New archival documents reveal potential dangers of Thatcher’s advisers on policing and community relations issues

The latest round of government papers from the Thatcher era have been released by the National Archives, this time relating to documents from 1986 to 1988. Amongst the papers that have been released is a Prime Minister’s Office file (PREM 19/1783) relating to the 1985 riots in Handsworth and Tottenham, continuing on from these files (PREM 19/1521 and PREM 19/484) which started after the 1981 riots in Brixton (I have discussed these files previously here and here).

One of the things that stood out from reading this file is the continued opinion of Thatcher’s adviser, particularly that of Hartley Booth, that the riots were organised in advance by criminal elements and that those involved were ready to use an arsenal of deadly weapons. As the last tranche of files released by the National Archives showed, in the aftermath of the 1985 riots Booth had claimed in memos to the Prime Minister that criminal elements and outside agitators from the far left had been involved in fanning the flames of disorder. This repeated a claim made by other advisers to Thatcher and the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, that various left wing groups had been involved in the 1981 riots as well.

In a memo written on 8 November 1985 to Thatcher’s Private Secretary, Mark Addison, Booth wrote:

Private reports from the police indicate further likely trouble in Tottenham. A milk float, complete with a very large number of bottles likely to be used in petrol bomb-making has been abducted in the last fortnight. Also, there have been several reports since 25 October that the ingredients for napalm [REDACTED] have been supplied to individuals in the Tottenham area. If Napalm is used, the police will require a new form of protective clothing. In Northern Ireland, the only known defence against Napalm is plastic bullet, which kept the users of this deadly material beyond throwing distance.

However Booth admitted in another memo, written on 19 November, that both of these claims were merely rumour and the police had not yet confirmed either the use of petrol bombs being made in bulk or that there were more than one instance of a rare ingredient (incidentally used in napalm) being purchased in a North London chemist. Booth reported to the Prime Minister:

Home Office and police do not at the moment feel the situation is serious, as there is no confirming evidence of iminent [sic] disorder.

Despite Booth eventually admitting that these use of petrol bombs and napalm by rioters was just a rumour, it does demonstrate that those advising the Prime Minister on matters of policing and public order were liable to believe the worst case scenarios. If taken at face value, this may have led to an escalation of the hostilities between the police and the public. If the government and the police were expecting that these weapons were to be used and that the only option was the pre-emptive use of plastic bullets and other forms of militarised policing, then these rumours could only add to the already existing tension. Plastic bullets had been stockpiled by the Metropolitan Police since the 1981 riots and along with the use of teargas, represented the use of policing techniques developed in Northern Ireland being redeployed on the mainland. Although plastic bullets have never been used in a public order situation in England, Scotland or Wales, the fact that people within government circles believed that they were necessary for police to use against the public (and in the case of Booth’s advice, pre-emptively) is a worrying thought.

Booth also maintained that the riots in Handsworth in September 1985 were organised by criminal elements and claimed that a police report (not included in the file) supported his view. In a covering memo to Thatcher, dated 26 November, Booth argued:

The degree of organisation among the rioters is well documented in this report… The report boldly concludes that the first riot was orchestrated by local drug dealers. This we suspected at the time, but had formerly been denied by the police.

In the same document, Booth suggested that the riots had an ‘appalling racial element’, stemming from a jealousy amongst West Indian drug dealers relating to the suspected wealth of Handsworth’s South Asian community.

In an interview with journalist David Dimbleby, Lord Scarman, who had led the inquiry into the 1981 riots in Brixton, seemed to suggest something similar and in a transcript included in the file, stated:

In 1981, we were not faced with the intrusion of organised crime, making use of disaffected youth. That is the new factor. It is a very dangerous factor and it has to be tackled…

Booth used this statement to reinforce his argument to Addison and Thatcher that organised criminals had been at the centre of the riots. However a Home Office letter to Addison by Stephen Boys Smith, written in January 1986, admitted that the ‘police view remains that there is no evidence of long term planning of the riot.

