Racial strife did not begin with Tony Blair

Against the British Right's pre-1997 narrative

In recent years, a particular narrative on the history of immigration and race relations in Britain before and after 1997 has become extremely popular, and the popularity and general acceptance of this narrative compels us to challenge it. Three recent statements of this narrative will serve as examples of this historical understanding (though we could select countless more).

The first is from Carl Benjamin (‘Sargon of Akkad’) of the Lotus Eaters. In a video published on 27 June 2025 entitled ‘Starmer Regrets His Island of Strangers Speech’, Benjamin provides his understanding of the state of demographics and race relations in Britain before Blair. He asserts, specifically regarding demographics, that

‘…prior to about 1997, Britain was an incredibly homogenous place. It was probably, I think [sic] it was about 91% native when Tony Blair took over, and so you would have a hard time finding foreigners in the country, non English, Welsh or Scottish [sic] in the country…’

And for race relations more broadly, he states:

‘…and when you did find [foreigners or people of non-white British background] they were mostly from London, sometimes from Manchester, Birmingham, but they were also heavily integrated culturally because they had no choice but to be, you couldn’t not be surrounded by British culture. And so there was no way that you could set up your own little enclaves and escape it, and be affected by the nature of the [native British] culture, so when you spoke to a black British person from the 1990s, they just seemed like a normal British person. So they [native white British] didn’t feel like strangers. But that’s the important part, is the fact that you felt like you had a national relationship with that person, and so they weren’t an offensive person to be around.’

The second of our three statements is from Cambridge academic James Orr, now Head of Policy at Reform UK, in an interview with Steven Edginton for GB News, published 10 July 2025. When discussing an Englishman’s sense (or lack) of connection to the country, Orr states that

‘…quite dramatic changes were already underway in the 1920s and but the sort of demographic dislocation doesn’t emerge until much later on, and does not really emerge until the beginning of this century.’

Later in the interview, contrasting the nature of immigration and race relations in Britain before Tony Blair to more recent arrivals, Orr says that:

‘…in the 1950s and 1960s when we saw waves of migration from the Indian subcontinent, what you saw broadly was an integration success story, certainly compared to the post-colonial migration of other colonial powers, certainly better than I think we achieved much better rates of integration and assimilation… because it was understood, what you know, to be British was to become British was… seen as something that was broadly civic than rather than… ethnic…’

This view is also shared by many right-wing politicians, both in the Conservative Party and in Reform UK. And in fact, Restore Britain’s leader, Rupert Lowe, who will provide the third of our statements, seems to also cling to this narrative, stating that:

‘In 1997, Britain was in good shape. We knew who we were, we were still one country, and most importantly, the population was stable. And immigration was under control.’

This quote is not from an old clip taken out of context, and is not just some half-thought-through commentary given in an interview of little importance — this quote is directly taken, word for word, from a reel on Restore Britain’s Instagram page on the very day that they launched as a political party. In fact, it’s the very first thing said in this reel, suggesting the degree of importance that Lowe and his acolytes place on the idea of 1997 as the real turning point for this country.

Hearing this historical perspective, which I call the ‘Pre-1997 Narrative’, one could come to three conclusions about immigration into Britain prior to 1997:

1. Before 1997, the effects of immigration were at worst benign and at best beneficial to Britain

2. Before 1997, the average person from an immigrant background usually understood themselves to be as (and were as) ‘British’ as the native population, and did not view themselves as radically different from the native white British population. If they were distinguishable from the native white British population in culture, mannerisms, and outlook in questions such as history and trust in the government, this did not create serious challenges for the majority.

3. Before 1997, establishment figures, whether politicians, journalists, or academics, were in the process of being able, or at least expected to, integrate those of immigrant backgrounds into becoming ‘British’. This ability or expectation changed after Blair.

This article will certainly not dispute the fact that Tony Blair’s government increased immigration to unprecedented levels. Nor will it dispute the negative effects of the laws that this government passed over its thirteen-year tenure, or the ‘pro-immigrant’, ‘left-wing’, and ‘liberal’ attitudes of the likes of Barbara Roche, aiming to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. These are facts that we can all acknowledge. It is therefore true to say that in certain respects 1997 was a turning point — but the ways in which it was have often been grossly misunderstood.

