HL Deb 16 December 1969 vol 306 cc957-80

2.51 p.m.

LORD WALSTON

rose to call attention to the Institute of Race Relations publication Colour and Citizenship; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I would at the outset like to make clear my own position with regard to this survey entitled Colour and Citizenship. My own connection with it is, I am afraid, a very tenuous one. I can claim to be no more than a form of consultant obstetrician who was present at the birth, though fortunately had very little part to play in it because it was an easy birth, and who had nothing at all to do with the conception and very little to do with the pre-natal care.

The credit for this survey goes to many people, but I shall only mention four by name. The first is Philip Mason, the Director of the Institute of Race Relations, whose vision and energy created the idea and whose tenacity made it possible. Secondly, I should like to mention my predecessor as Chairman of the Institute, Dr. Farrar-Brown, and with him the Nuffield Foundation of which he was at that time Director, and through whose generosity the very substantial amount of money needed for such a work was made possible. Third and fourth, Jim Rose and Nicholas Deakin, and with them their fellow-workers who actually carried out the work and produced the Report itself. To all those people and to those organisations a very great debt of gratitude is owed.

In our debate on November 25, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, said one thing at least with which I was in profound agreement, as I think I mentioned at the time. He emphasised, and so rightly emphasised, the need for more knowledge of the real facts about immigration and about colour, and reminded us that this subject should be discussed in the light of knowledge rather than of emotion. Colour and Citizenship is a contribution, and a very important contribution, to our knowledge, but it is far from the last word. For every question that it answers a hundred remain to be answered. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and other noble Lords, will impress not only upon the Government but upon all organisations and people with whom they come into contact and with whom they have any influence, and to whom the future life of this country is important, the need for more research, and, more specifically, the need for more money to make that research possible.

This Report covers a very wide range of subjects, and it is very far from my intention to attempt to deal with more than a few of them. Noble Lords who are to follow will, I am sure. between them deal with most of the important ones. The first point I wish to make, and which is made clear from the reading of the Report, is that the great majority of immigrants in this country are here to stay. Many of them, perhaps even most of them, would, in some ways, prefer to return to their own countries. After all, which of us would voluntarily exile ourselves from the land of our birth and the land of our friends and relatives?

But if one studies Part II of this Report, the historical account of the sending societies, the description of how immigration developed, and the movement that has taken place in the last ten years, one must be convinced, even if one had doubts beforehand, that the majority have come here solely because of the conditions in their own countries. They will not willingly go back until those conditions are improved, until they have in their own countries the opportunities for developing their own capabilities at least as fully as they hope to do in Britain, and of leading a life that is satisfying both materially and culturally. We cannot expect, if we are realists, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, always exhorts us to be, those conditions to be improved and those opportunities to be made available for very many generations ahead.

When I talk of the unwillingness of immigrants to return to their own countries, I am, of course, referring to the generalities of immigration. I am well aware, as I am sure your Lordships are also aware, that the term "immigrants" covers people who come from very many different countries, from India, Pakistan, Africa, the Caribbean, Cyprus, Malta and the Far East. Of these there are no doubt some, and in particular those who come from Pakistan, who hope eventually to return home. But I repeat that the vast majority intend to make their homes in this country.

It is our task to help them to contribute what they can to our own economic life and to our cultural values, to absorb from us all the good which we are capable of giving them; in a word, it is our job to help them to integrate into our society. But here let me remind your Lordships of the definition of "integration" given by my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he was Home Secretary. He described integration not as a flattening process of assimilation but equality of opportunity accompanied by cultural dliversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. It is to that aim that all right-minded people must exert their energies. Unfortunately, their task is made very much harder by those who, whether from a lack of knowledge of the facts, a lack of human sympathy and understanding, from sheer ignorance or positive malice, underline the undoubted difficulties that exist between those from other countries and cultures and ourselves, sow the seeds of mistrust and enmity between the immigrants and the native, and, perhaps most important, make immigrants feel that they are unwanted and unwelcome.

In spite of the difficulties put in the way of integration by such people, I am convinced that we shall succeed in our efforts to bring about this form of integration. I base my confidence on the fact that we are fundamentally a tolerant people. Our history gives ample proof of this. In spite of Lord Brooke's assertion that we are "a nation of predominently Anglo-Saxon stock", there are few, other than the noble Lord himself and perhaps General de Gaulle, who can seriously maintain that this is true. There are still among us many of Celtic origin who were here long before the Anglo-Saxons set foot in these Islands. There are also descendants of those who came with William from Normandy and who defeated the Saxons; and since then we have had people from Flanders, from Central Europe: we have had Huguenots and Jews. To-day all those people, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Central Europeans, Jews, Hugenots, are all British, and our culture, our society, is richer for them.