Booth and another adviser to Thatcher, Oliver Letwin, have been lambasted in the media for another revelation in this tranche of released documents for suggesting that government grants to inner cities community groups would be spent on ‘disco and drug trade’ (see here and here). However these documents suggest that Booth’s advice to Thatcher on public order and community policing issues had even more potential for wide-reaching problems, stemming from a prejudiced outlook on Britain’s African-Caribbean communities and the political organisations of the left.

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How the Morning Star reported the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989

By late December 1989, the revolution sweeping across the Eastern Bloc had reached Romania and in the days before Christmas, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu attempted to shore up his regime by launching a military offensive against those protesting against the dictatorship. On December 21, Ceausescu attempted to give a speech in Bucharest which descended into open revolt and a massively violent crackdown by sections of the army and police loyal to Ceausescu.

The Ceausescus fled the capital, but were captured by sections of the military who supported the revolution. On Christmas Day 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were quickly tried and executed on national television.

The Morning Star, formerly the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain but by then connected to the breakaway Communist Party of Britain, had reported on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but, as I have shown here, had reported the events from a very sympathetic to the Soviet Union perspective.

However the reporting of the final days of the Ceausescu regime revealed a much more celebratory tone. For example, on December 23 1989 – two days after Ceausescu’s ill-fated last speech – the Morning Star editorial team published on the front page:

The Morning Star salutes the heroism of the Romanian people and sends it condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the struggle.

Despite the enormous difficulties still to be overcome, Romania is set to join the movement for democracy and Socialism sweeping Eastern Europe. We wish them every success.

However inside the newspaper, it was qualified that Ceausescu became a ruthless dictator after 24 years in power, reminding readers that he had opposed in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In a further editorial on December 27, the Morning Star stated that the ‘unbridled exercise of personal power’ used by Ceaucescu had ‘nothing to do with the ideas of Socialism’ and further celebrated the ‘heroism of the Romanian people in the face of terrorism of the so-called security forces’.

Finally on December 28, the paper published excerpts from the trial of the Ceausescus and reported that life was returning to normal in Bucharest after the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime.

As I wrote in this book chapter, the newspaper’s favourable opinion of the Soviet Union was an almost historical hangover, based on nostalgia and popular memory, rather than seeing the Eastern Bloc as a blueprint for a socialist revolution in Britain. But even this view of the Soviet Union acknowledged the severe shortcomings of the Soviet experiment. As would be expected, the language used in the Morning Star in its reporting on the events from 1989 to 1991 was much more moderate than what was expressed in Marxism Today or the Socialist Worker, but there were many positive stories about the people’s uprisings in Eastern Europe and the moral and political bankruptcy of the collapsing regimes.

Within the pages of the Morning Star, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were celebrated as important reforms that allowed the people to achieve ‘democracy’ in the former People’s Democracies. A few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the paper reported that the ‘winds of perestroika have reached the GDR’, but this ‘[did] not mean a crisis of Socialism,… because the majority of the GDR population is not going to abandon human Socialism.’ Discussing the revolution in Romania, the editors of the paper claimed that it was ‘the essence of perestroika’ that was ‘at the heart of the complex changes taking place throughout Eastern Europe.’ When Mikhail Gorbachev eventually resigned in December 1991 and the Soviet Union dissolved, the editorial team celebrated Gorbachev as ‘[h]e tried to rescue the Socialist ideal from the authoritarian straitjacket that was suffocating it to death.’

Appeal for primary source material on British/Irish left & female hunger strikers at Armagh 1980

Recently the Irish Times has started running a series of articles on the history of the 1980-81 hunger strikes in the lead up to a symposium being held on the subject in London in June 2016. One of the articles by Maria Power discussed the hunger strike undertaken by three republican women in Armagh Prison in late 1980, whose contribution to the hunger strikes has been overlooked by many.

