Race, Immigration and Community Relations in Contemporary London

Race, Immigration and Community Relations

in Contemporary London

Ian Gordon and Tony Travers

for LSE London

London School of Economics

April 2006

This paper is intended to provide a brief summary of the key issues raised by the LSE seminar on Race, Immigration and Community Relations in Contemporary London. Few topics have generated as much interest and debate in recent years. The capital’s population has become steadily more cosmopolitan in recent decades, with large resident groups from many countries around the world. Most of these immigrants have moved to London to supply the skills and labour needed to maintain the capital’s economy. Some have fled persecution. Others choose to live in London simply because they prefer it to locations elsewhere. New populations have led to new challenges for city government and community relations. Such challenges will continue in the years ahead.

1. Background

Virtually all Londoners are descended, distantly, from people who came to Britain from overseas. London has been a centre of international trade since Roman invaders settled a city on the Thames two thousand years ago. People have moved in and out of the city as goods and services have found a market in it. There has long been a close link between the city’s position as a centre of commerce and the temporary or permanent settlement of foreign-born residents within it. However, the past 60 years has seen a radical change in the scale and nature of such internationalisation. Globalisation has had a profound effect on one of the world’s global cities.

Today, London-born residents of the capital may be white, black, Asian or of mixed race. Religion has joined ethnicity and nationality as one of the many ways of understanding the capital’s population. The title of this seminar refers to a number of subjects that are frequently confused. London is a complex place. This complexity is a strength yet also a challenge.

Contemporary immigration to Britain started with the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in the summer of 1948. There was political outrage when news leaked out that 430 West Indians were heading across the Atlantic to the UK. A number of Labour ministers and their Conservative opponents immediately feared that immigration was out of control. The threat of immigration was inflated, as it still often is. Only a few years before the Empire Windrush brought its new migrants to Britain, Europe had seen massive movements of people around the continent Many commentators have argued that the real issue was not migration, but colour⁴.

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was significant immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent. At this time, there was no immigration policy to constrain British citizens (as many from the New Commonwealth were) entering the home country. A long period of economic growth in the UK stimulated the need for a growing migrant workforce. The sudden arrival of many black and Asian Briton led to a rise in race-related violence and prejudice. A number of areas, including Notting Hill, Birmingham and Nottingham experienced rioting as white people reacted to the arrival of a black community.

As the result of political pressure, governments legislated three times within a decade to make immigration for non-white people harder. By 1972, legislation meant that a British passport holder born overseas could only settle in Britain if, first, they had a work permit and, second, could prove that a parent or grandparent had been born in the UK. In parallel with efforts to constrain immigration, there were also initiatives to tackle racial prejudice with the introduction of two race relations acts.

Immigration between 1948 and the mid-1970s was the origin of much of Britain’s ethnic minority population. The vast majority of these migrants settled in London, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Bristol and a number of smaller towns in England. Very few black and Asian Britons moved to rural areas, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. This pattern has been broadly maintained in subsequent years. However, within most cities, including London, there has been evidence of a decline in ethnic segregation⁵.

3. The evolution of modern London

In 1951, the UK’s ethnic minority population (which would not have been referred to in these terms) is estimated to have been less than 50,000⁶. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a significant growth in immigration from the New Commonwealth. By 1961, the number of London residents born in the ‘New Commonwealth’ was 242,000, providing a broad approximation of the overall level of the ‘ethnic minority’ population. This number grew to 583,000 by 1971 and 945,000 by 1981. The ‘non-white’ population in 1991 was about 1.4 million, increasing to about 2 million in 2001.

It is important to note that from 1945 until the mid-1980s, London’s population declined from about 8.5 million to 6.7 million. The new migrants were moving into London – and other cities – that were often suffering population and economic decline. Immigrants generally moved into deprived areas of cities and were subject to a poor quality of life. Often, the ethnic minority population has been seen (generally by benign researchers) as a proxy measure for urban stress. This association has led to an unfortunate link being inferred between London’s minority residents and the poverty of the areas into which they originally moved.

Latterly, a number of the non-white migrant groups that arrived in the 1950s and 1960s have started to out-perform the white population in terms of educational and other measures. This is not, however, true in every case. A complex web of institutional attitudes and individual characteristics have impacts that are still not fully researched or understood¹.

In England as a whole around 12 per cent of primary school pupils are non-white, but in outer London, 30 per cent of pupils are from minority ethnic groups, while in inner London, there is now a ‘majority minority’ population in state primary schools. At borough level, in Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Brent, two-thirds or more of primary pupils are non-white, implying that in particular schools the white ‘host’ population is likely to be in a very small minority. A fuller discussion of the impact of ethnicity and immigration on educational achievement can be found in the book Working Capital⁷.

The position and experience of ethnic and linguistic minorities within the educational system is significant from several different perspectives, such as: relative levels of achievement and their knock-on effects in the labour market; the experiences of particular groups within schools and through the educational process; the impact on the system of recent waves of refugees; and finally the more general quality of inter-group relations within schools and the communities associated with them.

There are substantial differences in school attainment by pupils from different ethnic groups, though these are not simply between whites and non-whites – or between native and non-native English speakers – and are on a smaller scale than differences between social class groups. Indeed, much of the inter-ethnic variation in exam results appears to be a reflection of differing degrees of (dis)advantage associated with parents’ socio-economic and family status, rather than something peculiarly ‘ethnic’.

Of course, this observation begs the question as to why there should be such variations in status. And it is the simple fact of difference in outcomes along ethnic lines which is most readily noted, by the pupils involved and their families, as well as outside observers. While Indians and some others have fared relatively well, national studies point to increasing disparities between the attainments of white pupils and those from some minority groups, both over time and during their own passage through the system:

A third of the working migrants had been in the UK for 25 years or more, while another third had arrived since 1995. The size of the latter group reflects both rising immigration during the 1 990s and the presence of many who only plan to stay in London (or the UK) for a few years. The most recent arrivals include many well-educated younger people from continental Europe, the Old Commonwealth, and the United States. The International Passenger Survey indicates that the majority of such immigrants expect to stay only one or two years. Despite this element of turnover, the proportion of foreign-born workers in London has increased by five percentage points over the past ten years.

A substantial factor in the overall increase in immigration to London has been the group formally identified as ‘asylum seekers and visitor switchers’ who accounted for 42,000 of the 95,000 net migrants into the city in 2002 down from a peak of 75,000 out of 122,000 net migrants in 2000 reached before the introduction of the government’s dispersal policy. The impact of these immigrants on the London labour market is not at all clear, although among those adults in London who arrived from the main origin countries for asylum seekers from 1990 onwards, the LFS records that fewer than 25 per cent were in work at the end of 2003 (against about 50 per cent among those from other Third World countries and 75 per cent among those from advanced economies). The speed with which this group can be integrated into the labour market appears critical to the projected substantial expansion of the city’s labour supply included in the London Plan.

London’s enhanced success in terms of employment and earnings growth over the last cycle has not been matched in terms of either employment or unemployment rates. In 1990 the city’s unemployment rate of 6.7 per cent of the economically active population was in line with ILO-definition national average while the employment rate of 75.4 per cent of all 16-60 year olds was also close so the national average of 75.7 per cent. However, by autumn 2002, and at a similar point in the economic cycle, the national unemployment rate of 5.3% was significantly lower than it had been in 1990 whereas in London the rate was actually slightly higher at 7.0 per cent.