These historical facts are borne out in the survey by modern statistical analysis. I recommend those who have any doubts on this matter to read Chapter 28. It is there shown that 35 per cent. of the sample questioned were firmly tolerant; 38 per cent. were inclined toward tolerance; 17 per cent. were inclined towards prejudice; and only 10 per cent. were positively prejudiced. Assuming that the 35 per cent. who were firmly tolerant and the 10 per cent. who were firmly prejudiced cannot be shifted in their views, there still remains over half the population who can go one way or the other —though most of them would find it easier to move towards tolerance. It is here that leadership is needed. Given the right leadership, this middle group will align themselves with the forces of decency; given the wrong leadership, some of them may not.

We have seen recently in Vietnam what happens when there is the wrong leadership. In My Lai there was a body of men who were no less decent, kindly, humane than any other body of men in the United States and Britain, or anywhere else. But under the influence of propaganda over the years; and of wrong leadership on the spot, those men behaved like wild beasts. There are those in this country to-day who are being subjected to propaganda just as were those men at My Lai. They are being encouraged to consider people of different colour as being fundamentally different from themselves, as being a threat to their material wellbeing and to their way of life. With this background of indoctrination it is not too hard to envisage a mob of British hooligans behaving towards coloured immigrants in the way American soldiers appear to have behaved to the people of My Lai. So it is more than ever essential for all those who are in a position to lead—and all of your Lordships are in such a position—to appear unequivocally on the side of tolerance and of kindness; to welcome the immigrants no matter where they come from; to make them feel at home and to help them in this difficult process of adaptation. Above all, it is incumbent on the Government to do this. I know that the hearts of the Government collectively and individually are in the right place, but I hope we may sec more public indications of a really deep concern for these problems.

The second thing I would ask the Government to do is to arrange for a far greater degree of co-ordination than exists at present between the various Ministries concerned with immigration. The Home Office, of course, is the principal one, but there are also the Departments concerned with housing, health, education, and employment. In their different ways they all do good jobs, but they would be far more effective if there was an overall strategy pulling together the activities of all these Ministries. I am not a lover of ministerial and inter- departmental committees, but I do believe that here is a case where great benefits would arise from having a standing committee of Ministers, chaired by a senior Minister, and backed by a similar inter-departmental official committee.

Let me now turn from the general to the particular. One subject I shall concern myself with is housing. Colour and Citizenship devotes a long chapter to this subject, and I urge your Lordships to read this. All I shall do is to quote some of the most significant figures, which show some of the differences in accommodation of immigrants and native families. I shall refer only to two areas, the London conurbation and the West Midlands conurbation, though in the Report itself many other areas are brought in. All the figures are based on the 1966 Census.

The average number of English persons per room in these two areas, as shown by the 1966 Census, was 0.57 and 0.58; for immigrants the figures were 1.05 and 1.10—just about double the density per room. In London, 11.8 per cent. of English households shared bathrooms, and 15.1 per cent. shared lavatories—a high enough proportion in all conscience. But for immigrants the corresponding figures were 50.9 per cent. and 53.2 per cent.—between four and five times the amount. In the West Midlands the figures were 3.1 per cent. and 5.6 per cent. for English households, and 26 per cent. and 39.4 per cent. respectively for immigrants. Finally, if one looks at council houses, in London 22.2 per cent. of English and 4.2 per cent. of immigrants were council tenants. In the West Midlands, the figues were 39.1 per cent. English and 8.1 per cent. immigrants.

I am not suggesting for a moment that these figures show any deliberate discrimination on the part of local authorities. I am satisfied that this is rarely, if ever, the case. But they do show clearly that in housing, as in so many other fields, the immigrant is at a manifest disadvantage. This, as is shown in Colour and Citizenship, and also in the ninth report of the Housing Management Sub-Committee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee, presided over by Professor Cullingworth (a very valuable document, which I strongly commend to your Lordships), is due largely to ignorance on the part of the immigrant of such regulations as there are, to lack of understanding of what is needed to obtain a better house, and of how to deal with local authorities, and sometimes because of fear of officialdom. But, as Professor Cullingworth says: it is clear to us that there are undoubtedly policies and practices which have a discriminatory effect. Because houses are not merely so many dwelling units, but are homes for real live people, for parents and for children, the effect of such places to live in spreads over the whole of family life and into the future happiness of to-morrow's citizens, and into their value to society as well. In this respect they are at a disadvantage in more than rooms and sanitation; their education, their opportunities for better jobs. and the chance to mix with white neighbours—all these things suffer. I ask your Lordships to forget for a moment percentages and groups, and the language of the academic investigator. It is sometimes hard to project these figures into human beings, but I ask you to think in terms of these actual individual human beings. I will describe to you the conditions of two families that I happened to hear of only yesterday.

