One night in late August 1958 a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, got into an argument with her Black Jamaican husband, Raymond, outside the Latimer Road tube station in West London. When a group of young people known as “teddy boys”—distinguished by their high, slicked-back hair, big suede shoes, and Edwardian-style frock coats—joined in and started hurling racist insults at Raymond, Majbritt turned on them. The next evening the teddy boys saw her again and started pelting her with milk bottles. One called her a “Black man’s trollop.”
Soon the confrontation escalated. Before long more than three hundred white people had gathered to go what they called “nigger hunting” in Notting Hill—what would become a weeklong orgy of racist violence. Just a week earlier there had been similar clashes in the St. Ann’s area of Nottingham, in the Midlands. According to the local newspaper, “The whole place was like a slaughterhouse.” (There were several stabbings, and eight people were taken to the hospital with a range of injuries.) The weekend of the riots in Notting Hill, the teddy boys turned up again in Nottingham—only to end up fighting one another when Black people stayed at home.
In both cases the authorities blamed the rampage not on racism but on indiscipline and a general lack of moral fiber. In his book The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (1987), Ron Ramdin quotes a statement issued by Nottingham’s chief constable the day after the violence: “This was not a racial riot…. The people primarily concerned were irresponsible teddy boys and persons who had had a lot to drink.” In London a few weeks later Justice Cyril Salmon, who presided over the sentencing of the Notting Hill rioters, told the perpetrators in the dock:
You are a minute and insignificant section of the population who have brought shame upon the district in which you lived…. I am determined that you and anyone anywhere who may be tempted to follow your example shall clearly understand that crimes such as this will not be tolerated in this country, but will inevitably meet in these courts with the stern punishment which they so justly deserve.
The culprits may have been small in number, but what became known as the Notting Hill riots had grave significance, for three reasons in particular. First, until then Britain’s Black postwar migrants, most of whom had come from the Caribbean, had experienced discrimination primarily in the form of personal encounters. The riots made it clear that racism was not just the work of wayward individuals or ignorance. In The Pleasures of Exile (1960), the Barbadian author George Lamming, who came to England in 1950, wrote, “We must accept that racial antagonism in Great Britain is, after Notting Hill, an atmosphere and a background against which my life and yours are being lived.”
Second, the violence inspired an enduring cultural response from within Black communities. Not long after the riots the Trinidad-born editor of the West Indian Gazette, Claudia Jones, declared in the paper’s offices that “we need something to get the taste of Notting Hill out of our mouths.” In January 1959 she played a central part in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, now the second-biggest annual carnival in the world. “Claudia, unlike the rest of us, understood the power of culture as a tool of political resistance,” the late Trevor Carter, who stage-managed the first carnival, told me in 2002. “The spirit of the carnival came out of her political knowledge of what to touch at a particular time when we were scared, in disarray.”
Finally, the British political class drew a perverse conclusion from the riots: that the core of the problem was not racism but the presence of Black people. Since 1948 Britain’s policy had been that all colonial subjects were entitled to live and work in the country. (My mother came from Barbados on a British passport.) After Notting Hill, however, British officials came to see the continuing arrival of Black immigrants as a threat to social order and peace. Even as they condemned the flagrantly violent displays of racism, they decided to reward the perpetrators by imposing racially biased immigration controls. George Rogers, the Labour MP for North Kensington, called for an end to “the tremendous influx.” The Conservative Alec Douglas-Home, then the minister of state for Commonwealth relations, announced that “curbs will have to be put on the unrestricted flow of immigrants to Britain from the West Indies.”
In 1962 Parliament passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which instituted a voucher system to limit the number of Commonwealth citizens eligible to immigrate to the UK, allowing migrants with jobs awaiting them or with skills deemed useful to enter fairly easily—but imposing a quota on unskilled migrants. The Labour Party as a whole opposed the legislation. Its leader at the time, Hugh Gaitskell, branded it a “cruel and brutal anti-colour” law. The book London Is the Place for Me (2016), by Kennetta Hammond Perry, outlines how the plan was always to claim plausible deniability around issues of racism. As early as 1954 the Commonwealth relations secretary, the First Earl of Swinton, had warned, “If we legislate on immigration, though we can draft it in non-discriminatory terms, we cannot conceal the obvious fact that the object is to keep out coloured people.”
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So while the act was presented as a matter of “controlling” immigration, it was transparently about restricting the number of nonwhite immigrants in particular, since it was primarily migrants from the Caribbean and Asia who would have been unskilled. “Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders will overwhelmingly fall into the acceptable categories,” explained the Labour MP and former commonwealth relations secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, who accused the government of introducing “a colour bar into our legislation…[while] the overwhelming majority of those trying to get in on the open quota will be coloured people.”
