Facing a Multiracial Future

A worried white majority confronts the stress of change

London's elegant Regent's Park Road is closed by Muslims prostrate in prayer for the holy month of Ramadan. Carnaby Street, whose chic boutiques launched the miniskirt in the Swinging Sixties, now has the slightly raffish look of an Oriental bazaar; half its shops are owned or managed by Indians and Pakistanis. Jamaican crackers outsell English tea biscuits in the Brixton district, while the rhythms of steel bands throb from clubs in Notting Hill. Much more jarring and incongruous, in an odd echo of the American '60s, the summer nights are also sometimes rocked by the sounds of youthful violence between races.

Most reluctantly, Britain has become a multiracial society. An influx of dark-skinned immigrants, mainly from Pakistan and the Commonwealth countries of the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, has woven strands of rich diversity into the staid patterns of English life, especially in the six major urban areas where two-thirds of them have settled. While Britain's 1.9 million newcomers represent a mere 3.4% of the 56 million population, the white majority is deeply perturbed by their presence. In a time of mounting unemployment (1.4 million), many whites fear that their jobs, their homes and even their culture are threatened by the darker faces in their midst. And with increasing frequency, their resentment flares into open hatred.

So concerned is the new Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about all this that it plans to deal with the immigration "problem" even before tackling the white-on-white hatreds that have plagued Northern Ireland for a decade. In fact, even while Thatcher was meeting her fellow Commonwealth leaders at their early-August conference in Zambia, back in London her Ministers were quietly completing new proposals to curb immigration from the Commonwealth countries. They stem from the Tories' belief that unless white fears are placated during the next few years, when unemployment is expected to rise to perhaps 2 million as a result of efforts to curb inflation, Britain could be wracked by a racial explosion.

Even now, British headlines reflect daily evidence of accumulating racial strain. A white man is mugged. A black teen-ager is pushed under a bus by white hooligans. A middle-aged Asian is beaten to death in the subway by three whites. A dead mouse is slipped into a Bengali worker's lunch pail. Soccer crowds jeer "coon" at a black player on the field.

In April, during the election campaign, a bloody race riot erupted in the West London district of Southall, near Heathrow Airport, which has the capital's biggest concentration of Indians and Pakistanis. Police had feared a clash between left-wing Asian militants and members of the racist, neofascist National Front, which had planned a campaign rally. But even before the rally, hundreds of Asian youths rained stones and bottles on the cops. They promptly counterattacked, clubbing young Indians and Pakistanis to the ground and dragging them into vans. "They got what they asked for," a bitter constable said afterward.

Other Western European states have had to deal with sizable racial minorities in the form of "guest workers" who have been allowed in on a temporary basis to fill factory and public service jobs. But in Britain, by contrast, most of the minorities are citizens; moreover, fully 40% of the country's nonwhites were born in Britain, and that proportion is swelling fast as a result of a birth rate that is 50% higher than the national average. Yet there is an almost unconscious refusal to accept them. In the last major poll on racial issues, taken by Gallup in February 1978, 49% thought that nonwhites should be offered financial help to return "home," as if they were not already there. Indeed, the British seem to regard the race problem as an unfortunate accident from which they still hope to recover.

During World War II, colonials of many races throughout the Empire fought under the Union Jack. In 1948 a grateful Labor government introduced the British Nationality Act; it said that citizens of the Commonwealth countries were also citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, thus providing the legal framework for future waves of immigration. By 1955 the first brown and black faces appeared in Yorkshire mill towns, drawn by high wages and, ironically, a vision of colonial-era civility. In 1962, after this immigration reached a peak of nearly 90,000 a year, a worried Parliament began limiting Commonwealth entry and the influx was reduced.

But the problem had already arrived. Hoping to legislate it away, Parliament in 1965 passed a race relations act that made it illegal to incite racial hatred. Broadened in 1968 and 1976, the act now bans discrimination in employment, schools and housing, and empowers a Commission for Racial Equality to investigate violations. In its first successful action, which came only last November, the CRE ordered a Birmingham restaurant to stop refusing nonwhite customers. The CRE has also acted to help individuals like Sohan Singh Saggu, a Leeds factory worker of Asian ancestry who was forced to build a 6-ft. hardboard partition around his lathe because fellow workers were continually spitting on him. After the CRE intervened, the factory promised to halt the abuse, and Saggu took down his bleak little fort.

For years most politicians evaded the race issue, and successive governments behaved as though time and good intentions would somehow make it go away. Says a ranking civil servant: "I think the difference between the U.S. and here is that in America the Government has been willing to do something more than pass laws. Here, once Parliament had passed the Race Relations Act, it then treated it as a bed to sleep on."