What we must insist on is that the ‘Pre-1997 Narrative’ dramatically understates social frictions and racial strife in Britain long before New Labour, overlooking the political class’s inability to either stop or integrate new arrivals into Britain from the Attlee Government onwards. Pre-1997 immigration and its attendant problems very much set the stage for later problems. Indeed, Blair marks no meaningful discontinuity except for the increase in absolute numbers. The Blairite approach towards race and immigration should be largely seen as an evolution of pre-existing views within the political class, and not as something particularly radical or new.

A brief overview of immigration into Britain before SS Windrush

Modern immigration is characterised by a constant stream of arrivals settling in a country so as to permanently and meaningfully change the makeup or character of its population. In Britain, for all the talk of Huguenots, this process of sustained, large-scale, long-term settlement only really began with Irish immigration in the nineteenth century.¹ Beginning in the 1840s, it was largely triggered by events such as the Irish Famine. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people left for Britain (though many more went to the United States), settling in cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and, of course, Liverpool. It is estimated that up to three-quarters of Liverpool’s population has some Irish ancestry today.

Naturally, this changed the character of the parts of the country in which the Irish settled. As Sean Glynn notes, ‘it was in such neighbourhoods particularly that the Irish appeared to form racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groupings which were often clearly differentiated from the indigenous population’.² The Irish population was even large enough to change the political landscape. Echoing today’s rise of the parliamentary group ‘Independence Alliance’ — a group of MPs of South Asian Muslim background (Jeremy Corbyn excepted) from largely South Asian Muslim-populated constituencies, championing the interests of their fellow Muslims in Palestine — the constituency of Liverpool Scotland between 1885 and 1929 voted for T.P. O’Connor, who was born in Ireland. O’Connor stood for the Irish Parliamentary Party, and was the only representative of an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected in a constituency outside of the island of Ireland.

While the Irish dominated this era of immigration, Jewish immigration, fleeing increased discrimination and violence in Eastern Europe, also increased during this period. Comparing government responses to each group, the reaction to Jewish migration can only be described as disproportionate. While around 150,000 Jews had settled in Britain during the latter half of the nineteenth century, compared to around 425,000 Irish over a similar time, it was Jewish immigration which induced the government to introduce legislation reducing immigration. As Endelman notes:

‘The number of newcomers in itself was not the problem — the Jewish population never exceeded one percent of the total population of Britain — but, rather, their concentration in three or four urban centers, the East End of London preeminently, which was already the focus of much middle-class concern’.

This led to ‘a transformation of the regulatory ambitions of the British state and a reorientation of the idea of the nation’.³ Fears of a non-European, non-Christian presence in England, caused by immigration, triggered the Balfour Government to pass the Aliens Act of 1905. This empowered immigration inspectors to exclude immigrants deemed ‘without means’. Comparing Jewish to Irish immigration, we can see that it took a far smaller influx to prompt government action.

While the British government’s response to Jewish immigration may appear harsh, its efforts to curb non-white immigration before 1948 were, by comparison, even more aggressive. Though port cities have always been home to a number of foreign seamen, temporary or permanent, the non-white presence in Britain increased relatively significantly during the First World War, with Asian and black merchant marines being brought into British port cities to support the expanded shipping industry. While these numbers were still very small compared to what was to follow from the late 1940s onwards, these arrivals still had a great political and social impact. Or, less euphemistically, they led to what can be considered the first major race-riots in Britain in 1919, in port cities such as Glasgow, London, and most seriously, Cardiff,⁴ where local demobilised soldiers fought with predominately black men over employment and response to, as the assistant head constable of Liverpool had delicately put it, ‘blacks interfering with white women’.

