World: The Dark Million

“The Englishman is tolerant of everything, including intolerance,” says a British sociologist. Only up to a point. Last week Britain’s Parliament was cracking down on the intolerance that native Britons practice daily against the swelling nonwhite minorities in their midst. Passed in the House of Commons by a vote of 261 to 249 was the second reading of a bill to outlaw discrimination “on the grounds of color, race, or ethnic or national origins” in hotels, restaurants, pubs, theaters, public housing and other places of public accommodation (though not in employment or private housing). Maximum penalty would be $280, and a good deal stricter ($2,800 and two years, or both) for written or verbal “incitement to racial hatred.”

“It would be a tragedy of the first order,” said Home Secretary Frank Soskice, introducing the bill, “if our country, with its unrivaled tradition of fair play, perfect respect for the rights and dignity of the individual, should see the beginnings of the development of a distinction between first-and second-class citizens.” Britons themselves, of course, are among the most class-conscious people in the world, but Soskice was talking about a still more unfortunate class that was not even born in Britain. For the bill was the first formal recognition of the fact that Britain, like the U.S., has a permanent and growing racial problem. “This is a problem we should have tackled years ago,” confessed one top government official. “We should have established the machinery to assimilate the immigrants. Instead, we pretended that there was no problem.”

The Loopholes. There was a time when the occasional Indian or African studying at Oxbridge or importing tea in London was nothing but a pleasant reminder of the many-splendored variety of the British Empire, and the exotic babble of Hindu and Jamaican dialects was merely a quaint phenomenon of sailors’ families settled in remote Welsh seaports like Tiger Bay. Then, when a large number of dark-skinned Asians, Africans and West Indians began flocking to Britain in the early 1950s, the British at first consoled themselves with the thought that these tropical people had only come to earn a nest egg, and would return to buy a trawler in Barbados or a camel in Karachi.

As the influx swelled, and wives and families began to immigrate along with students and bachelors, Parliament passed the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which for the first time limited the free entry into Britain of Her Majesty’s subjects from her outer domains. Even that did not stop it. Aided by loopholes in the law and a high birth rate, the number of nonwhites living in Britain since 1962 has doubled to what is darkly referred to as “the dark million.” Nearly half (about 450,000) of them are West Indians, with the remainder about equally divided among Indians, Pakistanis and Africans, and projections are for 4,000,000 or 5,000,000 by the turn of the century. Recently an anxious M.P. discussed in the Spectator the likelihood that “we should be come a chocolate-colored, Afro-Asian mixed society.”

Union Pressure. Since the nonwhite Britons equal 2% of the total, the notion of a “mixed society” may strike Americans as faintly ridiculous. But in a nation as homogeneous as Britain, that 2% is infinitely more visible than it would be in the U.S., and it arouses, if anything, greater resentment. Restricted in private industry by their background, and by union pressure, to the jobs that white workers refuse, the nonwhites have flocked to the unskilled occupations; they include the dead-hour mill shifts, the state-owned transit systems and nationalized hospitals, which pay some of the lowest salaries in Britain.

England has not one colored policeman, fireman or member of Parliament, and the BBC has only just hired its first Negro reporter; but 40% of the interns, orderlies and nonprofessional workers in Britain’s hospitals are colored, 17% of the nurses’ aides, and from 20% to 40% of the bus and underground employees in London and Birmingham. On the plus side, West Indian cricket stars have played in English professional leagues, while the fad for American-style (and Negro-based) rock ‘n’ roll has helped make sultry Shirley Bassey, daughter of an English mother and a Jamaican father, one of the top two or three British women singers.

Problems for “the blacks” are most noticeable in residential neighborhoods. Though their children attend unsegregated schools, they are often last in line for the cities’ already desperately overcrowded public housing, barred from private apartments and boardinghouses by “No Colored” signs, and forced to pay rates of up to 10% on mortgages for private houses. The dark million cluster in overcrowded, rundown Victorian neighborhoods in and around London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Bradford, where they sometimes make up 20% or 30% of the population. In London districts marked by proper English names such as Blenheim Crescent or Henry Dickens Court, the air reeks with curry and saris crowd the pavements, while other alleys are lined with Moslem butcher shops, Urdu movie houses, West Indian fish stands and Sikh temples. Behind the seamy house-fronts, brightened, Caribbean-style, with mauve, yellow and blue paint, crowded weekend beer parties set the nights alive with calypso melodies, steel drums, and some nasty fights.

Into Politics. White neighbors complain that the “nig-nogs, wogs, wallah-wallahs and coolies” use their milk bottles for chamberpots (and then return the empties), spit in the streets, and boost the crime rate. Many local police disagree. In Manchester, says Deputy Chief Constable William J. Richards, coloreds actually commit fewer offenses in proportion to their numbers than whites, though they are more often related to dope and prostitution, and thus more likely to hit headlines. “As a police problem,” says Richards, “they are no more noticeable than the Irish were 25 years ago.”

In 1958, when only 200,000 nonwhites were in the country, white ire, helped by a slight rise in unemployment, sparked race riots in Nottingham and London’s Netting Hill and Paddington districts. Since then, there have been no major outbreaks, but the underlying resentment remains strong, and both political parties have been understandably wary of antagonizing the white 98% of the electorate. Labor violently opposed the Tories’ 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, but reversed itself and last winter decided to extend the law. The Tories were only too glad to oppose last week’s bill on the ground that “the British people can be led, but they cannot be driven.” And, when Conservative Peter Thorneycroft proposed that instead of criminal penalties, far less onerous civil sanctions would be “appropriate,” Labor’s Soskice quickly indicated that his government would be willing to amend the bill and include them.