Coincidentally a former student of mine and I are beginning a small project to look at how the British and Irish left, as well as the women’s liberation movement in both countries, expressed solidarity with these striking women. This will be included in a special journal issue on the British left and Ireland currently being put together by Matt Worley and I. The abstract of our article is here:

Intersectional Solidarity: The female prisoners of Armagh, women’s liberation and the left in Britain and Ireland

In 1980, the Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the dirty protest being waged by the male members of the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army in Maze Prison. This eventually evolved into a 53-day hunger strike conducted by Republican prisoners in October 1980, which was shortly followed by the more infamous hunger strike in 1981 that claimed the lives of 10 strikers. Overshadowed by the fatalities of the 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved three IRA women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior fighting for a united Ireland. Both the blanket/dirty protests and the two hunger strikes generated sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain and Ireland. The various groups of the left, the women’s liberation movement and the republican movement all claimed that the women involved represented their competing ideals and agendas and these movements sought to weave their actions into their narratives. At the same time, many within these movements were also highly critical of these women and their links to the Republican movement. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their narratives and how the solidarity expressed became intersectional, imbued with contesting connotations of liberation from British imperialism, monopoly capitalism and patriarchy.

Part of this project has been locating the various publications of the various leftist and feminist groups in both Britain and Ireland. Last month, the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog posted an appeal for primary source material, which was very fruitful. However we’re still looking for more material, so here is the appeal again:

My former student and I are writing an article on the British and Irish left and the female hunger strikers at Armargh in 1980. We have (or are getting) material from the CPGB (Morning Star), the SWP (Socialist Worker and Socialist Review), the IMG (Socialist Challenge), the IRSP (the Hunger Strike Bulletin posted at Irish Left Archive) and Women Against Imperialism (a WAI report from 1980). We are also interested in material from the British and Irish women’s liberation movements and have got material from Spare Rib, the IMG’s Socialist Woman and the SWP’s Women’s Voice.

If anyone has access to material of any other British or Irish left-wing papers/journals from the period, would they be able to check whether there was anything on the strike (lasting from Oct-Dec 1980) or their ‘dirty protest’ (which began in Feb 1980)?

We’d be particularly interested in anything from Militant (or its Irish group), the Communist Party of Ireland or SF-WP, but would welcome any primary source material dealing with the topic.

If anyone has material, please contact me at: hatfulofhistory@gmail.com

I would like to thank everyone who has helped us find material so far, and hope that people can help us find more!

Thanks to the Bloody Sunday Trust for the archival pictures.

Stuff by me elsewhere on the interweb!

I just thought I’d mention two pieces which might be of interest to readers of this blog. Firstly, my 2013 article in the Journal for Cultural Research on the 2011 and 1981 riots in the UK is currently free to download/access.

Secondly, my guest blog post on the British Union of Fascists and the perception of Australia as a ‘proto-fascist’ colony made the top ten posts of 2015 at the Imperial & Global History blog.

I highly recommend reading them both!

The Communist Party’s campaign for the Race Relations Act 1965

This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1965 by the Wilson government, the first piece of legislation dealing with racial discrimination in the United Kingdom. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), a major part of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s anti-racist activism between the 1950s and the 1970s was the introduction and use of legislation to combat racial discrimination, namely the Race Relations Act. The following post looks at the CPGB’s call for legislation before 1965 and how it responded to the Act once it was in effect.

A CPGB pamphlet from 1961

Since the end of the Second World War, the Communist Party had campaigned for the introduction of legislation combat racial hatred and the incitement to racial violence. With the influx of Commonwealth migrants in the 1950s, the Party also campaigned for legislation to fight the racial discrimination faced by many of the new arrivals to the country. In 1955, the International Department published the pamphlet No Colour Bar in Britain, which contained the ‘Charter of Rights’ for Commonwealth migrants coming to Britain. The first point of this Charter called for:

No form of colour discrimination by employers, landlords, publicans, hotel proprietors or any aspect of social, educational and cultural activity. Any racial discrimination to be made a penal offence.[i]

