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Enoch Powell, Rivers of blood speech

Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell stood in British Parliament, and made one of the most famous speeches in history. This speech has been debated ever since. Was is a genuine warning, or did it actually make immigration a ‘Race’ issue.  To date its estimated there are around 10 million immigrants and their descendants now living in the UK, with hundreds of thousands joining every year. No longer from just ex British colonies. making up around 15% of the UK population as a whole, but a much higher percentage of younger generation. 

This is the full text of Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: “How can its dimensions be reduced?” Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, 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. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words “for settlement.” This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.

Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.

Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens.” This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another’s.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her ‘phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, “Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.” So she went home.

“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word “integration.” To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:

‘The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

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Jeff Turner and Gary Bushell on Oi!

The Cockney Rejects’ 1980 performance at Birmingham’s Cedar Club remains unnoted in the annals of rock history. It warrants no mention when music journalists compile the 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock, nor the 100 Craziest Gigs Ever, which seems like a terrible oversight. In fairness, no one is ever going to rank the show by the East End quartet – then enjoying chart success with a punk take on the West Ham terrace anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – alongside Jimi Hendrix at Monterey in terms of musical brilliance. Still, it has its own claim to historical import: by all accounts, it was the most violent gig in British history.

“I’d seen quite a bit on the terraces or outside football grounds, but this was carnage,” says Jeff Turner, today an immensely amiable decorator, then “Stinky” Turner, the Cockney Rejects’ teenage frontman, cursed with what his former manager Garry Bushell tactfully describes as “a bit of a temper”. Turner continues: “There was a lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, my brother [Rejects’ guitarist Micky Geggus] really got done bad, with an ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor. Carnage.”

The problem was football-related. “Most of the punk bands at the time, they had their ideals – the Clash, Career Opportunities, political stuff, fair play,” says Turner. “When I was a kid, my thought for punk rock was that it could put West Ham on the front pages.” To this end, the band – affiliated to the club’s hooligans in the Inter City Firm – had appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham shirts. “After that, everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn’t back down,” says Turner. “Once you were defeated, it would have opened the floodgates for everybody.”

So the Rejects and their party fought: “Twenty Cockneys against … well, not all 300 Brummies were trying to attack us, but I’d say we were trying to fight off 50 to 100 people.” In the aftermath, Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects’ career as a live band was, in effect, over. An attempt to play Liverpool later that year ended after six songs “because there was 150 Scousers trying to kill us”, while a subsequent gig in Birmingham was aborted by the police: “The old bill got wind of it and escorted us on to the M6,” says Turner. “At the time, I was gutted, but now, I think, thank God for that. Someone could have died.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising the gig has been swept under the carpet of musical history: after all, so has the genre the Cockney Rejects inadvertently inspired. Thirty years after Bushell – then a writer for the music paper Sounds, as well as the Rejects’ manager – coined the term “Oi!” to describe a third generation of punk-inspired working-class bands playing “harder music on every level, guitar driven, terrace choruses”, it remains largely reviled or ignored in Britain.

In the eyes of its remaining fans, Oi! is the “real thing”, the genuine sound of Britain’s streets in the late 70s, populated by artists Bushell championed when the rest of the music press concentrated on “bands who dropped literary references you wouldn’t have got if you didn’t have a masters’ degree and wrote pretentious lyrics”. Bands such as the Cockney Rejects, the Angelic Upstarts – Marxists from South Shields managed by a man Bushell colourfully describes as “a psychopath – his house had bars over all the windows because people had thrown firebombs through it” – Red Alert, Peter and the Test Tube Babies. It briefly stormed the charts. The Angelic Upstarts followed the Cockney Rejects onto Top of the Pops, while Splodgenessabounds made the Top 10 with the deathless Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please. But today, if the general public have heard of it at all, they tend to agree with the assessment once offered by journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie: “Punk’s stunted idiot half-brother, musically primitive and politically unsavoury, with its close links to far-right groups.” It is, asserts Bushell, “without a doubt, the most misunderstood genre in history”.

The problem isn’t really to do with the music, although protracted exposure to the oeuvre of Peter and the Test Tube Babies – home to Student Wankers, Up Yer Bum and Pick Your Nose (and Eat It) – could leave all but the hardiest soul pleading tearfully for a few literary references and pretentious lyrics. The problem is Oi!’s adoption by the far-right as its soundtrack of choice. It wasn’t the only part of street culture to attract the attentions of the National Front and the British Movement in the late 70s and early 80s. Losing out at the polling stations thanks to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the NF had instigated a programme of “direct action”: it would attempt to kick its way into the headlines at football matches and gigs. Chart bands such as Sham 69, Madness and the Specials had concerts disrupted.In 1978, seig-heiling skinheads caused £7,500 worth of damage at a Sham 69 gig in London.

But it was to Oi! that the far-right was most attracted, not least because it attracted both football hooligans and the re-emergent skinhead movement – two groups the NF’s direct-action programme targeted for recruitment. “We played a gig in Camden, we saw these Nazi skinheads beating the shit out of these two punks,” remembers Turner. “They’d managed to wreck Sham 69’s career, but us with our following” – the ICF was then headed by Cass Pennant, whose parents were Jamaican – “we weren’t going to have it. We just went down and absolutely slaughtered them. We declared to them that if they ever set foot where we were again, we’d decimate them.” And so it proved. “Neo-nazis confronted the Rejects again at Barking station,” remembers Bushell. “They basically told them, ‘We’re going to come to your gigs, we’re going to do this and do that.’ The Rejects crew battered them all over the station. They didn’t come to the gigs after that.”

Bushell points out that there was “a Nazi subculture all the way through punk. Malcolm McLaren started it all with the swastikas, which thick people saw and thought, ‘Oh, they must be Nazis.’” There were white power punk bands, too – such as the Dentists and the Ventz, which were formed by the “Punk Front” division of the National Front, in lieu of real punk bands showing any interest in promoting white supremacy. It was a trick the NF would be forced to pull again when Oi! bands resisted their overtures – the party recruited a failed punk band from Blackpool called Skrewdriver and repositioned them as the musical voice of the neo-Nazi movement. “It was totally distinct from us,” says Bushell. “We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.”

Bushell’s latterday career as a gleeful provoker of the liberal left, writing for the Sun and the Daily Star, probably hasn’t done much to help public perceptions regarding Oi!’s political affiliations. When Oi! was at its height, however, he says he was a Trotskyist who did his best to infuse the movement with socialist principles. He organised Oi! conferences and debates, “trying to shape the movement, trying to stop the culture of violence, talking about doing unemployment benefits, working with the Right to Work campaign, prisoners’ rights gigs – I thought we could unite punk and social progress.” Not everyone was receptive: “Stinky Turner was at one debate, and he didn’t contribute much, apart from the classic line, ‘Oi! is working class, and if you’re not working class you’ll get a kick in the bollocks.’” He laughs. “Perfect! That was what the Rejects were all about.”

Trotskyist or not, Bushell also managed to exacerbate the problem, not least by masterminding the unfortunately titled 1981 compilation Strength Thru Oi!. “I didn’t know!” he protests. “I’d been active in politics for years and had never come across the phrase ‘strength through joy’ as a Nazi slogan.It was the title of a Skids EP.”