The first family came to Britain from Guyana—or British Guiana, as it then was—in 1963. They live to-day in Shepherd's Bush, and they have been on the housing list since 1967; that is, for something between two and three years. They have five children, born between 1964 and 1969. They live in one room, with a double bed for the parents and with bunks for the children. They are under notice to quit, because the house is being bought. They are intelligent, relatively educated people, and the father is in fact working as a clerk. They have never been in rent arrears; they have never owed any money. They keep their room spotlessly clean. But in that case there are four little girls and one little boy. with their two parents, all living in one room.

The second family also come from Guyana, and they came here in 1962. Both parents work; the father is a ticket collector on British Rail. They have four children, the eldest being now some nine years old. They, too, live in one room, and they cook in the same room; and they share a bathroom. They too have their own double bed, with bunks for the children. Just think, my Lords, of that girl, born in 1961 and now nearly nine years old. She probably is no less intelligent than most other girls or boys of that age with the same background—ticket collector father, mother going out to work. What chance has she to make full use of the capabilities in her? She may have as good teachers as any other child, though I doubt whether the actual school buildings are as good, because she is living in an area which is shortly to be demolished under a slum-clearance programme.

But even assuming her school opportunities are as good as they would be anywhere else, what chance has she, coming home in the evening as she does to that one room, with her three brothers and sisters and her parents, to do her homework, to get on at school and to pass the examinations which would give her a chance to pass to higher education? And if she is denied that chance, as she is at the moment, and if hundreds and thousands of others, boys and girls, are similarly denied that chance, what attitude are they going to take in five years' time when they are 15, or in ten years' time when they are 20, when, because they have failed to get any higher education, they have been unable to get the sort of job which they know, inside themselves, they are capable of doing?

My Lords, instead of turning out those young people (most of them born in this country, so technically not immigrants themselves) with a sense of achievement and a sense of opportunity offered to them, we are in grave danger of turning them out with chips on their shoulders and a sense of frustration and injustice. Putting it on purely material grounds for ourselves, we are not only losing their productivity capacity, which this country wants, but we are creating a group of people who are very vulnerable to the blandishments of Black Power and those who wish to make trouble.

The problem posed by the two examples that I have given is not primarily a matter of colour; it is primarily a matter of poverty. But Colour and Citizenship, and Professor Cullingworth, too, make it clear that it is the coloured immigrant who is the greatest sufferer from this poverty. The Government have now recognised this situation, and I give them credit and thanks for it. They have made £25 million available over four years for the urban programme, designed precisely to attack this form of poverty. It is a good beginning, but it is far too modest to cope with a problem of this magnitude—and the United States shows us what can happen if one group of the community remains for long with such disadvantages. To put the matter in a way which may smack more of the News of the World than of The Times, do we wish to see the ablest of the second generation of immigrants become valuable citizens or do we wish to see them become leaders of Black Power? For, unless such young people are given the chance of developing their qualities for good, that is what may well happen.

I quote again from Professor Cullingworth. He writes: … as a country we have time to act but insufficient knowledge to determine in what way we should act. This is true, and it reinforces my earlier insistence on the need for more research and more funds with which to carry out that research. But we already have some knowledge—Colour and Citizenship has provided much of it—and some local authorities are making good use of it. The Government may say that housing and many other things that affect the lives of immigrants are no concern of theirs; that they are matters solely for the local authorities. But, my Lords, we cannot adopt or allow such a Pontius Pilate attitude. This is the concern of the whole country. The Government cannot sit on the sidelines: they must take positive action. Specifically, I put to my noble friends the following points, and hope that it may be possible for one or other of them, when they reply, to do so encouragingly, at least in regard to some of the points.