This meant support for Fenner Brockway’s attempts to pass legislation that would ban racial discrimination and the ‘colour bar’ in Britain. In June 1956, Brockway introduced a Bill ‘to make illegal discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.[ii] Brockway acknowledged that ‘there must be a limitation to the powers of legislation’, but cited three main areas where legislation was ‘justified and necessary’ – public areas, housing and employment.[iii] At this time, Brockway was also National Chairman of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which founded in April 1954.[iv] Between 1956 and the introduction of the Race Relations Act in 1965, Brockway proposed a bill on racial discrimination a number of times, all defeated by the Conservative majority. Kay Beauchamp wrote in Marxism Today in 1967 that Brockway had introduced a Bill on racial discrimination ‘no less than eight times’ and this had been supported by the MCF, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) and other progressive organisations, as well as the Communist Party itself.[v]

There were two main arguments made by the Communist Party for the introduction of the Race Relations Act. The first was a continuation of the CPGB’s anti-fascist stance, calling for a ban on the incitement to racial hatred. The other was the wider argument for legislation to combat racial discrimination that was much more widespread and institutionalised than that explicitly perpetrated by the fascist far right minority. The CPGB argued that this was not an issue of free speech, but stated that preventing race hatred was a ‘guarantee of peace, democracy and progress’.[vi] To defend these ideals, the Party demanded that fascist organisations, such as Mosley’s Union Movement, be banned from using public halls, and that workers should ‘oppose every form of colour discrimination’ and make ‘such discrimination or propaganda for it, a criminal offence’.[vii]

This argument was raised again in July 1962, when anti-fascists, in what were the beginnings of the Yellow Star Movement, battled in Trafalgar Square against the fledgling National Socialist Movement (NSM), led by Colin Jordan and future National Front leader, John Tyndall. According to The Guardian, the first public meeting of the NSM ‘ended with 20 arrests, fights, bleeding faces, abuse, and tears’.[viii] In the weeks following, the CPGB demanded that ‘racial incitement be made illegal… as a result of the widespread and deep indignation aroused by the recent re-activisation of fascist organisations in Britain’.[ix] The Party repeated that Fenner Brockway had been proposing legislation against racist propaganda for years and declared that it, along with the British working class, would ‘give its wholehearted support to the efforts being made for the carrying of such legislation in Parliament’.[x]

However, the Party was wary about the state using the 1936 Public Order Act to combat public racist agitation. In the same article, it warned that a ‘Tory MP, incidentally, has seized the opportunity to propose a ban on ALL political meetings in [Trafalgar] Square’,[xi] which would have had a much harder impact on the left and other progressive movements than the fascist far right. The fact that the Public Order Act had been ‘mainly used against those who resent and protest against provocative racialist propaganda’ was one of the reasons why the Communist Party supported Brockway’s Bill, rather than amending the 1936 Act.[xii] In a memorandum presented by the London District Committee in December 1964, the Party declared that:

There should be no question of amending the Public Order Act (1936) instead of introducing a Bill. The Public Order Act is an Act directed against the working class movement and any strengthening of it will tend to be used not against fascists, but as in the past, against anti-fascists.[xiii]

The other side to the campaign for legislation against racial discrimination was the much more widespread and institutionalised racism that black people in Britain faced in public places, in employment, in seeking housing and in their interactions with the state. Any legislation brought in could not eliminate all racism within British society, but Fenner Brockway’s aimed to ‘end, by legislation, the practice of race discrimination in… public relations’.[xiv] Despite the very real instances of racial discrimination that were experienced by blacks in Britain, the Conservatives opposed any legislation, declaring that ‘it would be almost impossible to prove that a person had been turned away on the grounds of colour and on the grounds of colour alone’.[xv] Describing Brockway’s proposals as ‘badly drafted and ill-conceived’, Conservative MP Bernard Braine claimed during a Parliamentary debate on the Bill that ‘a large number of coloured people… have not experienced any form of discrimination ‘ and ‘discrimination, therefore, is something which ought not to be tackled by legislation, but… by education’.[xvi]

