It’s 1964 and a newly installed Labour government are worried about anti-immigrant sentiment among its core voters.
At the general election in October that year, the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths had caused a famous upset in the Smethwick constituency in the Midlands.
Griffiths defeated Patrick Gordon-Walker, the incumbent MP and Shadow Foreign Secretary, on a brazenly discriminatory platform.
“If you desire a coloured for a neighbour, vote Labour”, Griffiths’ unofficial election slogan went. “If you are already burdened with one, vote Tory”.
Even more extreme versions of the slogan were tacitly endorsed by Griffiths during his campaign. Yet the message appeared to resonate.
Griffiths bucked the national trend and won Smethwick by more than 1,700 votes. Labour duly lost a constituency that had not voted anything other than Labour since the Second World War.
The story of Smethwick, and the lessons the Labour government took from it, have strong resonances today with the news that dozens of Labour MPs are urging the government to take a “tougher” stance on immigration to help combat the rise of Reform UK.
In 1964, Labour publicly dismissed the significance of Griffiths’ victory. The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, famously referred to him as a “parliamentary leper”.
But as I show in my new book, behind the scenes it is clear officials were spooked.
‘Labour have often sought to ride two horses simultaneously’
In opposition, Labour had vociferously opposed the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which was designed to restrict the ability of Black and Asian migrants from Britain’s former colonies to enter the UK.
Hugh Gaitskill, Harold Wilson’s predecessor as Labour leader, referred to the Act as a “miserable, shameful, shabby” piece of legislation, and promised to repeal it.
Yet once in power, Labour not only did not repeal the Act. In fact, they strengthened it.
The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act – which sought to prevent British passport holders in the former colony of Kenya from migrating to the UK – was, an editorial in The Times argued, “probably the most shameful measure that Labour members have ever been asked by their whips to support”.
Labour hoped the policy would help limit the appeal that the anti-immigrant stance being championed by elements within the Conservative Party was seemingly having in working-class constituencies that, like Smethwick, were home to growing numbers of immigrants.
READ MORE: Blue Labour ads, Blue Labour ideas: Inside the fightback against Reform
The Act became law in March 1968. Within weeks, Enoch Powell was delivering his incendiary “Rivers of Blood” speech at a hotel in Birmingham, a few miles south of Smethwick.
Before long, the neo-Nazi National Front was becoming a visible presence on Britain’s streets, and a would-be Prime Minister called Margaret Thatcher appeared to sympathise with people who were thinking of voting for them.
While the electoral success of the far right in Britain has, until now, been limited, the political debate on immigration has for decades been conditioned by anxiety around the potential appeal of figures like Griffiths and Powell.
In power, Labour have often sought to ride two horses simultaneously. In the 1960s the attempts to restrict immigration coincided with the introduction of a series of Race Relations Acts, which were genuinely pioneering (if long overdue) pieces of legislation that outlawed the incitement of racial hatred alongside other forms of discrimination.
‘Dressing up in Nigel Farage’s clothes is certain to end in failure’
In the late-1990s and 2000s, there was also briefly an attempt to speak in favour of multiculturalism and the diversity of modern Britain brought about by immigration. Yet this was soon superseded by a desire, often driven by David Blunkett’s Home Office, to talk tough on issues such as asylum and “community cohesion”.
The backdrop was the growing appeal of a successor to the National Front, Nick Griffin’s British National Party. By 2009, Griffin’s status was such that he was infamously invited to take part as a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time.
Griffin’s star eventually waned. Yet this was merely a pretext to the growth in influence of another outsider political movement in which the politics of anti-immigration has been central.
READ MORE: Labour plans campaign materials aimed squarely at Reform and Green threats
It is self-evident that, to this day, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have worked out how best to respond to Nigel Farage.
But the history of the political debate around immigration in Britain shows us what happens when the far right is allowed to set the terms of the debate. Ideas and policies that were once dismissed as “shameful” can, very quickly, be co-opted into the political mainstream.
Labour is right to be worried about Reform. But seeking to dress up in Nigel Farage’s clothes is certain to end in failure.
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