"Have governments had coherent responses to immigration since the 1960s? "
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Course
BPG - British Politics And Government (202)
Institution
University Of Oxford
Oxford tutorial essay answering: "Have governments had coherent responses to immigration since the 1960s?". This was for the British Politics and Government since 1900 (BPG) PPE module.
Kate Patrick
(iii) Have governments had coherent responses to immigration since the 1960s?
Successive governments since the 1960s have justi ed the need for immigration controls on the
grounds that they are necessary to promote harmonious race relations and ‘social cohesion’. This
seems to be incoherent with the inherently discriminatory nature of immigration controls, as well as
the lack of effective integration policy for successful migrants. I will address this tension, rstly by
arguing that the expansionist immigration policies of New Labour were not the ‘radical break’ from
the ‘bipartisan consensus’ that Consterdine (2013) suggests, but rather represented a continuation of
discrimination at the border on the grounds of race. I will then turn to the lack integration policy,
using evidence from Rutter and Bloch to suggest that not only has immigration policy has actively
worked to prevent social cohesion, creating a contradiction between ai and outcome. Ultimately, I
will suggest that if a racial lens is adopted, that government responses can be seen in some sense as
coherent if the overriding objective was the exclusion of non-white people both at the border and
within communities, as opposed to the promotion of ‘social cohesion’ (see Paul, and Akala).
I will de ne a coherent policy response in line with the OECD as being the ‘systematic promotion’
of ‘mutually reinforcing’ policies in the bid to achieve ‘agreed objectives’. I will make the
provisional assumption that the agreed objective of governments with regards to immigration has
been the promotion of ‘social cohesion’, which is the 'capability of people and places to manage
con ict and change’ (Rutter, 2015). As such, if policies are to be considered coherent they must
‘create synergies’ toward this end. I also note the signi cance of 1960s which, with the 1962
Commonwealth Act, marked a ‘water-shed moment’ as the rst formal restrictions on
commonwealth immigration were introduced, rendering British citizenship insuf cient to guarantee
entry (Consterdine, 2013: 56). Commonwealth immigration became less of a concern in the 1990s
as the rise in asylum seekers after the cold-war, took precedence. This was then eclipsed by the
issue of European immigration in the 2000s after the A8 decisions, and the age of ‘super-
diversity’ (Rutter, 2015). As such, adaptation overtime of policies in response to changing
circumstances should not be viewed as incoherence. And yet, I will hold that even with this caveat,
that government policy was consistently incoherent because policies actively contradicted one
another.
Firstly, I will detail how the governments immigration response from the 1960s until New Labour
was incoherent. The governments’ of cial commitment to promoting harmonious race relations is
evidenced by the passing of the 1965, 1968, and 1976 Race Relations Acts, which criminalised
public performances of racial hatred and discrimination. This provided the justi cation for
restricting the immigration of (some) commonwealth citizens, namely that too much immigration of
non-British nationals would exacerbate racial tensions, forming a ‘bipartisan
consensus’ (Consterdine, 2013). However, the discriminatory nature of the cumulative immigration
restrictions along the lines of race, worked to embed and legitimise racial discrimination (a failure
of Hattersely’s equation), indicating a central incoherence to government responses.
For instance, the 1968 Commonwealth and Immigrants Act was pushed through after panic ensued
after many non-white Asian people of CUKC status tried to ee to Britain after being persecuted in
Kenya. The Act effectively left 200,000 British citizens stateless and was justi ed by Callaghan on
the grounds that it aimed exclude those who did not ‘belong’ because they had not been
‘naturalised’ in the UK. Importantly, Kenyans of European descent had their right to entry protected
by a special Nationality Act in 1964, indicating the racial discriminatory nature of these controls.
This theme was corroborated in the 1971 Act which, again in response to the rising fears of
immigration sparked by Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers and blood’ speech, discriminated on the grounds of
parental heritage, effectively allowing only Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadian
commonwealth citizens unrestricted access. Importantly, if restrictions were justi ed on the need to
reduce immigration to preserve social cohesion, this act was ‘redundant’ because commonwealth
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