Black and British: A Forgotten History

by David Olusoga

In order to change the public mood and prepare the British people for new legislation that would, in effect, strip non-white immigrants of their rights of entry and settlement, successive British governments set about gathering information that was intended to prove that the black settlers represented a social problem. Five internal investigative studies were launched in the 1950s, by both Labour and Conservative politicians, all of which set out to delineate and define the problems caused to the country by the presence of black migrants and demonstrate the negative effects the host population might face if black people continued to arrive in significant numbers. No comparable investigations were established to discover if the arrival of European Voluntary Workers from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe might pose similar threats to the social fabric of the nation.