Chapter 3 - 1948–1991: Commonwealth Citizens

Summary

Immigration into Britain rose after the Second World War; some of it connected and some of it unconnected to earlier population movements, but all of it changed British society. Panayi has stated that after 1945, ‘the reality, regularity and scale of migration makes it a central factor in the evolution of [Britain]’. The diversity of immigration was also unprecedented. A million Irish moved here. New communities of hundreds of thousands of West Indian, South Asian and African people came into being. The Chinese population of Britain grew too. Meanwhile, immigration from the European continent continued, hundreds of thousands came from Poland and Italy, tens of thousands made their way from a variety of different European states, and others came from Cyprus and Malta.

However, this was also a period of large-scale emigration, with people leaving Britain to live abroad in countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, from which some later returned. During the interwar years, the number of people leaving Britain had probably been higher than the number coming in, but that changed in 1951, when the first census period was reported since 1871 in which more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it. In the years between 1951 and 1961, immigration and emigration were reported as being almost equal.

Those who came to fill labour shortages and work in Britain during the first five years after the Second World War were largely welcomed, according to a 1951 editorial in The Times:

[…] the presence of workers from the Continent is now accepted without remark in most of the principal industries and services of this country. In five years of patient and careful work, some 200,000 foreigners have been recruited, housed, and placed in the occupations where their capacities can be best used for the national benefit […] most of the Polish and European volunteer workers are ready to become permanent members of the British community which would be welcomed by all who have come into close contact with them.

After that, there was occasional resistance to labourers from the continent. For example, in 1955 the Scottish branch of the National Union of Mineworkers opposed a plan to import 10,000 Italian workers in coalfields and condemned the plan ‘as a substitute’ for better wages and conditions and improved mechanisation in British mines.