The words did not lend themselves to ambiguity: “Niggers, wogs and coons,” Right-wing politician John Kingsley had said at a speech in London, had no place in England. The killing of a Sikh youth weeks earlier, Kingsley went on, was nothing to mourn: “one down and a million to go.” The Australian-born judge, Neil McKinnon, who heard the case in 1978, observed that his own nickname at school had been nigger, and he had never taken offence. The mere use of the words, the judge told the jury, were therefore not necessarily inflammatory.
A year after it was elected to power with the largest parliamentary majority seen since 1997, the United Kingdom’s Labour government is realising its being dismantled. This weekend, a record 1,50,000 people — many connected to no party in particular — marched to commemorate slain Right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk, who until then had little presence in the country.
Elon Musk, appearing on a satellite link, warned of “a rapidly increasing erosion of Britain, brought with massive uncontrolled immigration.” The far-Right French politician Eric Zemmour prophesied the “great replacement of our European people by people coming from the south and of Muslim culture.”
There’s little doubt that the unravelling of English politics is taking place at a speed few anticipated. Even though elections are years away, polls show the Nigel Farage-led Reform Party leading both Labour and the Conservatives by some distance. Even though figures show net immigration has been falling, concern over the issue is at the highest levels since 1974.
The unmaking of an elite
Eight decades ago, writer George Orwell described the English elite as “an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus.” “Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles,” Orwell argued, the elite could constantly bring new weapons to the fight for power. The land-owning aristocracy, as its wealth diminished in influence, married into a new class of plutocrats. “The wealthy ship-owner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools.”
The rise of Margaret Thatcher — who studied at the state-funded Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ Grammar School, before going on to Somerville College in Oxford — showed this dynamism of class was still active in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yet, structural changes had begun to paralyse the English working-class. The massive strikes of 1978-1979 demonstrated that the impressive gains made by the working class after the end of the Second World War had begun to congeal, and dissolve under the pressure of inflation, historian Tara Martin Lopez has recorded in a superb book.
This was also a period, less noticed, of seismic cultural changes. The workers who came from across the former colonies to work on post-war reconstruction began demanding cultural rights. Famously, Sikh bus driver Tarsem Singh Sandhu fought in 1967 for the legal right to grow a beard and wear a turban.
English working-class and middle-class culture also came under a wider range of assault. The tumultuousness in that period is remarkable, even by today’s standards: consensual gay sex had been decriminalised, the right to abortion recognised, and the pound had been devalued in a desperate effort to cut imports.
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Raising the drawbridge
Looking back, it’s clear a rebellion against racial diversity and plural culture began to ignite in this same period. Following Tarsem Sandhu’s turban protest, the rising Conservative star Enoch Powell addressed his constituents in Walthamstow. “To claim special communal rights — or should I say rites — leads to a dangerous fragmentation of society,” he proclaimed in a now infamous 1968 speech. “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time,” he prophesied, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
This kind of language had, in fact, begun to embed itself in British Conservative politics — and substantial swathes of Labour — through the 1960s. In the early 1960s, Conservative populists like MP Cyril Osborne had argued against immigration from former colonies. In one interview, Osborne proclaimed England was “a white man’s country and I wish it to remain so.”
In the course of the notorious 1964 election campaign in Smetwyck, Conservative candidate Peter Griffith used flagrantly racist language: “If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.” The Labour incumbent, shadow home secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, lost on a 7.2 per cent swing to the Conservatives.
Figures on the economic Right wing of the Conservative party, like Edward Boyle and Iain Macleod pushed back, arguing immigrants were playing a critical role in stopping wages from spiralling upward. Fears of social unrest, together with these arguments, led to-be prime minister Edward Heath to sack Powell from his shadow cabinet.
The credit for crushing the English far-Right, though, must go to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — though her own racism is beyond dispute. Early in 1978, Thatcher — soon to become prime minister — voiced White fears that “this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.” Following these remarks, Daniel Trilling notes, there was a dramatic shift in support away from Labour. Thatcher’s hard line on immigration allowed her to defeat her opponents.
Thatcher also set in place the foundations of official multiculturalism, sociologist Jenny Bourne argues — enshrining a kind of informal apartheid that divided immigrant groups into distinct ethnic-religious enclaves, focusing on their purported cultural needs.
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The rise of post-Conservatism
Farage — the son of a stockbroker who studied at a fee-paying private school, and then skipped university to work directly as a commodities trader — came from a much more traditional conservative background than Thatcher. The politician’s great insight, Tim Montgomerie argues, was to realise that the Conservatives — like Labour — had become creatures of the City of London. The Conservative Party built by Prime Minister David Cameron — with figures like Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Nadim Zahawi, Sajid Javid and Rehman Chisti — was more monotone than it seemed: overwhelmingly private schools, and personally rich.
“All of the influential Tories live in London,” Montgomerie observed. “They imbibe its prosperity, its multiculturalism, its skyline full of cranes, its sexual liberalism and its internationalism. But London — for all of its qualities — is only part of Britain. There is another Britain, where wages are depressed, where working hours are long and where globalisation can be more of a problem than a blessing.”
The United Kingdom Independence Party spoke directly to these concerns. Even though Farage failed to make even a marginal dent in elections in London, he steadily expanded its reach in rural and small-town England. Here, immigrants from Europe were seen — rightly or wrongly — as threats to already perilously-low wages. Traditionalists were also shocked with Prime Minister Cameron legalising same-sex marriage. London seemed to be overrunning England.
There’s no telling what comes next, but England seems destined to see complex, painful and even violent processes of accommodation. Less than one in seven relationships in the United Kingdom cuts across racial lines, and killings of daughters from the Indian subcontinent communities, who choose to marry for love, remain a depressing part of the landscape. For the most part, communities remain profoundly ghettoised, with few spaces where genuine social interaction can take place.
As early as 2018, a United Nations special rapporteur warned of “structural socio-economic exclusion of racial and ethnic communities in the UK,” as well as “growth in the acceptability of explicit racial, ethnic and religious intolerance.”
For four generations, England’s racial groups have been pushing each other closer to the precipice, hoping their walled-off lives will insulate them from the rising tide of hate all around. The weekend’s march should demonstrate, if nothing else, that time for a genuine national conversation is running out.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)