First, there should be a major reallocation of national resources so as to help the under-privileged, regardless of colour. Second, the scope and provisions of the present Rent Act should be far more widely published than they are at present, so that people know just what the law is; and at the same time power should be given to local authorities to establish fair rents. Third, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government should urge local authorities to set up unified housing departments, which would include the departments of health and of welfare. Fourth, housing visitors should be given special training in the cultural and social background of immigrants. Fifth, I would remind my noble friend that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has only one of its staff who is concerned with housing management, compared with a professional staff of 150 concerned with housing construction. Let the Ministry recruit more with qualifications in housing management, and let these people be made available to those local authorities which have problems with immigrant housing.

Sixth, local authorities should be encouraged to increase their knowledge of the needs of coloured citizens. This involves recognition of the cultural diversity of immigrants and a willingness to talk with local immigrant leaders. Seventh—a delicate matter—I believe that statistics must be kept which distinguish people according to ethnic groups. It will not be easy to do this, but I do not believe that real progress can be made unless we have this information. In the preparation of these statistics local authorities, the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission should be brought into consultation, and so should immigrant leaders, also. Finally, the scope of the urban programme must be expanded, and the Government must retain reserve powers in order to intervene when local authorities cannot or will not do their job.

My final word, my Lords, is this. The integration of the Commonwealth immigrant is something which affects everybody. The Government must not allow the difficulties that arise from immigration to be dealt with piecemeal by separate Ministries acting in isolation. There is no room for the legalistic excuse that the problem is primarily one for another Department, or for a local authority. There must be co-ordination and, above all, there must be a sense of real urgency and a realisation of the disaster which will follow if we fail. But it is not only the Government which must act. We, too, as individuals, must realise that each and every one of us faces a challenge—a challenge to our claim to be called civilised, a challenge to our claim to base our lives and our behaviour on the Christian ethic. We cannot ignore this challenge, my Lords. If we fail to work with all our might to make the newcomers to our land welcome, we demonstrate to the whole world that our pious claims are a sham, that our fine words are cloaked in hypocrisy. What is more, we are putting in jeopardy the peaceful future of all those who come after us. In this great task for the years ahead Colour and Citizenship gives us help and gives us hope. I beg to move for Papers.

3.19 p.m.

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR

My Lords, I should like to offer my most earnest thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, for tabling this Motion and for giving your Lordships' House an opportunity to discuss this subject of outstanding importance. We are to have a further debate to-morrow which is receiving a great deal more attention from the Press than our debate to-day. I myself am in no doubt whatever that what we are discussing to-day is going to be infinitely more important to this country than the subject of our debate to-morrow, and I want to put it on record that that is the relative importance which I attach to the two.

I want, too, to express warm appreciation of this enterprise on the part of the Institute of Race Relations in having put in hand and prepared and published this massive Report, Colour and Citizenship. I know that it was inspired by Mr. Philip Mason, the Director of the Institute, and he deserves the utmost credit from us all for that. Personally I have found it a document of exceptional interest. It is full of material gathered from innumerable sources. I gladly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has said about the importance of yet further research. We may all have our different approaches; we may have our different ways of thinking. But let us, so far as we possibly can, establish a common basis of known fact. From that some of us may stray, in one direction or another, yet we can always be pulled back to the right course. But if the facts are unknown we shall be shadow boxing.

I found one of the most valuable elements in this Report the lengthy analysis of the different immigrant communities. All of us who have had anything to do with immigration are well aware of the facts concerning the various principal immigrant communities, but far too many people who discuss the matter do so in broad terms of immigrants or colour, or something like that, apparently unaware of the vast differentiation between Pakistanis and West Indians, not merely in appearance and background but in their probable behaviour when they settle in this country. Subject to one qualification, I regard this book as a first-rate piece of work. I should like to ask—I am not asking the Government but the Institute of Race Relations and the noble Lord, Lord Walston—whether there is any chance of a short popular version being issued. There is much that deserves to be far more widely known, but few people have the ability or the time to absorb a volume of 800 pages. Indeed, occasionally in the last few weeks I wondered whether we might have a new Standing Order requiring any noble Lord who tabled a Motion referring to a book of 800 pages to provide your Lordships with a shortened version of it.

LORD WALSTON

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord briefly? The answer is, Yes; there is in course of preparation—and I hope that it will be available quite soon—a shortened version for those who, unlike the noble Lord, are not prepared to read and study all that is in the full Report.

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR

My Lords, I am delighted to hear it, and I hope that the Institute will find the means of giving the shorter version a wide circulation.

My one qualification about the Report that we are discussing is that it seems to me to have been written largely from the standpoint of the immigrant communities and not sufficiently from the standpoint of the British people upon whom this wave of unexpected immigration has broken. The British people who did not welcome the disturbance to their way of life—a very drastic disturbance in a considerable number of places—are liable to be held to blame on grounds of racial prejudice against the newcomers, whereas the main truth is that the British people are very conservative (with a small "c") and do not welcome change.