To compound matters, its cover featured a photograph of a skinhead who turned out to be the delectable-sounding Nicky Crane, who – nothing if not a multi-tasker – managed to combine life as a neo-Nazi activist with a secret career as a gay porn star. “I had a Christmas card on the wall, it had that image that was on the cover of Strength Thru Oi!, but washed out. I honestly, hand on my heart, thought it was a still from The Wanderers,” Bushell says. “It was only when the album came through for me to approve the artwork that I saw his tattoos. Of course, if I hadn’t been impatient, I would have said, right, fucking scrap this, let’s shoot something else entirely. Instead, we airbrushed the tattoos out. There were two mistakes there, both mine. Hands up.”

Much worse was to follow. A July 1981 Oi! gig featuring the 4-Skins and the Business in Southall – the scene of a racist murder in 1976 and the race riot that ended in the death of Blair Peach in 1979 – erupted into violent chaos: 110 people were hospitalised, and the venue, the Hambrough Tavern, was burned down after being petrol bombed. Depending on whose version of events you believe, it was either sparked by skinheads attacking Asians or Asian youths attacking gig-goers: either way, the Southall riot stopped Oi!’s commercial progress dead. The Cockney Rejects found that shops refused to stock their new album, The Power and the Glory: “I’d sung a song called Oi Oi Oi and all of a sudden there’s an Oi! movement and I didn’t really want anything to do with it,” says Turner. “This awful, awful shit happened in Southall, we were never there, and we got the rug pulled out from under our feet. I went from the TV screen to the labour exchange in 18 months.”

An inflammatory article in the Daily Mail exacerbated the situation further: “We never had an problems with Nazi activists at our gigs until after the Mail’s piece,” says Bushell. “Only then did we have people coming down, thinking it was going to be this rightwing thing, When they discovered it wasn’t, that’s when the trouble started. I was attacked at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club by about 20 of them. I had a knife pulled on me at Charing Cross station.”

That should have been that, had it not been for Oi!’s curious afterlife in America. Steve Whale – who joined the Business after Southall and struggled on through the 80s, repositioning the band as “street punk” – unexpectedly found himself in possession of a US recording contract with Bad Religion’s label Epitaph, lauded by bands including Boston’s Irish-punk stars the Dropkick Murphys and the extraordinarily influential California band Rancid. Jeff Turner has just returned from a tour of Japan: “Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya. I haven’t got fortunes but I’m able to do that. That’s all I can ask for, it makes me happy.”

“I had Lars Freidricksen of Rancid come in and sit in the pub round the corner from my house, welling up, telling me if it wasn’t for Oi! he might have killed himself as a teenager,” says Garry Bushell. “I thought, ‘Fuck me, it’s really had an effect on these people.’ I’m not proud of the way Oi! was misunderstood, but I’m proud of the music, proud of what it started, proud of what it gave punk.”

In Britain, he concedes, the genre’s name is still blackened in most people’s eyes. “There were people in 1976 saying punk had to be a Nazi thing because of the swastikas. The difference is, those bands had rock journalists on their side. The Oi! bands only had me.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “I did me best.”

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Racism within The Skinhead Subculture

Racism within The skinhead subculture

As annoying as it is, the one question almost everybody, who is not a skinhead wants to know, is about the racism connection to skinheads, which has become almost a synonym of the word Skinhead

I will try to explain the reasons behind it. Without denying or justifying. I can only talk from my own real life experience, having grown up in a multi racial environment, from a very young pre school age child. On a council estate on the outskirts of London, in a town called High Wycombe.

Britain had an empire for almost 400 years, which covered 1/3rd of the world, encompassing many cultures and races. Every British person was bred to work for it, as a military serviceman, Industrial worker, or tradesman. The Second World War put an end to Britain’s power base. Germany surrendered, but the UK lost more than most nations.

Skinhead appeared towards the end of the 1960’s a boom time, with high employment, as the Empire was being closed and sold off, a boom needed cheap labour, to fill the shortage, created by the war losses. The government of the day decided to award all ex colonies British citizenship, and actively went out to places like The Caribbean and India to recruit a workforce. Those early immigrants arrived in the UK and were immediately awarded social housing. The British working class communities were forced to accept these new cultures into their communities, with no real education or understanding.

A deep fear of change arose. This together with the economic bust of the 1970’s, huge industrial turmoil, with strikes, 3 day working week, and a poverty wide spread across the country, a collapse of Britain as a national power and world influence. Racism was an immediate reaction. Immigrants taking jobs from the countries indigenous working class population. Three million unemployed – three million immigrants, easy mathematics. But it wasn’t only the unemployment, there was a huge shift in culture. The single parent family, shop hours changing. Foreign languages and street gangs on the estates. Fear and ignorance of the unknown.

The average skinheads age was around 14 years old, he would be very influenced by his parents, the media around him. Political groups set up, and actively recruited these kids into the fold, to act as street fighters. The organisations, The British Movement and National Front became a fashionable rebellion, very popular in the white working class areas, organizing highly visual street marches, adopting symbols of previous fascist groups of the 1930’s.

Here we see photographer Nick Knight photographing a young Skinhead lad. Nick later produced a book of images, which became mainstream reference for the Skinhead Subculture. Nick is now one of the UK most highly successful and wealthy fashion photographers

Although skinhead had originally come from Mods, the music of Jamaican Reggae and Ska popular. The skinheads of the mid to late 70’s and 80’s were much more of an aggressive hooligan element, wrapped up in political instability. The cold war made it popular to be anti Communist. The Racial tension and conflicts created by mass immigration, made it real life on the streets and school yards to associate with your own, fight for your territory. But most of it was just a fashion, rather than a violent reality, often just a rebellion to left wing leaning school teachers.

In 1981 riots spread across the UK, as a reaction to police oppression, political instability and anger at the governments, who had destroyed industry and communities. Most of the riots came from the Black areas , like Brixton in London, St Pauls in Bristol, Toxteth in Liverpool, The Moss side in Manchester. But there was one which happened in Southall, west London, which was a Bengali Sikh area. This went off between Skinheads and the local population. A pub venue called the Hanborough Tavern, which had skinhead bands playing was burned to the ground, the skinhead kids in attendance almost being burned to death. But Margaret Thatcher, notorious for knee jerk reaction banned skinhead Oi! Music overnight. Records pulled from the shelves, blacklisting, no radio play. The fact 2tone, which was also a very popular music of the same time, was reggae based, with multi racial members, was ignored. Those bands distanced themselves from Skinheads or stopped playing.

Many of the mainstream Skinhead/Punk bands, known as OI! bands folded up, labels dropping them. But it didn’t kill skinheads. It just pushed it underground, and made an already violent subculture, more violent, and radicalised some, deeper into political extreme groups. In reality the actual racial violence was quite small, it was often nothing more than a few skinheads fighting a few left wing students, but it grabbed huge media attention, which actually fuelled it. Kids became skinheads, and thought it was a rule, to be racist, even though a big number of skinheads came from all white areas, and had probably never met a non white person. This rumbled on throughout the 1980’s, creating a small industry for some. Racialist motivated skinhead music was made and exported, which, not unlike Irish rebel music, got a fan base and fantasy wrapped around it. But also raised reasonably large amounts of money for those involved, and their political groups.