The consequence of this, as Ian Spencer describes, was ‘an immigration policy that restricted entry of Asian and black people to Britain’, and thus ‘…the slow growth of Asian and black Britain following the acceleration associated with the First World War.’ This was regulated by a series of pieces of legislation: first the Aliens Order of 1920, which refused permission to land non-white seamen unless they could prove British subject status, and then an expanded Order of 1925 which had obliged non-white seamen, regardless of their actual citizenship, to register with the police as aliens and carry identity cards, effectively restricting their right of entry and permanent settlement in Britain. Furthermore, British overseas agencies were instructed to restrict the issuance of travel documents and passports to certain non-white individuals, hindering their entry and settlement in the UK.⁵ According to Spencer’s estimates, by 1939, the non-white population was estimated to be just seven thousand, when the British population was around 40 million people — that is to say, the non-white population of Britain was 0.0175% of the total population.

Attlee’s change of course

There is increasing awareness that the Attlee Government did not invite the SS Windrush to Britain in 1948. Its arrival was a surprise for the authorities at the time. However, it must be noted that it was largely a coincidence that the Windrush’s arrival and the passage of the British Nationality Act occurred in the same year. The British Nationality Act 1948 was primarily enacted because the Attlee Government felt the need to define British citizenship for the first time in law in response to Commonwealth countries such as Canada, India, and Pakistan explicitly defining theirs. To be specific, it sought to maintain unity by recognising all citizens of the remaining Empire or Commonwealth as British subjects in an attempt to maintain British international influence.

There is hesitation among some academic historians to link the Act with increased non-white immigration into Britain. For example, Spencer, whom I have used primarily to document the history of specifically non-white immigration into Britain between 1919 to 1950, asserted definitively that ‘…in no active sense did the Act contribute to the flow of British subjects into the United Kingdom, nor was it seen at the time as likely to do so.’⁶ Similarly, the British Government’s website page on the ‘Windrush Scandal’ argues that one of the ‘…most common misconceptions about the British Nationality Act 1948 (BNA 1948) is that it marked the beginning of an age of migration from the Black Commonwealth to the British Isles.’

Such assertions are quite puzzling, and I believe those who argue as such about the BNA 1948 frankly seem to be missing the point. In regards to actual policy, while the British Empire did indeed hold the idea of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ in the abstract from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the de facto understanding of race vis-à-vis immigration policy was was that non-whites, as ‘physically and culturally distinct groups’, were seen as unassimilable and likely to cause ethnic conflict with the natives. An influx of non-white immigrants was therefore to be avoided.⁷

While the legislation of the 1920s clearly violated the basic principle of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’, this was of no practical or political concern. By contrast, the BNA 1948 clearly affirmed the de jure right of all British subjects to move around the empire freely, and actually made the emigration of non-white people into Britain far more feasible. Spencer notes that although border guards still maintained subtle ways to keep non-white immigrants out, like limiting travel documents in the colonies,⁸ they could no longer turn them away at the ports, as they did in the 1920s. As Rieko Karatani also puts it, ‘….Commonwealth citizenship [affirmed by the BNA 1948] was the basis of citizenship rights and privileges inside the United Kingdom.’⁹ Overall, the true facts on the ground are determined by what is practically and legislatively acceptable (such as the 1920 or 1925 Acts, or conversely BNA 1948), not what is merely theoretically possible (as in the often-ignored general principle of ‘Civis Brittanicus sum’).

And indeed, the facts on the ground did change after BNA 1948. The growth of the non-white population of Britain became a point of concern even as early as the latter years of the Attlee Government. Reports of racial fracas, akin to the race riots in 1919, are found in towns such as Liverpool, Deptford, and Birmingham during the late 1940s. Cabinet-level discussions on ‘coloured’ immigration occurred in March 1950, over a growing concern about ‘serious difficulties which were thought would arise if immigration from British colonial possessions was allowed to continue or increase’. However, by February 1951, the Cabinet concluded that no legislation should be introduced at that time, against the precedent of such legislation being introduced in the 1920s. The reasons given were that such legislation was seen to be too controversial abroad, and might weaken British colonial and Commonwealth influence, as well as at home, for being racially discriminatory in nature.¹⁰

There was a clear change in policy towards immigration and race during the Attlee premiership, as the de jure policy of ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ was now more formally upheld. While border officials in the 1920s were at liberty to restrict access to Britain to most non-white people (particularly seamen), after BNA 1948, these prerogatives were rescinded. Though we can credit the Conservative Government that followed for an increase in arrivals, we must conclude that the Attlee Government was responsible for constructing the legal framework which allowed colonial subjects into Britain.

