making them targets of intervention as suspected evaders. This is the history behind the Windrush Scandal, indeed. It is salutary, at this juncture, to see that there is a longer history at play, which takes us beyond the communities who were the most conspicuous targets of Theresa May's Hostile Environment. The decisive decade in laying the political and legislative foundations of the scandal (in legislative terms, the period between the passage of the 1971 Immigration Act and the enactment of the 1981 Nationality Act) was a decade in which it was another racialized figure, specifically the so-called 'Pakistani', that stood at the centre of the politics of immigration and race. And yet this was a politics that would come to envelop all.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[127] Indian Workers Association, 'Smash the Immigration Bill 1971', 028-01-220, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, Manchester.