My mind goes back to a time when I was a member of the London County Council and I was invited by the church people of a certain village, near which a very big London County Council housing development was to take place, to come and talk to their annual church meeting about some of the problems of tolerance and integration that were going to arise. I welcomed that opportunity, and I remember making various suggestions, especially about the importance of giving valuable local information to the newcomers as they arrived, one by one; not only information about the churches (remember, I was talking to a church audience), but information about all the local facilities. When you move to a new house on a housing estate, miles away from where you have been, you feel lost—you might as well be in central Africa. If the local people are ready with information to guide you and answer your questions—how to get the milk, how to order a paper, where to draw your pension, and so on—an atmosphere of friendliness will be built up that may do so much good, in contrast to the other atmosphere of strangeness.

My Lords, imagine a village of a thousand people, an old-established village, and then 200 strangers of a different race arriving in that village within a short time from overseas. That will lead to the occupation by the strangers of every available scrap of space. Young people who wish to get married will have to move and settle elsewhere. The local feeling is predictable. It is human nature. But I fear that the authors of this Report would hold those villagers guilty of racial prejudice. This is my criticism. No doubt the Institute will wish to frame an answer to it, but this is my genuine feeling, having read these 800 pages as best I can.

Coming back to the story of substantial Commonwealth migration into this country, which started about 1954 and which is very thoroughly studied historically in the Report, I am afraid it is true to say that in the early stages of this migration virtually nothing was done to lessen local friction, or to foresee the social tensions that were likely to arise, until the setting up of the Committee in 1962 over which the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough, presided. I consider that that Committee have never received sufficient thanks for their services.

My Lords, what was happening in those early days was like bringing two pieces of metal into working contact, one hot and one cold, without any lubricant. To those who do not know the British, we are a cold race. The West Indians—and most of the early corners were West Indians—to all outward appearance are more extrovert than we are, and more hot-blooded; and they came, as did the vast majority of the immigrants, from a far hotter climate. Differences in climate seems to be hardly mentioned in this Report. The British weather is a major cause of disappointment and emotional reaction for those who have grown up in warmer climes. We cannot alter the British weather. In that and many other kinds of ways Britain fell sadly short of the expectations with which the West Indians came.

Up to that time we here had had very little experience of colour problems. The total coloured population did not reach 100,000 until about 1954. Now, only fifteen or sixteen years later, it is some twelve times as great—a twelve-fold increase in fifteen years. It is still growing at around 50,000 a year by immigration, and, I would think, about 30,000 a year by births in the United Kingdom. At any rate, this Report estimates that by 1986 we shall have here a coloured population of between 2 and 2¼ million. To assimilate these numbers into an already densely populated island is a task of massive difficulty, especially when the newcomers are not evenly spread but are concentrated in a limited number of areas. The difficulty would exist even without any differences of colour or culture. The trouble about colour is that it is a continuing reminder of different origin, but it will cease to matter much if the cultures are compatible. Where incompatibility of culture exists between two individuals their mutual reactions are not to be dismissed, I would submit, as race prejudice. This is a situation which must be carefully and compassionately studied, to see whether difficulties can be smoothed out, if not removed. That is what is now being painstakingly undertaken in many places by the community relations committees, and by their liaison officers and voluntary workers. Of course this is not a complete solution of the difficulties, but it is important and we cannot do without that individual work. We have attained at last to a recognition of differences of culture. Much of the earlier troubles arose from an idealistic desire not to recognise race differences at all. There are still traces in this Report of a hangover from that state of affairs: suggestions that neighbourhoods have not been radically altered by immigrants coming in; that those neighbourhoods were altering already, and that the immigrants have simply been made the scapegoats for change. It is far better to face boldly the differences in culture and background, and to try unashamedly to give to all those who need help the kinds of help they most need, and to educate public opinion ceaselessly in the facts, turning away from nothing. Government policy now, very rightly, is to give extra help to areas with special problems; and in so far as these are areas of high immigration (they are not always so) we should not blink that fact.

One of the most helpful recommendations in this Report is that the people who live in areas which have neighbourhood problems should be encouraged to come together in groups, regardless of colour, to talk about how the neighbourhood could be improved and then to try to get action taken by the local authorities and other bodies which have power to act. In this sort of development, clearly, the Churches have their part to play. The Report criticises the Churches for not having given enough leadership. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to speak to-day, and I hesitate to trespass on his ground; but I venture to think that, unhappily, most of what in terms of this Report are problem areas are areas where the Churches have tended to be weak.