The incohesive state

But why does Attlee’s decision even matter? After all, as Carl Benjamin argues, if one were to come across someone of immigrant background before 1997, apparently ‘they were also heavily integrated culturally’, and as British culture was so potent before 1997, ‘there was no way that you could set up your own little enclaves’. The insinuation is that while the BNA 1948 helped those in the colonies come to Britain, those who did enter became sufficiently culturally British and thus many of the problems that have been associated with immigration did not happen before 1997.

Except they did. From the 1950s onwards, Britain saw a spate of race riots. The existence of large-scale racialised violence substantially undermines the happy view of pre-1997 immigration espoused by Benjamin, Orr, and Lowe. Three post-1948 case studies reveal the origins of this unrest and present a very different image of immigration before Blair.

We can first observe the Notting Hill Riots of 1958. While no report was launched by the authorities at the time, what is clear is that the new Jamaican population was heavily concentrated in specific locations; or ‘little enclaves’, we could even say. As many native landlords would not accept Caribbean tenants elsewhere, those immigrants typically concentrated in areas where accommodation was cheapest and of the lowest quality.

Certain cynical actors, such as the landlord Peter Rachman, would seek to exploit the situation by trying to coerce white tenants out of their properties. (Many existing tenants had statutorily controlled rents, so their removal in favour of a new tenant was potentially highly profitable.) According to Christopher Hilliard, to do this, Rachman would rent to ‘a host of Caribbean men’ and encourage disruptive behaviour, such as playing loud music to make elderly white tenants move out. When colonial immigrants became landlords themselves, similar tactics were used. For example, a Jamaican landlord was reported to have attempted to evict his white tenant, and when she told him he could not lawfully do this because it was a controlled tenancy, ‘…he threatened to let out the rooms around her to some ‘picked’ obnoxious coloured people whom he would encourage to annoy her in every possible way.’¹¹

Over time, these practices led to overcrowding and concentrations of black tenants in specific properties, effectively pushing out white residents and creating a form of segregation, making it ‘unbearable’ for a white person to rent in such areas. In the riot of 1958, many of the white rioters were known to have been not immediately from areas of the riot itself, but rather ‘walked (or in some cases drove) to areas with more black inhabitants, and challenged them there’, indicating the widening segregation of communities only ten years after BNA 1948.¹² From this, we can see that segregated communities and serious racial tensions between them are hardly a new phenomenon that emerged after 1997.

Jumping forward twenty years, we can then analyse the Scarman Report of the Brixton Riot of 1981. Relations between the new black population and the police were particularly poor, with the black community consistently accusing the police of institutional racism (though the Scarman Report disputed this). The Scarman Report confessed the existence of ‘racial disadvantage’ for black people in society more broadly, and even that positive discrimination to was a ‘price worth paying’ — but it also acknowledged the growth of areas defined as being predominantly black and hostile to the police. Indeed, regardless of one’s view of whether there was serious racial prejudice or simply a lack of trust in the institutions of the state within the black community,¹³ what is indisputable is that the black population was increasingly identifying itself in ways that separated themselves from broader British identity.

Though advocates of the Pre-1997 Narrative will argue, explicitly or implicitly, that colonial immigration to Britain was ‘an integration success story’, exclusive black forms of identity were becoming increasingly popular with the black population in Britain. For example, as a Marxist article commenting on the riot noted, ‘In the “popular” form, what this amounts to is a tendency for many West Indian youth to identify with symbols of black assertiveness — in the late 1960s with the black power slogans from the US, today with some of the imagery of Rastafarianism and with reggae music. The number of committed, believing members of the Rastafarian cult is very small. But the number of youth who vaguely identify with its symbolism is much higher. A survey of a group of black youth in Handsworth showed that half thought Rastafarian [sic] “significant”.’

