Immigration has not simply been an administrative problem for the civil service: it has also featured regularly as an issue which has raised passions, and generated debate, in national political life. In this chapter, I will look at the history of this issue in post-war British politics, drawing upon the accounts supplied by Saggar (1992) and Layton-Henry (1984), and discuss the work of politicians, pressure groups and campaigners. I will also examine the content of political debate in Parliament during the passage of the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, and review the proposals that have been put forward to change British immigration policy in recent years.

The history of immigration as a political issue

Immigration became an important issue in post-war British politics in the 1950s, when pressure began to build up on the Conservative Party to retreat from its commitment to open borders in the newly formed Commonwealth. This was led by a small group of maverick backbench MPs, including Cyril Osborne who introduced a Private Member’s Bill into the House of Commons advocating immigration controls in February 1961. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was partly the result of Conservative ministers bowing to irresistible political pressure from their own grass roots.

The Labour Party leadership also changed its policy towards controls following the 1964 General Election, when Patrick Gordon-Walker, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, lost his seat to Peter Griffiths who fought a campaign against Labour’s ‘softness’ on the immigration issue. This shift in policy resulted in the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, and cross-Party agreement on the need for stricter immigration controls. As Saggar observes:

Despite this consensus, immigration continued to pose a problem for both political parties during the 1970s. One reason why the Labour Party lost the election in 1970 may have been that it was still perceived as being ‘weak’ on immigration control, at a time when public concern was continuing to rise.