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1 results

  • 12 - Why the English like turbans: multicultural politics in British history

  • Edited by David Feldman, Birkbeck College, University of London, Jon Lawrence, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Structures and Transformations in Modern British History
    Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    20 January 2011, pp 281-302

  • Summary

    The ban on Wolverhampton bus crews wearing beards and turbans initiated a two-year-long dispute that reverberated far beyond the town itself, in Britain and India. In 1983, following a long legal struggle, the House of Lords established the right of Sikh pupils to wear a turban at school. It is in the light of these consistent outcomes that we can ask why it is that the English like turbans. The idea that people of colour were out of place in Britain was neither the only nor the most significant obstacle to pluralist policies in post-war Britain. Assimilation provided the language with which ministers in both Conservative and Labour governments justified new immigration controls. Institutional pluralism was not only a Liberal enthusiasm but became convenient for Conservatives too following partition. The outcomes of the Sikhs' campaigns demonstrate that policies which sanctioned cultural pluralism predate the drive to multiculturalism in the 1980s.