The repercussions did include some serious bouts of racial trouble. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 are still remembered for being a violent confrontation between West Indian immigrants and white Londoners. But such flashpoints are remembered precisely because they were the exception rather than the rule. While low-level suspicion and concern about outsiders undoubtedly existed, all efforts to capitalise on such unrest were a consistent and wholesale failure – notably those of Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists and now head of the Union Movement. When Mosley tried to take electoral advantage of the Notting Hill riots and run for Parliament in the general election of 1959, his share of the vote did not even make it into double digits. The British people recognised that there were issues arising from large-scale immigration, but they also showed that they knew the answers did not lie with extremists who they had seen off before.

But troubles did arise, not least for some of those who had arrived in the country by invitation only to find themselves, once there, the target of discrimination. One response to these problems was Parliament’s passing of the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976, which made it illegal to discriminate against somebody on the grounds of ‘colour, race or ethnic or national origins’. It is a mark of how little thought through the whole subject was that no such bills were ever considered in advance but only ever as a reaction once problems arose. No Race Relations Act was prepared in 1948, for example, precisely because nobody foresaw the numbers of people who would be coming to the United Kingdom in the future or the fact that there could be unpleasant implications as a result.

Throughout this period opinion polls showed that the British public were overwhelmingly opposed to the migration policies of their governments and believed that immigration into Britain was too high. An April 1968 poll by Gallup found that 75 per cent of the British public believed that controls on immigration were not strict enough. That figure would soon rise to 83 per cent.⁶ At this point there arose the only moment when immigration briefly had the potential to become a major political issue. In that same month the then Conservative shadow cabinet minister Enoch Powell gave a speech to a Conservative association in Birmingham that opened out the debate and just as quickly closed it down. Although it didn’t quite use the words by which it became known, the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was filled with prophetic foreboding about the future of Britain if immigration continued at its then current rate. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,’ declared Powell. ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’⁷ Although Powell’s speech was about identity and his country’s future, it was also about practical concerns – about constituents finding hospital places or school places for their children in a stretched public sector.