As for the Church to which I belong, I think it is a fair criticism in the Report that the Church of England concentrates overmuch on the pastoral care of individuals in its parishes and is often not well enough organised to study the distinctive pastoral needs of whole communities which overlap parish boundaries. I do not know to what extent the Churches, individually or ecumenically, have given well-qualified clergy or laymen in areas of heavy immigration a definite assignment to work out what Christian people, regardless of colour, could do to improve race relations. I think that right reverend Prelates will probably regard parts of this Report as compulsory study for some of the key people in their dioceses; and I expect that the noble Lord, Lord Soper, and others will, equally, desire that everybody who calls himself a Christian minister, throughout the land, whether locally affected by these problems or not, should read at any rate the abridged version which the noble Lord, Lord Walston, promises us.

My Lords, if I do not this afternoon dwell on the Race Relations Board or Act, it is only because the whole subject is so broad, and because there may be other opportunities to debate those particular matters in detail. I find it interesting that the Report now regrets Section 6 of the Race Relations Act 1965; that is the provision which makes it an offence to use words which incite to hatred of other races, whether or not they would be likely to cause a breach of the peace. This was a provision 'which I always refused to introduce when I was responsible because I said, and I truly think, that the business of the police is to be keepers of order and not censors of speech. I felt that we were endangering free speech by that provision in the 1965 Act, and I must say that I should like to see it disappear so far as the spoken word is concerned. On the other hand, I would not lightly abandon it for the written word. When I was Home Secretary I was deeply troubled about some of the anti-Semitic pamphlets which were thrust into letter boxes—a form of what I can only call racial pornography.

My Lords, we had our immigration debate the other day. A remark of mine in that debate received far more publicity than I had expected, and it has been referred to again to-day. I expressed the view that Britain is likely to make her best contribution to the world if she continues to be, as she has been for centuries, a nation of predominantly Anglo-Saxon stock. Several people have written to me since criticising the word "Anglo-Saxon"; and it has been criticised again to-day. I quite agree. Indeed, my noble relative here is a Celt. I am well aware that we are made up of Celtic, Norman, Danish and many other stocks. But I would only say, by way of apology, that I can point to a place in this Report where the adjective "Anglo-Saxon" is used, for shorthand purposes, exactly as I used it in my speech the other day.

The number of letters that I received after that speech astonished me. Some of them were written with out-and-out prejudice; they came from that 10 per cent. section whom the Report identifies as definitely prejudiced. But others of the letters were movingly simple and grateful, not motivated by hatred of anyone but just expressing gratitude that at last some leaders in Parliament were expressing what is the overwhelming popular feeling: that the people of this country, though they want to live on terms of goodwill, want passionately to be sure that the whole character of the country and of the British way of life are not going to be changed over the years by unlimited immigration.

The correspondence that I have received has made me realise how much still remains to be done by both main political Parties, probably by all the political Parties, in getting their policies across to the public. No political Party, I believe, now favours unlimited immigration. One could see clearly the Government's fear of unlimited immigration by their bringing in the 1968 Bill to control the influx of Kenya Asians. That is a Bill which the authors of this Report, looking at the problem, as they generally do, more from the standpoint of the immigrants than of the native-born British, condemn as the lowest point reached by any Government at Westminster.

Immigration is now strictly controlled—except for wives and young children, who must be a diminishing number. But the letters which I have received—obviously reasonable letters in other respects—reflect the common view that unlimited immigration is continuing and that Mr. Enoch Powell is the only Member of Parliament who is not prepared to see it continue indefinitely. That, I am sure, is how he gains the support of perfectly reasonable people up and down the country. One can read in this Report that a Gallup Poll after his best-known speech disclosed 75 per cent. support for him among those who were interviewed. It is up to the leaders of the political Parties to counteract that false idea by explaining the facts of their own policies even more vigorously and vividly. I disagree with Mr. Powell totally over the continued admission of the wives and children of those already here—I understand that he would stop all that immigration straight away. If so, I think his policy on that is inhuman. But if Parliament believes that it is not in the world's best interests that this country should be progressively changed into a totally multiracial society from being a society of predominantly European stock, then Members of both Houses of Parliament must be prepared to say so and risk being called racialist or prejudiced. If Parliament is to control race tensions in this country it must regain the confidence of both communities, the natives and the immigrants alike.