Finally, we can look at the Bradford Riots of July 2001 and the findings of the Ouseley Report. Though this obviously occurred after Blair took power, these events involved people and communities which existed in Bradford long before 1997, and it would be disingenuous to simply blame the Blair Government for what happened. In 2001, Bradford experienced a thousand-strong riot between white and Pakistani youths of the city. It is clear that for all of the claims of integration in pre-1997 Britain, many British cities were marked by extreme segregation. This was not denied in the Ouseley Report, which noted the existence of ‘comfort zones’ for both whites and Pakistanis, where ‘different ethnic groups are increasingly segregating themselves from each other and retreating into [areas] made up of people like themselves’.¹⁴ Furthermore, Ouseley observed the ‘virtual apartheid’ in secondary schools in the area, further demonstrating the lack of cultural cohesion between communities, completely contradicting the ‘heavily’ culturally integrated image of pre-1997 Britain.¹⁵

It should be clear by now that the Pre-1997 Narrative of a successful British cultural assimilationism inverts the reality. The ‘steelman’ of these claims should ultimately recognise that policymakers with varying degrees of alarm towards these issues tacitly settled on demographic stabilisation as the correct response. Long before Blair, and in fact even before their explication in Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the challenges of multiracialism were of enough concern to start unwinding the Attlee Government’s experiment in putting ‘Civis Brittanicus sum’ into practice.

The 1948 framework began to be seriously broken down across bipartisan lines over the 1960s with the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts in 1962 and 1968, as well as the Immigration Act 1971, under Macmillan, Wilson, and Heath. The 1968 Act by the Wilson government is revealing: it targeted the influx of Kenyan Asians, including some who had British passports, who fled Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘Africanisation’ policies. The 1971 Act under Heath introduced the concept of ‘patrial’ citizenship to immigration law, establishing a framework which introduced controls on those without a parent or grandparent born in the UK, in essence without doing so for those of British descent. This process of unwinding the BNA 1948 was finalised in the creation of British citizenship in the British Nationality Act 1981 under Thatcher, which finally severed ‘UK citizenship’ from the imperial structure of subjecthood (though maintaining outdated concepts such as Commonwealth voting).

Of course, there was no Powellite repatriation of those settled. Instead of Powell’s more radical solution, a halfway house was reached to ‘stop Empire coming home’ whilst simultaneously importing another imperial framework to ‘manage’ race relations in the Race Relations Acts. The first Act of 1965 established the Race Relations Board, whose first (Liberal) chairman, Mark Bonham Carter, viewed the ‘permanent historical problem’ of a significant African-descent minority in the United States with misapprehension, whilst also looking to the Civil Rights movement for inspiration. The second Act of 1976 created the groundwork for Blairite equalities policy, replacing the Board with the Commission for Racial Equality. Before Blair, Britain had just about struck a delicate balance of demographic control with special minority protections. Since Blair, and certainly in the past few years, any semblance of that balance has been completely blown up.

Ultimately, if one could (incorrectly) think of the pre-1997 era as racially harmonious, it is only because there had already been an inescapable demand from the British public to arrest and reverse demographic displacement. This is far from the claims of any kind of deep assimilationism at this time.

The insufficiency of the Pre-1997 Narrative

It is only as a result of this process that Benjamin, Orr, and Lowe are correct in their understanding of pre-1997 Britain by comparison to today. For all that has been described above, Britain still remained a largely homogeneous country: in 2000, around 9 percent of people in Britain were non-white. However, it is clear that even by the 1950s — despite relatively low levels of immigration by contemporary standards — race relations were a serious concern. There was violence, alienation, social incohesion, and distrust between native and immigrant, decades before Blair was given the keys to No. 10. This clearly invalidates statements such as immigrants being ‘heavily integrated culturally because they had no choice but to be’, or that before 1997, immigration was ‘broadly an integration success story’.