Industrial Strikes ravaged the 1970’s, ultimately culminating in a mass cull of industry right across the UK, making millions unemployed and destroyed working class communities

Skinheads never really recovered the huge numbers of 2tone 1979-1982.

The media constantly wrote that any violence or racism reported must therefore involve Skinheads, who would always be portrayed as the instigators, which drove huge divides and enhanced the public persona, but also exported the skinhead image, as one of a racist thug. White supremacist groups in USA, Hollywood and parts of Europe picked up the image and uniform, a monster was fed. Even today, and although Indonesia has one of the biggest Skinhead scenes on the planet, California has a big Hispanic Skinhead scene, whenever the word Skinhead is mentioned in the press, any random Racist white person, is often what they are talking about.

  • Yea good….a few things I would say is that there was racism with the skinheads in the 60’s ” Enoch Powell Rivers of blood speech” Paki bashing and the likes….. Also the racism of the 70’s was a trend of going against the status quo such as lefty teachers and a lot of kids attracted to being a skinhead were so because it was unpopular with the masses as with the NF…a lot went along with it as they did with the uniform…it was part and parcel…those days if you became a skin you became a racist and a lot loved to revel in there 5 minutes of TV glory seig Heiling for the cameras even though a lot couldn’t care…it was all about being anti social and what better way than pretend you agreed with what the country had fought against not 40 years previous….if we weren’t the outsider then we would make ourselves the outsider by any means possible…..I would also say that before becoming skinheads we were no bodies, part of a massive crowd then when we became skinheads we become something and infamous which as a kid we all yearned for. Jim
  • Skinheads were a violent youth culture, and a big part of that was street fighting with other young men, These days, would be seen as very politically incorrect. Squaddies, Pakistanis and even Gays were reported in the press, as being targets for skinhead aggression. But much of that was just media exaggeration, The mass majority of fighting was with any other group of young, mainly white men.
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The Story of Oi!

The Cockney Rejects’ 1980 performance at Birmingham’s Cedar Club remains unnoticed in the annals of rock history. It warrants no mention when music journalists compile the 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock, nor the 100 Craziest Gigs Ever, which seems like a terrible oversight. In fairness, no one is ever going to rank the show by the East End quartet – then enjoying chart success with a punk take on the West Ham terrace anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – alongside Jimi Hendrix at Monterey in terms of musical brilliance. Still, it has its own claim to historical import: by all accounts, it was the most violent gig in British history.

“I’d seen quite a bit on the terraces or outside football grounds, but this was carnage,” says Jeff Turner, today an immensely amiable decorator, then “Stinky” Turner, the Cockney Rejects’ teenage front man, cursed with what his former manager Garry Bushell tactfully describes as “a bit of a temper”. Turner continues: “There was a lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, my brother [Rejects’ guitarist Micky Geggus] really got done bad, with an ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor. Carnage.”

The problem was football-related. “Most of the punk bands at the time, they had their ideals – the Clash, Career Opportunities, political stuff, fair play,” says Turner. “When I was a kid, my thought for punk rock was that it could put West Ham on the front pages.” To this end, the band – affiliated to the club’s hooligans in the Inter City Firm – had appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham shirts. “After that, everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn’t back down,” says Turner. “Once you were defeated, it would have opened the floodgates for everybody.”

So the Rejects and their party fought: “Twenty Cockneys against … well, not all 300 Brummies were trying to attack us, but I’d say we were trying to fight off 50 to 100 people.” In the aftermath, Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects’ career as a live band was, in effect, over. An attempt to play Liverpool later that year ended after six songs “because there was 150 Scousers trying to kill us”, while a subsequent gig in Birmingham was aborted by the police: “The old bill got wind of it and escorted us on to the M6,” says Turner. “At the time, I was gutted, but now, I think, thank God for that. Someone could have died.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising the gig has been swept under the carpet of musical history: after all, so has the genre the Cockney Rejects inadvertently inspired. Thirty years after Bushell – then a writer for the music paper Sounds, as well as the Rejects’ manager – coined the term “Oi!” to describe a third generation of punk-inspired working-class bands playing “harder music on every level, guitar driven, terrace choruses”, it remains largely reviled or ignored in Britain.

In the eyes of its remaining fans, Oi! is the “real thing”, the genuine sound of Britain’s streets in the late 70s, populated by artists Bushell championed when the rest of the music press concentrated on “bands who dropped literary references you wouldn’t have got if you didn’t have a masters’ degree and wrote pretentious lyrics”. Bands such as the Cockney Rejects, the Angelic Upstarts – Marxists from South Shields managed by a man Bushell colourfully describes as “a psychopath – his house had bars over all the windows because people had thrown firebombs through it” – Red Alert, Peter and the Test Tube Babies. It briefly stormed the charts. The Angelic Upstarts followed the Cockney Rejects onto Top of the Pops, while Splodgenessabounds made the Top 10 with the deathless Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please. But today, if the general public have heard of it at all, they tend to agree with the assessment once offered by journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie: “Punk’s stunted idiot half-brother, musically primitive and politically unsavoury, with its close links to far-right groups.” It is, asserts Bushell, “without a doubt, the most misunderstood genre in history”.

The problem isn’t really to do with the music, although protracted exposure to the oeuvre of Peter and the Test Tube Babies – home to Student Wankers, Up Yer Bum and Pick Your Nose (and Eat It) – could leave all but the hardiest soul pleading tearfully for a few literary references and pretentious lyrics. The problem is Oi!’s adoption by the far-right as its soundtrack of choice. It wasn’t the only part of street culture to attract the attentions of the National Front and the British Movement in the late 70s and early 80s. Losing out at the polling stations thanks to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the NF had instigated a programme of “direct action”: it would attempt to kick its way into the headlines at football matches and gigs. Chart bands such as Sham 69, Madness and the Specials had concerts disrupted.In 1978, seig-heiling skinheads caused £7,500 worth of damage at a Sham 69 gig in London.

But it was to Oi! that the far-right was most attracted, not least because it attracted both football hooligans and the re-emergent skinhead movement – two groups the NF’s direct-action programme targeted for recruitment. “We played a gig in Camden, we saw these Nazi skinheads beating the shit out of these two punks,” remembers Turner. “They’d managed to wreck Sham 69’s career, but us with our following” – the ICF was then headed by Cass Pennant, whose parents were Jamaican – “we weren’t going to have it. We just went down and absolutely slaughtered them. We declared to them that if they ever set foot where we were again, we’d decimate them.” And so it proved. “Neo-nazis confronted the Rejects again at Barking station,” remembers Bushell. “They basically told them, ‘We’re going to come to your gigs, we’re going to do this and do that.’ The Rejects crew battered them all over the station. They didn’t come to the gigs after that.”

