Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era.

Behar, Joseph

Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, by Kathleen Paul. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1997. xvii, 253 pp. $23.60 U.S.

The division between social and political history always seemed to be more about left and right than about the locus of proper historical attention. Though sources and interpretive frameworks have been defended or derided as either top-down or bottom-up, both schools have always examined the relation between official policy and public culture. Over the last decade historians of modern Britain have been bridging the somewhat artificial divide between the two approaches by bending the source material of the one to the interpretive imperatives of the other. Thus Kathleen Paul's first book, Whitewashing Britain utilizes rigorous research at the P.R.O. to shed light on popular notions of race and citizenship in postwar Britain. It's a very worthwhile exercise, exposing once again some myths about postwar British governments and society. But there is also a sense of double legitimating going on here; the use of official sources establishes the work's traditional credentials, while the interpretation of the material ensures that it falls easily into the corpus of progressive scholarship on postwar national identity and race.

Paul looks at British migration and nationality policies in the postwar period, focussing for the most part on the years 1945 to 1962, but updating the story to the Thatcherite period in the last chapter. She argues that successive British governments differentiated between "communities of Britishness" in order to serve both imperial and domestic exigencies. At the core of this process of differentiation was skin colour, which Paul argues "had the most direct and immediate effect on concepts of British nationality." There doesn't seem much to argue with in all this, and the author's straightforward and occasionally inspired prose makes her impressive harvest of P.R.O. material readily digestible. Her main goal, she announces at the outset, is to reverse the notion that "a liberal elite was forced by an illiberal public to change the formal nationality policy." In this enterprise she is following upon the leads of Bob Carter, Shirley Joshi, Marci Harris, Diana Kay, Robert Miles, Kenneth Lunn, Laura Taba and others.

Paul begins by dissecting the 1948 British Nationality Act as "the opening play in the game of citizenship politics in postwar Britain." Her suggestion that this is a novel reading of what appeared to be a restatement of the liberality of British citizenship legislation is not entirely accurate; Dummett and Nicols (Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others), and Kay and Miles (Refugees or Migrant Workers?), have both advanced this same basic interpretation. But Paul argues that the Act was meant to preserve the hegemony of Westminster by maintaining the U.K. at the centre of "migratory routes" throughout the empire and commonwealth. Others have emphasized that the Act established a precedent for distinguishing between British subjects on the basis of external citizenship, and so set the stage for future discriminatory legislation.

The migration angle is developed in the following chapters, in which Paul deals with the effects of the 1948 Act, and of subsequent nationality discourse and legislation, on four migrant groups: U.K. residents emigrating to one of the five white dominions, Irish citizens working in the U.K., European refugees recruited to settle in the U.K., and colonial citizens of colour migrating to the "mother country." Migration and citizenship policy was so constructed as to facilitate the migration of "British stock" -- white residents of the U.K. -- to the dominions, so that, as one official put it, they "would want to defend us if the U.K. got into trouble." At the same time European refugees would be recruited as replacement Brits, while Irish migrant workers would fill temporary gaps in the labour force. Paul puts this policy convincingly into the context of postwar labour shortages and fears about the demographic decline of the U.K., as well as of the desire of policy makers to maintain a bankrupt Britain as an independent world power.

Much of the material on this migration and nationality policy -- the assisted passage schemes, the recruitment of displaced persons, the exceptional national status configured for the Irish -- has appeared in two previous articles by Paul in the Journal of British Studies and in International and Working-Class History. These sections of the book offer a worthwhile distillation of the articles, and of the work of others in the field. The concepts of "British stock" and of the "British way of life" are developed within the metaphor of an extended family: "British stock emigrants to the dominions were the children of the empire, `coloured colonials' were friends of the family, continental aliens were potential in-laws whose children would be recognized as one's own, the Irish in Britain ... first cousins."

Significantly, "coloured colonials" are the only ones not directly related. The thematic centrepieces of the book are the chapters that follow the ones on white skinned migrants, and deal with those British citizens who were excluded from the internal sphere of Britishness because of the colour of their skin. Here Paul posits that while the "liberality" of the 1949 legislation was meant to allow the peopling of the dominions with British stock, its unintended effect was to prevent British governments from restricting what they feared would be a flood of migrants of colour to Britain. Thus governments were moved to construct informal definitions of Britishness to offset the liberal, statutory one. Successive governments, seeking to persuade a basically tolerant British public of the dangers of unrestricted migration, recast migrants of colour as "black immigrants," and immigration as a "problem." By 1962 the issue of nice had been injected into the public discourse to the extent that restrictive legislation was politically tenable.

The thesis is enticing, and Paul's exposition of no less than five cabinet committee reports on colonial migration between 1947 and 1957 reveals that both Labour and Conservative governments certainly did view the migration of citizens of colour to the U.K. as a social threat, but were prevented from restricting it by a liberal public climate. However, Paul is not always so thorough at, as she puts it, showing how "the language of the Cabinet room and parliamentary chamber ... moved to the public highway." She writes, for example, of an "educative campaign designed to inculcate" the dangers of uncontrolled colonial migration, but then follows by explaining that there were "no formal directives or official offerings of hate literature." How then did the process take place? Perhaps necessarily given the constraints posed by space and official sources, Whitewashing Britain falls short of providing a thorough analysis on this score. The book is rather a complement to such recent works of discourse analysis as Anna Marie Smith's New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, or David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire.

In the final chapter Paul is forced to rely on unofficial sources -- media analysis mostly. The result is a lively if somewhat speculative reading of the legacy of differentiating communities of Britishness; Norman Tebbit's "cricket best" of nationality, the irony of the British positions on the Falkland and HongKong, the ready acceptance of white commonwealth athletes such as Zola Budd and Greg Rudeski as British, are all ink-grated into the thematic structure. Social phenomena, it would seem, lend themselves to the integration of a more varied body of sources.

This is not to say that the relationship between official and public discourse is tenuous or indecipherable. In fact this book adds significantly to recent scholarship on the continuity and connection between official constructions of national identity and public perceptions of Britishness and citizenship. Paul does good groundwork here, upon which the bridge between social and political history can be built.