Two years later Labour won the general election with a significant swing but lost a seat in Smethwick, near Birmingham, where the Conservative candidate refused to condemn the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour.” The Labour minister and former leader of the House of Commons Richard Crossman later concluded that the loss made it “quite clear that immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser for the Labour party.” The country still needed migrant labor: during these years the UK was losing more residents to emigration (primarily to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) than it was gaining from immigration. Moreover, the postwar boom was still under way, and the National Health Service—which employed a significant number of immigrants—had just been restructured, attracting around 18,000 much-needed doctors and nurses from the Indian subcontinent alone. And yet once it came to power in 1964 Labour not only kept the 1962 act in place but also extended its provisions. No government or opposition has made the case for immigration since.
Sixty-six years later history seems poised to repeat itself. This summer, from July 30 to August 7, mobs of white people across the country attacked mosques, minority-owned businesses, police officers, and hostels housing asylum seekers—only for the newly elected Labour government to pledge to get tough on immigration.
This time the spark was ostensibly the horrific fatal stabbing of three girls—ages six, seven, and nine—at a Taylor Swift–themed holiday club in Southport, near Liverpool. Eight other girls and two adults were also injured. The alleged assailant was not yet eighteen and therefore could not be named. Word got out on social media that the knifeman was a Muslim asylum seeker. One such post alone was viewed 15.7 million times. The MP Nigel Farage, who leads the far-right Reform Party, pondered why the incident was not being treated as terror-related: “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld.”
Within days a judge agreed to name the alleged assailant as Axel Rudakubana, a British Christian born in Wales to Rwandan parents, in an effort to stem the flow of misinformation. (Rudakubana was less than a week shy of his eighteenth birthday.) But the mobs were not much interested in the facts. The day after the stabbings a right-wing posse showered Southport’s mosque—and the police protecting it—with bricks. Elsewhere false rumors spread about protesters being stabbed by Muslims. So, too, did the violence.
The disturbances were most prevalent in the north, in towns like Liverpool, Blackpool, Leeds, Middlesbrough, and Manchester, but violence also broke out in the Midlands and parts of the south. Over the course of a week, hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotherham (in the north) and Tamworth (in the Midlands) were attacked; Muslim graves in Burnley, near Manchester, were desecrated; minority-owned businesses in Belfast had their windows smashed; a Citizens Advice bureau in Sunderland was set aflame. An Asian man in Hull was attacked in his car; immigration law firms needed special protection after a list of their addresses was posted on Telegram; in Belfast a rioter brutally beat a man in his fifties, who had to be rushed to the hospital in serious condition. No one was killed; there were no attacks in Wales or Scotland.
On the sixth day of the violence, Keir Starmer, the recently elected Labour prime minister, called the rioters “far-right thugs” and pledged to do “whatever it takes to bring [them] to justice.” Local MPs and Citizens Advice bureaus advised Black and brown people to stay at home and let the police handle it. (In a handful of cases groups of British Asians—most of them young—retaliated in kind.) But the police could not handle it. They could at times contain it; they could stand between the rioters and their targets; they could arrest some of the worst offenders in the moment. But their presence was not exactly a deterrent: the rioters simply targeted them, too. The violence stopped only when antiracist groups like Stand Up to Racism, along with some trade unions, managed to coordinate a considerable counterpresence, galvanizing hundreds across the country on a night when a hundred more far-right demonstrations were threatened. Realizing they were outnumbered, the mob stayed at home. The government thanked the police, not the movement.
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At the time of this writing more than 250 people have been jailed for participating in the attacks, and more than four hundred others are in custody awaiting sentencing. The youngest person to be arrested so far is an eleven-year-old in Middlesbrough whom police caught during an early morning raid on suspicion of violent disorder; the oldest to be found guilty to date is a sixty-nine-year-old grandfather from Liverpool who was carrying a cosh and admitted to violent disorder. As he was arrested he shouted, “I’m English, I’m seventy, all right—leave me alone!”
“Whatever the apparent cause or motivation, we make no distinction,” Starmer said in his statement denouncing the unrest. “Crime is crime.” The protests were clearly criminal, but their criminality was not the most salient thing about them. The targets were not random. This was not high jinks but domestic terrorism; it was not social violence but political violence, and as such it demanded a political response.