Bushell points out that there was “a Nazi subculture all the way through punk. Malcolm McLaren started it all with the swastikas, which thick people saw and thought, ‘Oh, they must be Nazis.’” There were white power punk bands, too – such as the Dentists and the Ventz, which were formed by the “Punk Front” division of the National Front, in lieu of real punk bands showing any interest in promoting white supremacy. It was a trick the NF would be forced to pull again when Oi! bands resisted their overtures – the party recruited a failed punk band from Blackpool called Skrewdriver and repositioned them as the musical voice of the neo-Nazi movement. “It was totally distinct from us,” says Bushell. “We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.”

Bushell’s latterday career as a gleeful provoker of the liberal left, writing for the Sun and the Daily Star, probably hasn’t done much to help public perceptions regarding Oi!’s political affiliations. When Oi! was at its height, however, he says he was a Trotskyist who did his best to infuse the movement with socialist principles. He organised Oi! conferences and debates, “trying to shape the movement, trying to stop the culture of violence, talking about doing unemployment benefits, working with the Right to Work campaign, prisoners’ rights gigs – I thought we could unite punk and social progress.” Not everyone was receptive: “Stinky Turner was at one debate, and he didn’t contribute much, apart from the classic line, ‘Oi! is working class, and if you’re not working class you’ll get a kick in the bollocks.’” He laughs. “Perfect! That was what the Rejects were all about.”

Trotskyist or not, Bushell also managed to exacerbate the problem, not least by masterminding the unfortunately titled 1981 compilation Strength Thru Oi!. “I didn’t know!” he protests. “I’d been active in politics for years and had never come across the phrase ‘strength through joy’ as a Nazi slogan.It was the title of a Skids EP.”

To compound matters, its cover featured a photograph of a skinhead who turned out to be the delectable-sounding Nicky Crane, who – nothing if not a multi-tasker – managed to combine life as a neo-Nazi activist with a secret career as a gay porn star. “I had a Christmas card on the wall, it had that image that was on the cover of Strength Thru Oi!, but washed out. I honestly, hand on my heart, thought it was a still from The Wanderers,” Bushell says. “It was only when the album came through for me to approve the artwork that I saw his tattoos. Of course, if I hadn’t been impatient, I would have said, right, fucking scrap this, let’s shoot something else entirely. Instead, we airbrushed the tattoos out. There were two mistakes there, both mine. Hands up.”

Much worse was to follow. A July 1981 Oi! gig featuring the 4-Skins and the Business in Southall – the scene of a racist murder in 1976 and the race riot that ended in the death of Blair Peach in 1979 – erupted into violent chaos: 110 people were hospitalised, and the venue, the Hambrough Tavern, was burned down after being petrol bombed. Depending on whose version of events you believe, it was either sparked by skinheads attacking Asians or Asian youths attacking gig-goers: either way, the Southall riot stopped Oi!’s commercial progress dead. The Cockney Rejects found that shops refused to stock their new album, The Power and the Glory: “I’d sung a song called Oi Oi Oi and all of a sudden there’s an Oi! movement and I didn’t really want anything to do with it,” says Turner. “This awful, awful shit happened in Southall, we were never there, and we got the rug pulled out from under our feet. I went from the TV screen to the labor exchange in 18 months.”

An inflammatory article in the Daily Mail exacerbated the situation further: “We never had an problems with Nazi activists at our gigs until after the Mail’s piece,” says Bushell. “Only then did we have people coming down, thinking it was going to be this rightwing thing, When they discovered it wasn’t, that’s when the trouble started. I was attacked at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club by about 20 of them. I had a knife pulled on me at Charing Cross station.”

That should have been that, had it not been for Oi!’s curious afterlife in America. Steve Whale – who joined the Business after Southall and struggled on through the 80s, re positioning the band as “street punk” – unexpectedly found himself in possession of a US recording contract with Bad Religion’s label Epitaph, lauded by bands including Boston’s Irish-punk stars the Dropkick Murphys and the extraordinarily influential California band Rancid. Jeff Turner has just returned from a tour of Japan: “Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya. I haven’t got fortunes but I’m able to do that. That’s all I can ask for, it makes me happy.”

“I had Lars Freidricksen of Rancid come in and sit in the pub round the corner from my house, welling up, telling me if it wasn’t for Oi! he might have killed himself as a teenager,” says Garry Bushell. “I thought, ‘Fuck me, it’s really had an effect on these people.’ I’m not proud of the way Oi! was misunderstood, but I’m proud of the music, proud of what it started, proud of what it gave punk.”

In Britain, he concedes, the genre’s name is still blackened in most people’s eyes. “There were people in 1976 saying punk had to be a Nazi thing because of the swastikas. The difference is, those bands had rock journalists on their side. The Oi! bands only had me.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “I did me best.”

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UK Immigration and the National Health Service

Immigration and the National Health Service: putting history to the forefront

Wedding-on-Somerleyton-Road-west indians in london
Stephanie Snow , Emma Jones | 08 March 2011

Executive Summary

  • The Coalition Government’s plans to restrict immigration to the UK through capping non-EU immigrants and to introduce more stringent controls for highly skilled migrants are contradictory given the long history of recruitment of overseas health workers.
  • Since the 1930s, successive governments have recruited doctors, nurses and other health workers from overseas to work in UK health services with the first mass recruitment waves of nurses from the African Caribbean in the 1950s and doctors from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s.
  • The need for health workers was significantly increased by the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 and the expansion of specialists and technologies.
  • Immigration controls were tightened during the 1960s and 1970s but the increasing demand for overseas health workers continued.
  • Discrimination around training and career opportunities of first generation overseas health workers has had negative consequences for recruitment from the second generation.
  • The lack of any system of accurate data to monitor the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers has exacerbated the difficulties of manpower planning.
  • Shortfalls in certain fields of nursing and medicine continue and are predicted to intensify because of an international shortage of health workers.
  • Putting history to the forefront would help policymakers realize the significance of the NHS’s continuous dependence on overseas health workers and the need therefore both to improve equity and opportunity for such health workers and to integrate this fact of health manpower planning into national immigration policy.

Introduction

The current recruitment of junior doctors from India appears incongruous given the Coalition Government’s plans to cap non-EU immigrants, apply transitional controls for all new EU members in future, and introduce more stringent controls for highly skilled migrants. Yet present preoccupations about immigration take no account of the impact of such measures on public services such as the National Health Service (NHS) which has a long history of reliance on overseas health workers. Since the 1930s, successive governments have resolved staffing crises through recruiting workers from overseas. The NHS currently employs around 30 per cent of nurses and doctors from black and minority ethnic (BME*) groups with approximately 30 per cent of doctors and 40 per cent of nurses born outside the UK. The low awareness of the historical importance of overseas recruitment to the NHS has artificially constrained immigration debates. It has also contributed to the failure to tackle the discrimination experienced by these workers in training and career opportunities. BME clinicians are over-represented in the lower grades of the professions, under-represented in senior managerial positions, and work in the less popular areas; fewer than 10 per cent of NHS senior managers and only 1 per cent of NHS chief executives have a minority ethnic background.

