Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

Black Britons were to Powell and those like him a constant reminder of the lost empire and the connections and interconnections that had made Britain powerful. But more than that they profoundly undermined another idea that was sacred to Powell; that whiteness and Britishness were interchangeable, and always had been.15 The idea, already current in the early 1960s, that the nation should change, adapt to the presence of black and brown Britons, denounce racism and pass anti-discrimination laws, was counter to Powell’s conception of England. These ethnic outsiders, as he saw them, should not be accommodated but marginalized and ideally expelled; he called it ‘re-emigration’, and described them as the ‘immigrant-descended population’. If this was not possible then a new definition of Britishness and British citizenship had to be established, one that viewed Britishness in racial terms, something that English law had rarely done. With the exception of a couple of minor inter-war ordinances, the English common law had – in letter if not always in practice – been colour-blind. In one of his most emphatic and disturbing statements, made late in 1968 and several months after he had predicted that ‘rivers of blood’ would flow in British streets, Powell dismissed utterly the concept of integration and rejected the notion that it was ever possible for a non-white person born in Britain to become British in a true or meaningful sense. ‘The West Indian or Indian does not, by being bor...