We are still going to receive large numbers of immigrant wives and children. Can we make sure that we are giving them every chance to develop their own gifts and personalities in what is for them a strange land? The children who come here and go straightaway to school certainly should be getting all the benefits that our educational system can offer them, though if immigration into a certain area is very rapid then schools will be, at any rate temporarily, overcrowded. As your Lordships know, I am worried that there is still unrestricted entry for those between 13 and 16, because I believe it is intensely important that young people who come here from another land should have the opportunity of a year or two in a British school before they pass straight into the labour market. I was interested to find on page 276 of this Report special mention of the problem of the big influx of those between 13 and 16 who have come in from India and Pakistan.

I am certain that the Report is right in attaching such great importance to the teaching of English to those of the immigrants who are not familiar with the English language. After all, we can imagine ourselves if we go to a strange land; if we have not a familiarity with the language there, how can we expect to establish ourselves and to make our way? I found the Report not only interesting but encouraging on this topic of the development of the teaching of English to immigrants. I wonder whether, in all this, we are making enough use of those young people who have gone out from Britain to some of these countries overseas on V.S.O. or other assignments and who, when they come back to Britain, will know so well the feel of that country. I wonder whether more of them could be encouraged, when they come back, to help with the teaching of English to immigrants from those countries who want to improve their English and get to know English ways. I know that that is a small point, but I feel we should not overlook any contribution that can be offered by people who are specially qualified to make one.

And what about those of the wives of men already here, who come with some professional qualification which may not be high enough to be recognised in this country? We have experienced this difficulty in the past with those who have gained teaching qualifications abroad. Cannot those people be identified quickly and offered advice at once as to how they can get, if they wish, the further training they will need in this country in order to exercise their professional skills here? Unless that sort of information is available to them quickly, they will become disappointed because they are not recognised for what they think they are; they will become frustrated and will end up lower down in the labour market than they need be or than we should wish them to be.

There are valuable suggestions in the Report about the part that the police can play in race relations. I am inclined to agree that police training has been slow to get adapted to the new problems of race that have emerged in many of our communities. I would say that all that one reads here about the development of community liaison officers among the police is well worth attention—community liaison officers whose business will not be to give attention to relations solely between coloured people and the police, but between the community as a whole and the police.

I was disappointed when I came, in the recommendations, to the passage on dispersal. I was surprised at this, because the Report is right in saying that housing is at the root of so much. That is how local concentration arises. The immigrants go somewhere where they can get a roof over their heads. That will determine where the children go to school, and that, in turn, will determine the sort of jobs which the children are likely to get.

I entirely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has said about the housing conditions of a great many of the immigrants being thoroughly inferior and deplorable. At the same time, one must remember that large numbers of these immigrants arrived in areas where there was no vacant land and where there were already long waiting lists of British people in bad housing conditions. Those of us who have been on housing committees—and I am sure there are many noble Lords on both sides of the House who have this experience—will know that it is quite unfair to condemn a housing committee out of hand for racial prejudice, simply because it is trying to be fair to its own people who have been waiting for a long time, as well as to take into account the special needs of immigrants who have recently arrived and who are perhaps living in even worse conditions.

It is unfortunate that in recent years it has been hard, not only for immigrants but for everybody, to obtain mortgages. I thoroughly agree with what the Report says about the importance of all concerned to be willing to grant mortgages and improvement grants on houses to immigrants. All that may gradually help with the dispersal of the excessive concentrations. I should be interested to know what fortunes the Government or the development corporations are having in seeking to get coloured families to move to the new towns, because there is a massive movement of population going on wherever a new town is being developed. It seems to me obvious that that movement should include the movement of members of coloured families too.

I must mention repatriation, which I suppose is one aspect of dispersal. I am absolutely sure that those who have tried this country and, having tried it, do not like it should be offered facilities to return to their old lands if they wish. I am equally sure that no one should be forced to go against his will. That is something which nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has advocated.

The British are tolerant people. This Report finds that three-quarters of them are tolerant or tolerant-inclined and only 10 per cent. strongly prejudiced. Very rightly, at the end the Report recommends attention to the removal of particular causes of friction which may sway otherwise tolerantly-inclined people into hostility. For some reason, the Report in its main descriptive chapters gives surprisingly little attention to these causes of friction: the difficulties, for example, of English mothers in obtaining maternity beds in some areas of heavy immigration; the differences in standards of hygiene among some of the immigrants, at any rate when they first arrive; the intense pressure on school places; the transformation of a quiet neighbourhood into a noisy one and, above all, as I have just said, the new competition for council houses and flats when immigrants arrive in great numbers.