Putting history to the forefront requires addressing deep-seated and difficult questions around immigration and the NHS that have never been tackled by policy makers. Health worker shortages have been a perennial problem for a number of interrelated reasons including difficulties around nurse recruitment and retention, the reluctance of UK-trained doctors to take up posts in unpopular locations and specialties, and the challenges of balancing the production of doctors and nurses with NHS staffing needs against the unpredictable forces of immigration and emigration. The difficulties look set to continue given the international shortages of health workers which are anticipated to reach 53,000 in the UK, 40,000 in Australia, and 275,000 in the US over the coming year.

Recruitment of overseas nurses

Staffing crises in British hospitals had been identified long before the establishment of the NHS in 1948 and concern over nurse shortages had been the subject of numerous government inquiries which blamed low recruitment on inadequate training, poor pay, and the marriage bar. During the Second World War, hospital domestic and nursing work was regarded as vital to the war effort and attracted a large number of women into national service. But staffing the new NHS was compromised by the national post-war labour shortage. The unprecedented increases in the medical and nursing workforce over the first decade of the NHS exacerbated the problem. Between 1949 and 1958 the medical workforce increased by 30 per cent in England and 50 per cent in Scotland; the nursing and midwifery workforce increased by 26 per cent across Britain. The most severe shortages were in unpopular areas of nursing such as hospitals for the chronically sick, mental hospitals and in geriatric nursing.

As early as 1949 the Ministries of Health and Labour, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council and the Royal College of Nursing launched campaigns to recruit hospital staff directly from the Caribbean. Recruitment was aimed at three main categories of worker: hospital auxiliary staff, nurses or trainee nurses, and domestic workers. Senior NHS staff from Britain travelled to the Caribbean to recruit, and vacancies were often published in local papers. In 1949, the Barbados Beacon advertised for nursing auxiliaries to work in hospitals across Britain; applicants were to be aged between 18 and 30, literate, and willing to commit to a three-year contract. By 1955 there were official nursing recruitment programmes across 16 British colonies and former colonies. Over the next two decades, the British colonies and former colonies provided a constant supply of cheap labour to meet staffing shortages in the NHS, and the number of women from the African Caribbean entering Britain to work in the NHS grew steadily until the early 1970s. By the end of 1965, there were 3,000-5,000 Jamaican nurses working in British hospitals, many of them concentrated in London and the Midlands. It has been estimated that by 1972, 10,566 students had been recruited from abroad, and that by 1977 overseas recruits represented 12 per cent of the student nurse and midwife population in Britain, of which 66 per cent came from the Caribbean.

By the late 1980s, the NHS again faced serious problems in the retention and recruitment of nursing staff, much as it had done in 1948. The problem now involved chronic shortages of both trainees and qualified nurses. Nursing’s popularity as a career choice among school leavers had declined markedly. Changing social expectations and financial constraints meant that young people were now seeking better-paid job opportunities in other sectors of the economy. The abolition of work permits for overseas nurses in 1983 added to the difficulties. Meanwhile, an estimated 30,000 nurses were leaving the NHS every year; their departure blamed on long-standing problems associated with low salary levels and the pressures of the job. By 1998, there were reports that the shortages in newly qualified nurses were approximating 8,000 a year. Problems intensified with the expansion of the NHS in 2000 which created additional demand for nurses that were met by recruiting workers from India.

Recruitment of overseas doctors

The shortage of doctors in the UK was well-established by the 1960s especially in unpopular locations such as single-handed general practices in deprived urban areas and remote rural locations, and in hospital specialties like mental health and care of the elderly. In 1944, the Goodenough Committee had recommended expanding medical schools to relieve shortages but the 1957 Willink Committee decided that student numbers should be cut because of the risk of overproduction. Taking into account the minimum five year period of training, the Committee concluded that reducing medical student intake by 10 per cent between 1961 and 1975 would keep numbers in balance. Since 1939 student numbers had increased by more than a third and even before the Committee’s recommendations were made public some medical schools had begun to reduce their student intakes. Yet, within months of the report’s publication, it became evident that in fact a shortage of medical personnel was imminent.

In retrospect it is clear that the Willink Committee’s estimates failed to anticipate the need for extra doctors to improve future health services and to meet the requirements of a growing population. These underestimates drove the first mass wave of medical recruitment from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and by 1960, between 30 and 40 per cent of all junior doctors in the NHS were from these countries. In 1961, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead told the House of Lords: ‘The Health Service would have collapsed if it had not been for the enormous influx from junior doctors from such countries as India and Pakistan’. The emigration of these doctors built on Britain’s historical links with its ex-colonial territories, especially India. As a direct result of colonial rule, by the time of Indian Independence in 1947 Indian medical schools and hospital administration ran along the lines of the British model. Medical education and training were delivered in English, and geared towards meeting the requirements of the General Medical Council. This ensured that Indian-trained doctors would be able to work in Britain, and encouraged overseas medical graduates to come and gain further training and experience that they would then take home. Emigration of large numbers of UK-trained doctors to work mainly in the United States and Canada, because of the relatively poor pay and conditions of the NHS, compounded the shortages. By the late 1960s, Henry Miller, Professor of Neurology at Newcastle University and chairman of the British Medical Association’s Committee for Planning, estimated that the annual emigration of British trained doctors amounted to between 30 and 50 per cent of the annual number of medical graduates.

In 1963 the Conservative Health Minister, Enoch Powell, who later led the call for stricter controls on immigration, launched a campaign to recruit trained doctors from overseas to fill the manpower shortages caused by NHS expansion. Some 18,000 of them were recruited from India and Pakistan. Powell praised these doctors, who he said, ‘provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of our hospitals and who are an advertisement to the world of British medicine and British hospitals.’ Many of those recruited had several years of experience in their home countries and arrived to gain further medical experience, training, or qualification. In 1968, the recruitment of overseas doctors was fuelled again by the predictions of further medical shortages by the Todd Committee, which recommended expanding medical schools. By 1971, 31 per cent of all doctors working in the NHS in England were born and qualified overseas. Overseas doctors remained central to NHS staffing throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, filling vacancies in locations and specialties that were unpopular with UK trained doctors. In 1997, 44 per cent of 7,229 newly registered doctors (under full registration) had received their initial medical education overseas.

Brixton riots 1981.
Brixton riots 1981.

Racial integration has caused issues in British society for many years, with street riots in areas like Brixton in London

Immigration controls

Since the nineteenth century and before, Britain has had a long history of immigration and racial tensions have arisen from groups such as the Irish and East European Jews settling in the country. However, post-war mass migration changed the UK’s ethnic landscape in an unprecedented way and successive governments sought to allay public anxiety by introducing tighter controls around immigration. By the 1960s, the 1948 Nationality Act, which had granted British citizenship to citizens of British colonies and former British colonies, was under attack. In 1962, the then Conservative Government introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, restricting the admission of Commonwealth settlers to those who had been issued with employment vouchers. In the eighteen-months before the Act was passed, many new arrivals came to Britain. This large influx stoked popular fears of uncontrolled immigration, which sustained calls for increased controls. In 1968, a new Labour Government introduced a second Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which distinguished between British passport holders, with the right to live in Britain, and those without. The law was rushed through with the primary purpose of restricting the entry into Britain of Kenyan Asians, driven out by the ‘Africanisation’ policies of the Kenyan government. As British passport holders, Kenyan Asians had had, up to this point, unconditional right of entry. While this new piece of legislation applied to all Commonwealth countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, it was more unlikely that people from the New Commonwealth would qualify as patrials, thereby creating a division between white and black Commonwealth citizens.