This inaction has allowed some voices of hate to win a wider hearing than they might have had otherwise. For instance, the National Front, as the only political group actually encouraging violence against minorities, has achieved notoriety beyond its membership of 20,000 or so with scare tactics and street demonstrations. But both the Tories and Labor have carefully refrained from playing reckless politics with race. The Labor Party at least has correctly diagnosed the nature of Britain's racial ills even if it failed to push through any forceful program while in office. Says Merlyn Rees, Labor's shadow Home Secretary: "We need to counter the myths and propaganda about immigration and immigrants and state the positive case for a multiracial society. The real question facing us is not immigration but race relations."

But so far Rees is one of the few responsible voices attempting to rouse Britons to this reality. Margaret Thatcher was helped by the race issue during her campaign. "The moment a minority threatens to become a big one," she said on TV early last year, "people get frightened. The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in." After that speech, Thatcher's standing in the polls shot up 11%, because she seemed to be granting respectability to anti-immigrant sentiment.

The Thatcher immigration policy is aimed at curbing "those coming in." The proposals, which will be formally announced in the fall, would restrict most further immigration to the wives and children of male heads of families already legally settled in Britain; that would chiefly affect nonwhites, since many would-be white immigrants would be admitted under a provision allowing immigration of persons who have a British-born grandparent. Under the Tory plan, the new Commonwealth inflow would drop in twelve months from the 1978 total of 42,939 to as low as 28,000, and would further decline over the next five years to under 5,000 annually. Also, those who are admitted would have to prove they can support themselves without aid while looking for jobs. The aim is a virtual halt in nonwhite immigration. Vows a senior Whitehall official: "We shall see the end of the immigration era within the lifetime of the present Parliament."

But slamming the door will not soon dispel the antagonism toward nonwhites that originally arose in the colonial era and was later compounded, as the Empire faded, by an uneasy feeling that racial diversity was yet another symptom of national decline. As one troubled Londoner complained to TIME, many Britons "have been made to feel that they don't belong to their own country any more." A white lawyer, speaking about a visit to the capital's racially mixed Peckham area, expressed a common lament: "I felt completely alien. I felt pressure."

On the basis of numbers alone, the presence of less than 2 million nonwhites should not appear threatening to white Britons. After all, many immigrants tend to take jobs that whites no longer want, such as hospital orderlies, garbage collectors and bus conductors. What has magnified white fears so greatly is the immigrants' concentration in London and other manufacturing centers where they speak their own language, buy their own foods, make their own music. In Birmingham, some schools are more than 50% black. Sections of Bradford, a textile town that has many Indian workers, look more like Madras than the Midlands.

Brixton, a South London district of small row houses where 70,000 West Indians live, is rapidly deteriorating into the capital's first true ghetto, a backwater of black alienation and crime. Cecil, 18, a slender youth with a black leather cap, leans against the doorway of the Brixton unemployment office on Coldharbour Lane and says, "I wouldn't work in this country. I'd rather be a crook." A Jamaican who left the island when he was three, Cecil has not held a job since he graduated from school last year. Unable to find anything paying more than $50 a week, he has had repeated brushes with the law, and plans to return to Jamaica when he has enough cash. "Look at the streets here," he says. "You see a lot of people suffering-- no job, no money."

Not far from Brixton is the East End's Brick Lane, where between 7,000 and 25,000 Bengalis -- no one knows the exact number -- work in garment industry sweatshops. A timorous, often illiterate people, for the past two years they have been subjected to vicious beatings and murders by white gangs. Listening to the sound of prayer coming from the local mosque, Gulam Mustafa, a leather goods manufacturer and local Bengali leader, says he has appealed repeatedly to the Home Office to help halt the attacks. The Bengalis' cause was taken up last year by the Anti-Nazi League, a leftist group formed to combat the National Front, but Bengalis are wary of being caught in the crossfire between left and right. "We need all the understanding possible to get along with the host country," explains Mustafa, "but we are the scapegoats in the confrontation. Where are our rights?"

That question is being asked most insistently by the nearly 1 million British-born children of immigrants. Unlike their parents, they regard themselves as Britons first, with a birthright of equality. They may not wait long to press their demands. In an eloquent TV documentary aired last month, a young Birmingham Asian, Tony Huq, expressed his generation's mood of defiance: "Gone are the days when we didn't even make a whimper. Gone are the days when we kept quiet about discrimination. Gone are the days when we accepted second-class citizenship."

Gone are the days, too, when Britain could ignore its minorities. A social struggle has barely begun, and it could reach threatening dimensions before Britons recognize that once it is a reality, a multiracial society cannot be undone.

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