Great strains were put on neighbourhood relations from 1955 onwards when the immigrants were beginning to come in large numbers and we were totally unprepared for it. Yet we might well have known that much hard thinking would have to be done, for 1955 was only six years after the publication of the Report of the Royal Commission on Population, and it is intriguing to look back to see what that Royal Commission said: Even, however, if it were found practicable to secure a net inward balance of migration on anything like this scale, we should have to face serious problems of assimilation beyond those of training and housing. Immigration on a large scale into a fully established society like ours could only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good human stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged in it.… All these considerations point to the conclusion that continuous large scale immigration would probably be impracticable and would certainly be undesirable … Six years later large-scale immigration started and we took far too little warning from that Report and elsewhere about the difficulties. The newcomers came, in the main, to areas where housing was already a problem, and locally no one knew why they were being allowed to enter the country in such hosts. The truth was that the then Government believed that the open door was the right policy if the concept of Commonwealth was to be upheld. But the people among whom the immigrants came did not see or understand it that way and they were given very little help to do so.

The long-term result has been that masses of people all over the country are now saying, "Why did we create these appalling problems for ourselves?" I think it is an essential part of a race relations policy to give the answer. The answer is that for the sake of the Commonwealth ideal we held the door open as long as we possibly could, and, because there were shortages of manpower and woman-power in the most industrially prosperous parts of the country, the immigrants flocked in there. Parliament, the local authorities—in fact everybody—failed to take the measure of the social difficulties that this was bound to create. But this immigration did preserve our public transport services and our Hospital Service. The question why a public-spirited and compassionate society like ours has so badly failed to staff its own Hospital Service with doctors and nurses is one that deserves, and to my way of thinking has not yet received, most searching inquiry. But I believe that the Report is right in finding that Commonwealth immigration has resulted, on balance, in economic gain rather than economic loss.

Yet the misunderstandings on both sides have been immense, and I hope that the result of debates like this will be to make us still more determined to reduce these misunderstandings in the future. I am desperately anxious that we shall not repeat our earlier mistakes in a later context—the mistakes of failure of communication. Nine or ten years ago the public generally believed that Parliament simply did not know what was happening. The pressure for a measure of control was so great. The public certainly did not realise the reason why the then Government were maintaining the open door, even, as it was thought, well past the twelfth hour. Now the public is still suffering from illusions, as the Report quite correctly says. Many people imagine that the immigrants are spreading health hazards widely, which is not true. Many people imagine that they are taking out of the social services more than they put in, which is not true. It is not true largely because the average age of the immigrants is low and as yet they include relatively few old people. My Lords, we must correct these illusions and mistakes. But we must not fall into the converse mistake of appearing to take the side of the immigrants to the extent of placing all the blame for all that goes wrong on the native inhabitants of Britain. I believe that there is a great deal in this Report which points the way to further steps which may be taken to help the immigrants to feel genuinely that this country is a welcoming place; and if these are taken, Britain should increasingly regain their confidence. I believe with equal strength that much more needs to be done to explain to the native-born British what the policy of their leaders is; to convince them that they are not being asked to make room for numbers of immigrants who are going to continue to come without any limitation whatever, and that it is the intention of Parliament that Britain, though enriched by immigration as it has ever been, should continue to be a nation in which the old stock which has been here for centuries shall predominate.

LORD O'HAGAN

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him one question? There is a great deal of interest in what he has said, and I should like to get it clear in my own mind. I noted while he was speaking, and I enjoyed and appreciated his speech very deeply, some of the constructive points that he mentioned. Am I wrong in thinking that he, on behalf of his Party, put forward no major constructive proposal in the field of race relations and restricted himself to what might be called minor ameliorative measures, like neighbourhood groups, returning V.S.O. volunteers, better relations with the police and the dissemination of facts of Government policy? Am I right in thinking that he was not supporting or putting forward a major constructive policy?

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR

My Lords, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has asked that question, because a speech is always liable to be misconstrued when it cannot possibly cover the whole breadth of a subject. What I sought to say was that this was a very far-reaching Report, and that there was a great deal in many of its recommendations which I would endorse. I then threw out two or three relatively minor ideas of my own which I had not seen mentioned in the Report. I am not saying that I agree with all the recommendations that are there, but I think that the authors of the Report did their work thoroughly and I believe that many of their recommendations deserve further study.