Exceptions to immigration controls were made for essential and well-qualified staff, hence both nurses and doctors were exempt from the immigration controls imposed in the 1960s. In general, the men and women who came to work in the NHS were welcomed throughout this period of political agitation. Their professional status distinguished them from the mass of migrants, most of whom were classified as unskilled. In spite of his later vocal opposition to black and Asian immigration in general, Health Minister Enoch Powell championed the recruitment of overseas nurses in the early 1960s. As historian of the NHS, Charles Webster suggests, this apparent anomaly was perhaps because the immigration of nurses not only ‘provided a plentiful supply of cheap labour, reduced wastage, and undermined the shortage argument’ but also ‘strengthened his hand in pressing for a strong line against the nurses’ pay claim, which itself was his chief weapon in his wider campaign to induce colleagues to adopt a more aggressive approach to the control of public sector pay.’ Immigrant nurses were therefore an expedient means of providing political leverage.

The situation had altered by the 1970s. Immigration laws undermined the employment rights of overseas nurses. The automatic right of entry to prospective nurses from the Commonwealth was withdrawn with the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act. Later, in 1983, work permits for nurses were also abolished prohibiting further entry of overseas nurses to train in Britain. A report for the Commission of Racial Equality, published that same year, found a higher proportion of trained overseas-born nurses, than overseas-born nurses in training. It also stated that less than 9 per cent of nurses employed by the NHS were born in developing countries. Despite attempts to improve recruitment within the UK, the shortage of qualified nursing staff continued, and was approximating 8,000 a year by 1998. The subsequent expansion of the NHS under New Labour created a need to rapidly increase the nursing workforce but while the number of British training places was increased, this did not solve the immediate demand for workforce growth. International recruitment became one of the government’s key strategies in tackling the chronic shortage of qualified nurses, this time with a focus on recruiting already trained nurses and midwives from overseas, rather than training them in the UK. In 2002-03 more than half of the nurses newly registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council had trained outside Britain. Unlike for overseas nurses, the tightening of immigration controls in the 1970s and 1980s had not significantly reduced the numbers of overseas doctors coming to Britain, while the output of UK medical schools continued to fall short of the NHS’ manpower needs. The flow of overseas doctors into and out of the UK is not monitored, but estimates from the early 1980s suggest that around a third of the yearly influx of overseas doctors returned to their home country. In 1985 the work permit scheme was eventually extended to include doctors. An official ‘loophole’ was created however which meant that overseas doctors could continue to seek postgraduate training in Britain for a four year permit-free period, extendable for a further year after approval from the postgraduate dean. In 1997, this permit-free period of postgraduate training was extended to six years.

The output from UK medical schools was increased in 2000 and this brought a change in attitude towards overseas doctors. By 2005 the government feared that the recruitment of overseas doctors would deny employment to a large number of home-grown medical graduates, especially as International Medical Graduates (IMGs), who were often highly skilled, and with several years’ experience in their chosen field, remained an attractive prospect for the NHS. In a bid to keep junior posts open for graduates who were British or EEA nationals, in April 2006 the Department of Health retrospectively sought to debar IMGs from applying for training posts in the NHS. Under new rules, hospitals were told they must prove they could not recruit a junior doctor from the UK or the EU before shortlisting candidates from other countries. The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) challenged the Government in the High Court, which ruled that the Department of Health’s guideline was illegal. The judgement was upheld by the House of Lords in April 2008, but not before thousands of overseas doctors had had their opportunity of permit-free training abruptly withdrawn at great personal and financial costs to themselves and their careers. The long-term implications of this action however were not anticipated so the UK is now once again looking to recruit Indian-trained doctors to fill vacancies in specialties unpopular with UK-trained graduates.

Discrimination, qualifications and training

Migrants arriving in the first wave of mass migration endured verbal and physical abuse both within and outside the workplace. White trade unionists resisted the employment of migrants and imposed a quota system. Within the NHS, concern that importing overseas workers was likely to create tensions was recognised in a 1949 Home Office memo:

‘it has been found that the susceptibilities of patients tended to set an upper limit on the proportion of coloured workers who could be employed either as nurses or domiciliaries.’

Racism and discrimination have been universal experiences of health workers migrating to the UK especially around training and career progression. Many of the nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s expected to achieve the internationally-recognised State Registered Nurse qualification (SRN) which would allow them to return home and gain employment. But nursing authorities at that time argued that their racial characteristics limited their intellectual capacities and motivation to achieve that level of training. Thus many overseas nurses were forced or even duped into State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) training rather than the more prestigious and more highly valued SRN qualification. The longer term consequences of this were significant as the SEN was not an internationally-recognised qualification and limited overseas nurses’ options for returning home.

The move towards recruiting overseas-trained nurses has not prevented discrimination and exploitation. Overseas-trained nurses are required to complete a programme of supervised practice placement and adaptation, but as the Researching Equal Opportunities for Overseas-trained nurses and other Healthcare Professionals (REOH) Study found, the skills and experiences of these highly trained individuals are not given adequate recognition within the inflexible formal assessment and accreditation system in the UK, leading to under-grading, deskilling, and skills waste. Like nurses, BME doctors have been disadvantaged by the medical profession’s internal hierarchies which left them working on the geographical and institutional margins of medicine. As migrants, they experienced difficulties in getting shortlisted for jobs and were more likely to gain posts away from prestigious teaching hospitals and medical schools. Some even had to accept lower remuneration in order to support themselves and their families. Nor were BME doctors trained in the UK exempt from barriers, particularly around selection processes where those responsible for shortlisting candidates frequently excluded individuals on the basis of a foreign surname.

The legacy of discrimination against first generation overseas health workers has had consequences for the recruitment from the second generation. Nurses, especially, do not see nursing or other health service work as a career they would wish for their daughters. And although some of the barriers have been removed since the 1990s with new legislation and workplace regulations, institutional discrimination within the NHS continues to impede many working lives. This has direct implications for the future of the NHS and its status as a world-leading provider of healthcare as it is likely to continue to need to recruit manpower from overseas

Manpower planning

Since the 1930s, unplanned shifts in population growths, upturns and downturns in economic conditions, and changing political motivations have created and continue to create contingencies in NHS staffing for which successive governments were and are unprepared. It is clear that any government would find it very difficult to manage health manpower requirements by achieving equilibrium between migration and immigration flows. Shortages of health workers, especially doctors, are difficult to handle because of the lag time between the creation of training places and qualification.