The Communist Party countered these claims by the Conservatives that legislation was unnecessary in the Daily Worker and other CPGB literature. In a memorandum submitted to the Labour Government by the London District Committee in March 1965, the Party declared that racism was ‘widespread in relation to employment, housing and recreational facilities’ with ‘many examples of refusal to serve coloured people in restaurants, public houses and other public places’.[xvii] To counter this, the Party proposed that discrimination should be made illegal:

• by a keeper of a Hotel, Public House, Café or Restaurant…;
• by a keeper of any kind of Boarding House, Common Lodging House or in granting a tenancy;
• by a keeper of any public place of entertainment… to which the public are admitted.[xviii]

In the sphere of employment, the Party proposed legislation making it illegal for ‘employers or workers to refuse employment, apprenticeship, training or promotion’ on the grounds of race, along with attempts to ‘pay a lower rate to a worker’ on racial grounds.[xix] The Party proposed that any public incitement of racial hatred or contempt should be an offence, to be applied to the spoken word and that used in leaflets, newspapers or any other printed or duplicated material. The Party reiterated that ‘existing legislation is inadequate with this menace’ of explicit racial prejudice and ‘the matter cannot be effectively dealt with by amending the Public Order Act’.[xx]

Throughout the Communist Party’s campaign to support the creation of what became the Race Relations Act, there was the acknowledgement of the limitations of legislation without wider education and efforts made at local grassroots level. ‘No one would pretend that such legislation, by itself alone, would be sufficient to wipe out colour-bar practices’, wrote Kay Beauchamp, ‘let alone to rid people’s minds of the racial ideas which more than three hundred years of capitalist rule have plated there’.[xxi] But what it was hoped the Race Relations Act would do was ‘deter those who at present practice racial discrimination’ and ‘restrain those… who deliberately incite racial hatred’, as well as preventing ‘the more open forms of their insidious propaganda’.[xxii]

In November 1965, the Race Relations Act was enacted by the Labour Government. On the issue of discrimination, the Act made it illegal for places of public resort to ‘practise discrimination on the ground of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins against persons seeking access to or facilities or services at that place’.[xxiii] In the sphere of housing, tenancy could not be withheld on the grounds of race, but this only applied to freestanding properties and not to lodgings where the landlord also lived.[xxiv] The Labour Government established a Race Relations Board to investigate complaints of violations of the Act and facilitate conciliation between the parties concerned. Punishment for violation of the Act could only be delivered by the Attorney General, to whom the Race Relations Board would report. While racial discrimination was now in violation of civil law, it made racial incitement, published, distributed or publicly spoken, a criminal offence. However the final clause of the Act also amended the 1936 Public Order Act, extending it to any words or writings deemed ‘threatening, abusive or insulting, with intent to provoke a breach of the peace’ and not limited to the issue of ‘race’.[xxv]

The Race Relations Act was a significantly weaker Act than the one which had been proposed by Fenner Brockway and was, as Dilip Hiro noted, ‘criticized by liberal opinion both inside and outside Parliament’, including criticism from the Communist Party.[xxvi] The Act was described as ‘marred by weakness which represented a dangerous concession to the most reactionary and racially prejudiced of the Tory Party’.[xxvii] Tony Chater claimed that the Act worked as a ‘barrier against prosecution for incitement to racial hatred’ as it relied on the Attorney General to initiate any proceedings.[xxviii] Conciliation machinery was viewed as ‘very desirable, but only within the framework of criminal proceedings’, not as a substitute for legislation.[xxix] ‘If such machinery becomes a substitute for legislation against racial discrimination’, warned CPGB member Harry Bourne, ‘then full licence will be left to the racialists to carry on their foul work’.[xxx]

In July 1967, Beauchamp wrote in Marxism Today:

The Race Relations Board recently reported that out of 309 cases referred to it, 224 referred to matters outside its powers, including 97 on jobs and 23 on housing. Of the remaining 87, 17 had been settled out of court, 2 had been referred to the Attorney General and 31 were being looked at.[xxxi]

