Search results
-war period and the political process of decolonisation. By contrasting aspects of UK policies with those adopted by France, which experienced comparable trends in migration from existing and former colonies, it also explores how far the differences between the French Republican and British multicultural models of integration influenced the development of social policies targeted at migrants
Politics in Mid Twentieth-Century Britain: Adultery in Post-war England’, History Workshop Journal 62(1) (2006), 86–115; S. Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34(4) (2001), 773–95. M. Grimley, ‘The Church of England, Race and Multiculturalism, 1962–2012’ in J. Garnett and A. Harris (eds), Rescripting Religion in the City: Migration and Religious Identity in the Modern Metropolis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), chapter 12; Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Harlow
Thus the pressure from social advocacy movements to improve immigrant welfare does not appear to have been quite as strong as in France; it did not partially re-frame official discourses, nor did it (yet) change the terms of public debate. The foundations of the British ‘multicultural state’ Alongside restrictive border controls, the two other central features of Britain
has termed ‘the Black Atlantic’,82 the tendency beyond Lord Kitchener has been to domesticate and confine it to a specifically British landscape. Thus ‘Windrush Square’, in the heart of Brixton, opened in 2010, ‘symbolis[ing] the beginnings of modern British multiculturalism’. And far from being imposed from above, its nomenclature was the ‘popular choice’ of local residents, businesses and organisations.83 Windrush mythologies and silences Returning to June 1948, neither Cummings nor Lord Kitchener were fabricating their welcome and anticipation of arrival
been created in Brixton symbolising ‘the beginnings 198 Stowaways and others of modern British multicultural society’.79 Such celebration and inclusion has led the British National Party’s leader, Nick Griffin, articulating the politics of cultural despair, to view 1948 as the year ‘when Britain’s prelapsarian idyll ended’.80 Griffin’s views are not totally isolated and perhaps find some resonance within the right wing of mainstream British nationalism as articulated by the journalist and writer Roy Kerridge.81 It remains, however, taking British society and
. Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002); L. Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005); T. Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2006); A. Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 2003); P. Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Harlow
arrivals as decolonisation gathered pace? How far did they tackle racial discrimination, and what were the differences between French Republican and British multicultural models of integration as each nation sought, eventually, to restrict the flow of these new immigrants? What this chapter gives us is not only a deeper understanding of the complex forces at work as two of the largest decolonising powers