Nevertheless, a lack of longitudinal data to track the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers has contributed to the difficulties. As has the fact that workforce planning for medicine and for nursing has been treated as two separate enterprises, despite evidence from economic analysts since the 1960s of the inherent problems in this approach. In May 2006, Josie Irwin, Head of Employment Relations for the Royal College of Nursing, summarised the difficulties in oral evidence to the House of Commons’ Health Committee. Numbers of nurses, she said, had increased by 85,000 since 1997. However: ‘the quality of workforce planning in the UK means that we do not know where all those nurses have gone; we do not know how many of them have stayed in the UK; we do not know how many of them have stayed in the NHS … we do not know very much about the retirement behaviour of these nurses … the success of importing new numbers of nurses in the UK is challenged by not knowing enough about them once they have entered the workforce.’

Manpower challenges persist. A 2008 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Looming Crisis in the Health Workforce, suggests that the overall pool of potential workers will diminish internationally on account of contractions in younger age cohorts. UK medical and nursing school places have increased significantly over the last 10 years with the aim of developing a sustainable UK-trained workforce. Yet history suggests that the UK’s dependence on overseas health workers will continue and may even be exacerbated by the international shortage of health workers.

Conclusions

The Coalition Government’s resolve to introduce further curbs on immigration as a response to public concern about the drain of migrants on local resources simply repeats the contradictory patterns of earlier administrations. Putting history to the forefront would help policymakers construct historically-evidenced agendas that could aid health manpower planning and improve equity and opportunity for significant numbers of health workers.

Current debates need to reflect on the impact of tightening immigration controls – including those for highly skilled migrants – on public services, especially the NHS. The forces of migration and emigration are unlikely to weaken given the global nature of the healthcare market, and the NHS will continue to need to recruit staff from overseas. Acknowledging the UK’s long reliance on overseas health workers and establishing a system for the collection of longitudinal data to monitor the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers are achievable short-term policy goals which would help manpower planning enormously. Measures could be put in place to ensure the qualifications and training of highly skilled migrants are recognised within UK systems; and institutional discrimination around training and career opportunities in the NHS needs continuing redress. Addressing the deep-seated problems around nurse recruitment and retention, and the unpopularity of certain medical specialties and locations are much more challenging issues and will require a longer timeframe. History shows that it is in the UK’s long-term interests to ensure that future generations of overseas health workers operating in a global market will choose to work in the NHS.

*Technical Note: BME: the predominant term employed throughout this article is ‘black and minority ethnic’, or BME, to describe all members of minority racial groups. Other terms such as ‘black’, ‘West Indian’, ‘Caribbean’, ‘Afro-Caribbean’, and ‘South Asian’ and ‘Asian’ have been used where appropriate to distinguish between ethnic minority groups. We recognise that the persons to whom the terms are applied do not necessarily define themselves by such terms.

Further Reading


Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2008) The Looming Crisis in the Health Workforce.

Panayi, Panikos (2010) An Immigration History of Britain. Pearson Education. Julian M Simpson, Aneez Esmail, Virinder S Kalra, Stephanie J Snow (2010) ‘Writing migrants back into NHS history: addressing a ‘collective amnesia’ and its policy implications’,Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103(10): 392-6.

Smith Pam A., Helen Allan, Leroi W Henry, John A Larsen, and Maureen M. Mackintosh (2006) ‘Valuing and Recognising the Talents of a Diverse Healthcare Workforce’, Report from the REOH Study: Researching Equal Opportunities for Overseas-trained Nurses and Other Healthcare Professionals. European Institute of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, the Open University and the Royal College of Nursing.

Migrant Health Workers in the NHS

About the author


Stephanie Snow and Emma Jones are Wellcome Research Associates in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine, University of Manchester. stephanie.snow@manchester.ac.uk; emma.l.jones@manchester.ac.uk. This paper is based on their new book, Against the Odds: Black, Minority and Ethnic Clinicians and Manchester, 1948-2009, published by Carnegie Press, 2010 on behalf of Manchester Primary Care Trust who funded the research.

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Football hooliganism makes it to America

Football, or as Americans call it ‘Soccer’ may be one of the fastest growing sports in America – with the English Premier League watched by millions each week – but it appears some of its worst excesses may have crossed the Atlantic. 

Two gangs of rival supporters were seen brawling in the streets of New Jersey Sunday afternoon ahead of a heated clash between the New York Red Bulls and newly-formed New York City Football Club.

In scenes reminiscent of the blood-soaked battles between British hooligan gangs, shirtless men bellowed ‘who are ya?’ at one another and lashed out with full trash bags and sandwich boards outside a supporters’ bar.

The unedifying confrontation raised the prospect of a violent soccer culture having migrated west, along with many of its best-known players, who have accepted big-money deals to devote themselves to U.S teams. 

 Scuffles break out outside New Jersey bar ahead of soccer derby 

Attack: Street brawlers were pictured in Newark, New Jersey, attacking one another with sandwich boards and shouting ahead of a New York City FC vs New York Red Bulls soccer match

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Attack: Street brawlers were pictured in Newark, New Jersey, attacking one another with sandwich boards and shouting ahead of a New York City FC vs New York Red Bulls soccer match

'Who are ya?': The fighters were shouting at one another in faux-British accents, appearing to mimic the hooligan cultures which plagues UK soccer

‘Who are ya?’: The fighters were shouting at one another in faux-British accents, appearing to mimic the hooligan cultures which plagues UK soccer

The clash took place not far from Penn Station in Newark, and under a mile from the Red Bull Stadium, where the Red Bulls eventually beat NYCFC two goals to nil.

The fans fought – reportedly only for a few minutes – outside Bello’s Pub and Grill, a New York Red Bulls supporters’ bar.

A member of staff told DailyMail.com the clash did not involve patrons drinking inside and it is the first known instance of soccer-related violence around the stadium

Violence and gang culture related to soccer fans has been a serious problem in Great Britain and other European countries, where riot police and mounted officers often attend the most emotional games in an attempt to keep the peace.

One passing witness said ‘Some of the guys had tattoos and were making hand gestures, whilst bouncing on the spot, a bit like a child desperate for an ice cream’

Soccer authorities have been promoting a sanitized version of the game in the United States, garnering many fans in the process.

The elevated profile of the sport – as well as big-money contracts – have seen famous European players moved to American teams.

Shirtless: Some of the fans wore little clothing as they clashed not far from Newark's busy Penn Station

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Shirtless: The appalling site of fat guts put local residents off of their hot dogs. Some of the fans wore little clothing as they clashed not far from Newark’s busy Penn Station

Intervention: An NJ Transit Police squad car was seen headed for the fans towards the end of the clip

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Intervention: An NJ Transit Police squad car was seen headed for the fans towards the end of the clip

Quite the welcome: Fans at the game displayed this banner - satirizing the way many European players towards the end of their careers have signed deals with U.S. clubs

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Quite the welcome: Fans at the game displayed this banner – satirizing the way many European players towards the end of their careers have signed deals with U.S. clubs. Big names include David Beckham, Thierry Henri and Chelsea’s Frank Lampard – who played Sunday for NYC FC.

Hollywood producer Albert Goldstein has immediately called for a script to be written, and is desperately looking for an English sounding American actor to play firm boss ‘Road-sign Randy’

The violence tonight raises the question of whether individual soccer fans may be attempting to transfer the so-called hooligan culture across the Atlantic.