The amendments to the Public Order Act in the 1965 Act were claimed by the CPGB to have ‘nothing to do with race relations’ and its extensions going ‘beyond the intention’ of the Act, with the possibility of it being ‘used to curb the normal political activities of the people’.[xxxii] Despite its weaknesses, the Communist Party saw the Act as ‘a first limited step to combat the spread of racial discrimination and incitement’ and called for support for it ‘in principle by all progressive people’.[xxxiii] The CPGB continued to call for ‘amending of the Race Relations Act to make it more effective against incitement to race hatred and against discrimination, particularly in housing and employment’.[xxxiv] It also proposed that ‘it should be easier for a victim… to have recourse to law without having to seek the Attorney General’s intervention’.[xxxv] However as the Act was strengthened by the Labour Government in 1968, this happened as more severe restrictions were placed on black immigration in Britain.

Beauchamp’s 1967 article in Marxism Today

 

(Full refs are available upon request)

[i] Bolsover, No Colour Bar in Britain, p. 11.

[ii] Hansard, 12 June 1956, col. 247.

[iii] Hansard, 12 June 1956, col. 248-49.

[iv] Howe 1993, p. 231.

[v] Beauchamp, ‘Racialism in Britain Today and How to Fight It’, Marxism Today, July 1967, p. 203.

[vi] ‘Stop Racial Propaganda’, n.d., Manchester: CPGB flyer.

[vii] ‘Stop Racial Propaganda’

[viii] The Guardian, 2 July 1962.

[ix] Jones, ‘Outlaw This Incitement to Racial Hatred’, Comment, 11 August 1962, p. 381.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Zaidman, ‘Fight Race Hate Here Too’, Comment, 5 October 1963, p. 631.

[xiii] London District Committee, ‘Memorandum on a Bill against Racial Discrimination and Incitement’, 16 December 1964, in CPGB archives, CP/LON/RACE/01/01, LHASC.

[xiv] Hansard, 30 April 1958, col. 388.

[xv] Hansard, 24 May 1957, col. 1604.

[xvi] Hansard, 24 May 1957, col. 1602; col. 1606.

[xvii] London District Committee, Against Racial Discrimination & Incitement: What Should Be in the Bill?, March 1965, p. 2, in CPGB archives, CP/LON/RACE/01/04, LHASC.

[xviii] London District Committee, Against Racial Discrimination & Incitement, p. 5.

[xix] London District Committee, Against Racial Discrimination & Incitement, p. 6.

[xx] London District Committee, Against Racial Discrimination & Incitement, pp. 8-9.

[xxi] Beauchamp, ‘Colour Bar’, Comment, 11 January 1964, p. 22.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Race Relations Act, 1965, 1 (1)

[xxiv] In most discussions of the shortcomings of the first Race Relations Act, it is generally mentioned that ‘it did not apply to the areas of employment and housing’. While employment was not included in the Act, some mention of housing was included, but this is commonly overlooked. Even contemporary reports in the Communist Party press generalised about the weaknesses of the Act, stating that, ‘Discrimination in the important fields of employment and housing is not within its scope’. Miles and Phizacklea 1984, p. 57; Hiro 1992, p. 210; Moore 1975, p. 103; Chater 1966, p. 62; Daily Worker, 29 April 1965.

[xxv] Race Relations Act, 1965, 7

[xxvi] Hiro 1992, p. 210.

[xxvii] ‘Political Committee Statement on Race Relations Bill’, in CPGB archives, CP/LON/RACE/01/02, LHASC.

[xxviii] Chater 1966, p. 62.

[xxix] Chater 1966, p. 63.

[xxx] Bourne, Racialism, p. 12.

[xxxi] Beauchamp, ‘Racialism in Britain Today and How to Fight It’, p. 203.

[xxxii] ‘Political Committee Statement on Race Relations Bill’

[xxxiii] ‘Political Committee Statement on Race Relations Bill’

[xxxiv] Beauchamp, ‘Racialism in Britain and the Fight Against It’, p. 617.

[xxxv] Bourne, Racialism, pp. 12-3.

‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War

Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the same time, they were seeking to build metaphorical walls of their own to keep out ‘undesirable’ migrants.

In 1982, Thatcher described the Berlin Wall as ‘a monument to oppression and cruelty, but also to futility’. The British border control system, which was significantly strengthened during her Prime Ministership, could be described in the same terms.

Since Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, the free movement of people within the borders of the EEC (and then the European Union) meant that Britain experienced significantly more numbers of migrants from Europe than from the Commonwealth and other nations, whose numbers were cut dramatically by the introduction of the Immigration Act 1971. Although opposition to Britain joining the European Community has been widespread, but diffuse, since the late 1960s, opposition to migration from within Europe was only a minor feature in the discourse on immigration in Britain until the 1990s.

The most reasonable explanation for this is because there was free movement within the EEC’s borders, labour migration was not permanent and numbers seemed to rise and fall in line with changes in the economic landscape. But there is also the possibility that objections to European migration were muted because most migrants within the EEC were “white”. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991 and the enlargement of the European Union in the early 2000s have shifted the discourse on European migration in Britain.

A substantial part of the discourse has been a concern over migrants from Eastern Europe to Britain, replicating fears expressed over previous waves of migrants to Britain – that Eastern Europeans, particularly Polish migrants, have been taking jobs away from British people and that others, particularly Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians, have been involved in crime in Britain, from petty offences to trans-national organised crime. These objections to migration from Eastern Europe have been usually, but not always, part of a wider objection to the European Union and a push for Britain to leave the EU.

Furthermore in 2015, the nations that exist on the edges of the EU, such as Greece, Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania have been seen as having porous borders that have allowed asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ from the Middle East and South Asia into Europe. Under the Conservatives (and driven to the right by UKIP), anti-European and anti-immigrant sentiment had reached such a height that Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU and Cameron has pushed for a renegotiation of the nation’s obligations to Europe. This is possibly the biggest assertion of British self-interest within the EU since Margaret Thatcher refused to join the Schengen Area in the late 1980s.

In 1985, the Schengen Agreement was first signed by member countries of the EEC to discard the operation of border control between these countries, which has expanded within the EU to twenty-five countries. Thatcher refused to join and during an infamous speech in Bruges in 1988, stated:

Of course, we want to make it easier for goods to pass through frontiers. Of course, we must make it easier for people to travel through the Community. But it is a matter of plain common sense that we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants.

By this time, ‘Fortress Britain’ had already excluded most Commonwealth immigrants and now it resisted relaxing its controls with regards to people from within Europe.

As travel restrictions between East and West Germany were abolished in November 1989, Thatcher expressed that she hoped that ‘this is only a prelude to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.’ As the rest of the Soviet Bloc collapsed, while many proposed greater integration of the former Eastern ‘people’s democracies’ into the European Union, Thatcher and other Eurosceptic Tories worried about expansion of the EU eastwards. However by the time that EU expansion was actually tabled, Labour was in power, who did not oppose this, much to the chargrin of many.

While the walls are going back up across mainland Europe now, Britain’s (metaphorical) walls have been erected since the dying days of the Cold War.

 

History Carnival 152

The History Carnival continues and like Bakhtin would have wanted, here it comes to distract us all from our work (As Shit Academics Say reminds us, ‘You should be writing”). Hatful of History is delighted to bring you a selection of the recent bloggings on history and/or by historians.

The terrorist attacks in Paris last month brought out several different historical issues on what Brett Holman coined the ‘historioblogosphere’ (or the ‘unorthodox scholarly publishing platforms’ as Melissa Castan has phrased it). Peter Frost in the Morning Star looked at an earlier massacre in the French capital, the killing of over 200 protestors marching against the French occupation of Algeria in October 1961. Mark Humphries, guest posting at Historian on the Edge, rebuked Niall Ferguson’s lazy comparison between the global West’s ‘war on terror’ and the fall of the Roman Empire. And the anti-immigrant hysteria after the attacks was critiqued at Frog in a Well, using the example of the internment of Japanese Americans in the USA in the Second World War.

