THE KENYAN ASIANS, BRITISH POLITICS, AND THE COMMONWEALTH IMMIGRANTS ACT, 1968

Abstract

The article examines the 1966–70 Labour government's decision to withdraw the right of entry from Asians with British passports who were driven out of Kenya by its ‘Africanization’ policies. It examines the decision within the context of three issues: first, the existence and status of a pledge, allegedly made by Macmillan's last Conservative government, that the Asians' right to enter the UK would be respected; second, a decline in both major parties' commitment to the Commonwealth; and, third, competing ideological strains within the Labour party. The article concentrates on the first of these issues, focusing on an as-yet-unresolved debate between Duncan Sandys and Iain Macleod, both Conservative Colonial Secretaries. Macleod argued that a solemn pledge had been given to the Asians, while Sandys and the Conservative party adamantly denied the claim. In the light of new archival evidence, the article argues that the Asians' exemption from immigration controls, which had been applied to the whole of the Commonwealth, did not result from an explicit commitment by the British government; it was rather the unintended result of the mechanism chosen to restrict Commonwealth immigration in 1962. It was a consequence, however, that was recognized by civil servants at the time of the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, and accepted by key figures in the British cabinet, including Duncan Sandys himself. The position taken by Sandys and the majority of the Conservative party in 1968 was, behind the safety of the Official Secrets Act, a betrayal of commitments made and pledges given only a few years earlier. The article concludes by suggesting that the Kenyan Asians' crisis represented both a shift, in the two parties, away from previous commitments to the Commonwealth and, in the Labour party, the triumph of James Callaghan's strand of Labour ideology – nationalist, anti-intellectual, indifferent to arguments about international law and obligation, and firmly in touch with the social conservatism of middle- and working-class England.