474
PARTISAN REVIEW
celebrated its centenary. In the early 1950s, the Muslim population of
Britain was twenty-three thousand.
It
was virtually
nil
elsewhere in Europe
with the exception of France, through its incorporation of Algeria as a
supposedly metropolitan province, and its use of Maghrebi Arab troops
and labor battalions in the First War. Black immigrants were fewer still.
The relationship between the end of empire and mass immigration
into formerly imperial countries is a subject which has not yet been
explored. These are movements of population which challenge stereotypes
and taboos. Hitherto colonized people sought entry first and foremost into
the colonizer countries-people from the Indian sub-continent to Britain,
Maghrebi Arabs to France, Libyans to Italy, Indonesians to Holland, and so
on. On the one hand, the independence newly won by nationalist leaders
and movements evidently was not enough to retain their people, and on
the other hand, quite as evidently, they were choosing to live in the very
imperial countries which their nationalist leaders had been trying to per–
suade them to resent as exploitative and racist.
First to arrive in Britain, in 1948, was a boatload of five hundred immi–
grants from Jamaica, to a chorus, in the press at least, of surprise and good
will. At the time Britain was as stable a country as any; its identity had
remained unquestioned for over two centuries and perhaps longer. The ris–
ing flow of immigrants soon altered the initial reaction, raising the prospect
of racial conflict, something of which there had been neither previous
experience nor expectation.
In
one of the most influential speeches made
in postwar Britain, Enoch Powell, already a cabinet minister, issued a warn–
ing about just such an outcome. What he said was, "Et Tiberim multo
spumani tern sanguine cerno," which translated into folklore as a prophecy
of rivers running with blood. Here was the last British politician, it is safe
to say, to wreck his career by quoting Virgil. Nobody was willing to reflect
on what exactly the link might be between warning, prevention, and cure.
In the sixties and seventies, policy was pursued by all political parties to
limit immigration while at the same time ensuring that whatever possible was
done to promote rights and equal opportunities for those who had already
overcome immigration barriers--or managed to slip under them. A prolifera–
tion of agencies, some of them official like the Race Relations Board and
others quangos, self-appointed from among the great and good, worked to
make British citizens of them. In true liberal style, neither the natives nor the
immigrants were asked for their opinion about that. Race riots did occur; the
worst was
in
1981,
in
Brixton, an inner London suburb with a large Jamaican
population. But legislation and long-perfected hypocrisy have fudged the sort
of slide into safety which has served the British so well
in
many a narrow pass.
According to the lates t census of 1991, 5.5 percent of the population
are immigrants from the West Indies-Mro-Caribbean in the term typical