We can therefore assert that the Pre-1997 Narrative fails to address two key points. Firstly, immigration of people from vastly different countries to Britain, on any scale, led to racial strife. Even levels of immigration far below that of New Labour created serious problems. Carl Benjamin’s Lotus Eaters can lament the increased presence of non-whites in his native Swindon, Orr may feel uncomfortable going around many parts of London, and Lowe might assert that until as late as 1997 we were ‘still one country’, but such feelings of alienation were experienced by poorer white-working-class communities in cities many years before either Benjamin or Orr were even born. It explains, for instance, the rise of far-right organisations such as the National Front in the 1970s or the British National Party in the 1990s, or the overwhelming support for Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech.¹⁶

Secondly, it was not from 1997 onwards but from the 1940s onwards that the political class adopted a deeply flawed approach to immigration, as demonstrated by the racial strife and violence this approach ultimately caused. This approach was also against the wishes of the native British people. That is to say, the ideas of the political establishment did not suddenly become ‘Woke’ vis-à-vis immigration and integration from May 2 1997. It appears that, from a very early stage, the political class adopted views that were, and are, radically different from those of the British public, and were exceptionally slow (and reluctant) to row back from this even after these ideas proved disastrous.

While the British public agreed and supported the maverick Enoch Powell, Brian Walden, the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood (which is now one of the least white constituencies in the entire country, currently represented by Shabana Mahmood, who faced a strong challenge from Akhmed Yakoob, an openly racially sectarian candidate, in 2024) in the 1960s and 1970s, regretfully sums up what he and his fellow MPs’ beliefs about immigration and immigrants were in a radio broadcast. It does not sound particularly different from what many say about the political class today:

‘I can’t say that my own efforts did much to improve public understanding. I suffered from the not uncommon failing of politicians, that having made up my mind, I refused to take up any notice of evidence that contradicted me. In the 1950s and early 1960s, large numbers of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean came to the West Midlands to take jobs in industry. There was an anxiety amongst the local population at an influx on this scale, for which nothing could prepare them.

In confronting this problem, my failing was liberal intolerance. I believed in racial equality, and was upset by colour-prejudice and so my sympathies were with the immigrants.’

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This article was written by Ernest Hydel, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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1. It should be noted that Irish immigration, unlike all other immigration described in this article, was basically a case of internal migration, as Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom at this time; nonetheless, it is still worth discussing as it was the first wave of migration to decisively change the character of large areas of the country in modern times.

2. Glynn, S. (1981) ‘Irish Immigration to Britain, 1911-1951: Patterns and Policy’, Irish Economic and Social History, 8(1), pp. 50-65.

3. Endelman, H.B. (2002) ‘Native Jews and Foreign Jews.’ p. 156.

4. Spencer, I.R.G. (1997) British immigration policy since 1939: The making of multi-racial Britain. London and New York: Routledge. p. 9.

5. ibid, pp. 3-13.

6. ibid, pp. 53.

7. ibid, p. 22, p. 9.

8. ibid, ch. 2, p. 23.

9. Karatani, R. (2003) Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, p. 125.

10. Spencer, p. 51, pp. 55-57.

11. Hilliard, Christopher. ‘Mapping the Notting Hill Riots: Racism and the Streets of Post-war Britain.’ History Workshop Journal, no. 93 (Spring 2022): pp. 47-68, pp. 50-54

12. ibid, p. 54.

13. For this, one can see Hansard for the Parliamentary debates over the Scarman Report. Enoch Powell suggested the riots were caused by the alienation of the black community as a manifestation of being alien due to its visible differences and urged for the government to be transparent about the demographic growth and changing proportions of this community, while Mr. Tilley, the MP for the constituency where most of the rioting took place, believed the riots were caused by a process of alienation for the black community, stemming from ‘white racists’. See: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1981/dec/10/scarman-report?.

14. Sir Herman Ouseley, Community Pride: Making Diversity Work in Bradford, p. 18.

15. ibid, p. 13.

16. The NF became the fourth largest party in terms of vote share. For more information, see Whiteley, P. (1979). ‘The National Front Vote in the 1977 GLC Elections: An Aggregate Data Analysis.’