The video shows an New Jersey Transit Police squad car responded to the violence. DailyMail.com has contacted NJ Transit and the Newark Police Department for comment. 

Reminiscent: The men seemed to be imitating the football violence which is common overseas - pictured above are fans in Germany being held back by riot police

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Reminiscent: The men seemed to be imitating the football violence which is common overseas – pictured above are fans in Germany being held back by riot police

Transplant: Former Chelsea player Frank Lampard, pictured above with his fiancee Christine Bleakley in Times Square, is one of several European stars to transfer to the U.S.

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Transplant: Former Chelsea player Frank Lampard, pictured above with his fiancee Christine Bleakley in Times Square, is one of several European stars to transfer to the US

The height of the British hooligan culture, was the 1970’s and 80’s until Maggie Thatcher clamped down on it, with heavy fines and jail terms. The New Yorkers have some distance to go, than a few cafe signs and ‘Oo Are ya’s’ 

SOCCER HOOLIGANISM VIDEO ECHOES ELIJAH WOOD ‘GREEN STREET’ FILM

Soccer fans brawling in the streets may be new in reality, but the fascination of hooligan-style violence to Americans has been given the silver screen treatment in the past.

2005’s Green Street Hooligans, which stars Elijah Wood, demonstrated told the story of a Harvard drop-out who was enticed into the violent world of British sporting violence.

Wood’s character left college in disgrace after taking the fall for his roommate’s cocaine use, then moved to London and got caught up in the Green Street Elite, a group with links to London’s West Ham football club.

The young American gets caught up in the brutality and camaraderie of the so-called GSE, which organizes huge, bloody brawls with fans of rival clubs.

However, he is scared away from hooligan culture for good after a family friend is beaten to death when a fight gets out of hand. Elijah Wood joins British football hooligans in Greet Street 

Visceral: Elijah Wood, right, starred in Green Street, which saw him take on British football hooligans on their own turf
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Visceral: Elijah Wood, right, starred in Green Street, which saw him take on British football hooligans on their own turf

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3191764/Has-British-style-hooliganism-infiltrated-American-soccer-Fans-brawl-streets-ahead-New-York-derby-match.html#ixzz3iUjsJWAy
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George Cole Dies aged 90, A British Legend

Actor George Cole, best known for playing Arthur Daley in TV’s Minder, has died aged 90.

Cole played the Cockney wheeler dealer Daley for 16 years, between 1979 and 1994.

He also starred in a number of St Trinian’s films as shady businessman Flash Harry.

Agent Derek Webster said Cole had died at the Royal Berkshire hospital following a short illness, surrounded by his family.

“It is with deep regret that I have to announce the sad death of one of our most loved and respected actors,” 

George was a much loved actor, and great inspiration for working class people. playing the lovable rogue, Wheeler Dealer anti authority character. He became the name used for the dodgy second hand card dealer, that you cant trust as far as you can throw him.

God love ya sunshine, see you at the Winchester Club in the sky, So long as ‘Er indoors aint there’

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Sharpies, Australian

Sharpies, or sharps, are the darlings of Australian gang fashion. They started out in the 1960s when groups of working-class teenagers in Melbourne, and to a lesser extent, Sydney, came together over cars, tattoos, fights, and “dressing sharp.” While US-style motorcycle clubs evolved around leather jackets, Australian sharpies defined themselves by Conny tops, Staggers jeans, and chiseled shoes. But like bikers, sharpies placed a similar value on loyalty asserted with violence.

Nick Tolewski was in his early teens in the late 1970s when he and his friends started taking photos of the Thomastown Sharps, one of Melbourne’s largest sharpie groups in the city’s north. A few years ago Tolewski self-published some photos of the period in a book titled Once Were Sharps. Now, with a second book on the way, we sat down for a chat.

VICE: Hi, Nick. Tell me about growing up with these guys.
Nick Tolewski: A lot of them lived on the same street. As a young kid I would see them at Andy’s Pinball Parlour, the roller disco on Settlement Road, the swimming pool, the youth center on a Friday night, or at the Main Street Recreation Reserve. Then I got to know some of them through my love of pigeons. I used to breed pigeons when I was five and so did a bunch of the Thomastown Sharps. So we used to go to each other’s houses and check out what we each had. But see, I was eight years younger than a lot of them. I used to run around like a little mascot to them. When I was 13 I started boxing with Squirt, who was similar in age and part of the sharpies because his brother was Thomastown’s main guy.

Apparently sharpies were like Australian skinheads. Were they racists?
Nah, they weren’t. The Thomastown Sharps were all different nationalities. They had all religions, races… it was all mixed. A lot of the ethnics had been in Thomastown for 20 years. The rest of the city was still getting used to the influx of migrants that arrived in the 50s and 60s, but Thomastown had racial harmony.

But they were definitely violent?
Oh, sure. The Thomastown Sharps had five big names: Big Louie, Blacky, Mitcho, Big Ears, and Wayne. They were all the big blokes and got in a lot of brawls, but Big Louie was definitely the toughest. He didn’t fear anyone. He knew Chopper Read the best out of Thomo boys and they spent some time together in Pentridge Prison.

There are a lot of tattoos in these photos. Tell me about what tattoos meant?
To get inked back then made a statement. Some of the boys got the names of the core members tattooed on them. It was like a badge of honor and a distinctive statement that showed you didn’t care what others thought. The boys couldn’t always afford to get them done properly, so they’d jerry-rig a tattoo gun with pen ink, wire, and a small motor. Snatch tattooed “fuck off” on Pee Wee’s lip. The Pink Panther and a bluebird were also iconic tattoos among the sharps.

That takes me to my next observation: There’s not a lot of girls in these photos. Did anyone ever have a girlfriend?
Yeah, there weren’t too many girls in Thomastown, but there were a few scattered across different sharpie gangs. They were tough and held their own. No one did them any favors because they could do it for themselves. But a lot of the guys had girlfriends. Snatch had a fair few. He was seen as the ladies man among the Thomo sharps. He used to pull in the sheilas.

What happened to the Thomastown Sharps?
In the early 80s, they started using guns. Places started getting shot up and the whole gang thing was taken to another level. Also drugs got in the way. Blokes were getting on heroin. They were ten years older and everything changed.

So what are these guys doing now?
One of them works for the local council of Whittlesea. One is a schoolteacher in Daylesford. Another is a builder in Bundoora. A lot of them became panel beaters. But the majority of them don’t work these days. And a lot of them have passed away from overdoses or car accidents.

What do you think of modern gangs?
No good, mate. Too much violence with knives and guns, which leads to killings. The Lebanese Tigers and Black Dragons used to do their karate, but most of the fights back in the day were fists and feet. Also, gangs now take all types of drugs that make them go mad. It’s not good.

So what do you still find appealing about the sharpies?
The look of them. With their hair, tattoos, clothes, and how they hung out as a gang. They were tough, you know. And as a little kid, coming from a working class family, you looked up to those guys. They gave me a sense of belonging and purpose.

Interview by Dan Nulley. Follow him on Twitter