Other news stories, such the British MP John McDonnell’s quoting of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in the House of Commons, led to Adam Cathcart at The Conversation to explain the hullabaloo was all about and why such a little book is so important. In more local British news, an archaeological project by the University of Reading at Glastonbury Abbey gave rise to a discussion, over at the Clerk of Oxford, about the use of the legend of King Arthur by monks at the Abbey over the centuries.

Speaking of the Middle Ages, the wonderful Notches blog featured a post by Katherine Harvey on masturbation and the Church at this time, showing that ideas about solitary sex were more complicated than we would think. The Prosecution Project blog has also recently included a discussion of the history of sexual behaviour, looking at court documents that reveal the lives of ‘queer’ Queenslanders and soldiers during the Second World War. Inspired by this post, Marion Diamond at Historians Are Past Caring has written about long-term same-sex relationships that avoided the legal gaze.

Those who have not been fortunate enough to escape the legal gaze have been the urban poor, who have often had to beg to maintain their existence. Brodie Waddell at The Many Headed Monster looks at the disparaging terms used to describe beggars historically and the use of the term ‘rich beggar’. On the urban poor in the twentieth century, the blog ‘Labourers, Porters, Charwomen and Needlewomen’ discusses those who lived on Tiger Yard Camberwell estate in 1930s London. At the Perceptions of Pregnancy blog, George Campbell Gosling explores how class, money and ‘respectability’ all informed how women were treated in maternity hospitals in the inter-war period before the establishment of the National Health Service. Still on the subject of hospitals, Helen King at Nursing Clio has looked at the history of x-rays and the treatment of the wrists over time.

Keeping with the first half of the twentieth century, Brett Holman at Airminded has argued against using the term ‘blitz’ to describe aerial bombing in the First World War. And tenuously, one of the German cities that was the recipient of much aerial bombing in the Second World War was Dresden, which then had the (possibly mis-) fortune of being rebuilt while part of the German Democratic Republic. Dresden has been, for many, a symbol of the downside of German reunification since the 1990s, but many were cheering, as The Old International noted, when local football team Dynamo Dresden unfurled the largest banner in Europe. November also the anniversary of the collapse of East Germany and Ned Richardson-Little blogged about the ‘long fall’ of the Berlin Wall at his new blog, Superfluous Answers to Necessary Questions.

While historians have focused heavily on the reasons why the GDR collapsed in 1989, there is also a growing literature on GDR (and the rest of the Soviet system) and their international solidarity with the ‘Third World’. The Imperial and Global History, run by the University of Exeter, featured another outstanding post on Soviet internationalism and Latin America by Tobias Rupprecht. At the African American Intellectual History Society blog, Reena Goldthree has written about an earlier form of internationalism, Garveyism and Pan-Africanism, and attempts by Garveyites to create a global mass movement, which rivalled the anti-colonialism of the inter-war Communist International. As well as fractious relationship with various national liberation movements, the international communist movement had problems with the women’s movement during the inter-war period. Writing at the University of Sheffield’s History Matters blog, Ben Lewis explores the role that Clara Zetkin played as a leading figure in the Bolsheviks and her role in the women’s movement.

Based on the research done by University College Dublin’s Mary McAuliffe, the Dublin Inquirer’s Louisa McGrath has also written recently about revolutionary Irish women and looks at the role that these women, particularly lesbians, played in the 1916 revolution. With next year being the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, Liam Ó Ruaric has outlined at the Irish Revolution blog, the global significance of the revolution.

Lastly, Sharon Howard, in last month’s History Carnival at Early Modern Notes, asked where history was going next. Lucy Robinson’s exciting blog post on mass observation and her diaries from the 1980s throws up ideas about the new directions that history may take us. And over at the University of Birmingham’s Modern British Studies blog, Kathryn Robinson writes about using 1980s sitcoms to analyse Thatcherite Britain.

So keep blogging! And reading blogs! And if you read something great over the next month, use the History Carnival nomination form. Art and Architecture, Mainly is up next on January 1, 2016.