And yet there are, to my knowledge, no plans to “get tough” on racism, Islamophobia, or xenophobia. No speeches have been made about the benefits of immigration for a country suffering from a labor shortage with an aging population. There are no antiterrorism programs under development to deradicalize the white working-class communities most vulnerable to the messages of white supremacy, like there have been for Muslim communities targeted by radical Islamists.
However, two weeks after the riots abated, the new Labour home secretary, Yvette Cooper, did announce a plan to crack down on immigration by recruiting a hundred investigation and intelligence officers to target smugglers, increasing detention capacity, and overseeing a “large surge” in enforcement and return flights. All this amounted, she said, to a bid to bring up deportation rates to the highest level since 2018. Why she chose 2018 is something of a mystery, though perhaps it seemed like an achievable goal. Removals in 2018 were already trending steeply downward, having dropped by more than a third in the previous five years; over the next five years they would fall by another 40 percent. Given that none of the measures Cooper cited have worked so far to stem the tide of immigration or quell unrest, it is difficult to see why she thinks they will work now.
It would be unfair to assume that Cooper’s announcement was only a response to the riots. She made no causal links between the unrest and the policies she outlined, which were consistent with what Labour had promised during the election. And yet it would be naive to think that the recent violence wasn’t at least part of the calculation.
The newly elected Labour Party is an overly cautious beast. It won a huge parliamentary majority in July’s elections, but turnout was low—Labour secured only 20 percent of the eligible vote—and Reform, the far-right party that demanded a freeze on nonessential immigration, was among the big winners of the night, with support from 14 percent of the electorate.
A few days after the election the former prime minister Tony Blair wrote an op-ed in The Times advising Starmer to take a harder line on immigration, crime, and “wokeism.” Britain needs “a plan to control immigration,” he explained. “If we don’t have rules, we get prejudices…. There is also clearly a challenge in part of the Muslim community, but that is a topic requiring its own special analysis.”
The parallels between 1958 and 2024 can be overstated. The focus back then was not on religion but on race, which was understood as virtually synonymous with immigration. Black and Asian communities are far more established and embedded now; white people are also generally less bigoted. In a Gallup poll following the 1958 riots, more than half the respondents opposed equal access to council houses for nonwhite immigrants, and more than a third were against equal job opportunities. The potential to use race as a wedge issue was clear: before the 1955 election Winston Churchill recommended the Tories adopt the slogan “Keep Britain White.” In February an Ipsos poll showed that a plurality of respondents believe immigration is good for the country and that diversity is a simple everyday fact of life in Britain.
In other respects the situation now is worse than it was in the Fifties. Trust in politics in general and in mainstream parties in particular has significantly eroded. Turnout for the 1959 general election was 78.7 percent, and the two main parties received 93.2 percent of the vote between them. In July turnout was 59.9 percent, and the two main parties combined won 57.4 percent. Reform’s success also confirms Britain’s participation in a broader European trend of local, regional, and even national governments falling to politicians who advocate blatantly racist and Islamophobic policies. Finally, thanks to social media, misinformation and social unrest can spread like a bushfire; in 1958 the disturbances were limited to young men in just two areas over two weekends.
However, the echoes of 1958 can’t be ignored. The UK may in many ways be a more tolerant country now than it was in the Fifties, but xenophobia is even more deeply embedded in its political culture. According to YouGov polls taken after the riots, immigration is now considered the most important issue in the country, with more than two thirds believing it is too high. Now as in 1958, the government delivered a robust condemnation of the aggressors without addressing the nature of their aggression, treating the attacks instead as primarily a matter of social delinquency. To the extent that the government has acknowledged the rioters’ politics, it has tended to identify them only as “far-right extremists” and lump them in with “Islamists” and “left-wing extremists,” as though these groups were equivalent in their impact and provenance.
In fact, right-wing politics have long enjoyed an exceptional degree of encouragement from mainstream political culture and the media. In a single month in 2015 a cartoonist for the Daily Mail, one of the country’s best-selling newspapers, drew caricatures of African people selling shrunken heads and of bearded, big-nosed refugees crossing Europe’s borders with rats scurrying alongside them; last year he was recognized by the Society of Editors. During the general election campaign, when the Conservative Party planned to stop small boats coming across the English Channel and to fly asylum applicants to Rwanda, Labour declined to emphasize that this treatment of the world’s most vulnerable people was unethical, saying only that it would deal with the matter more efficiently. Paying “£600m for a few hundred removed,” Starmer said during the campaign, was “gesture politics. We will end this farce. We will restore serious government to our borders, tackle this problem at source, and replace the Rwanda policy—permanently.”
Now as then, the bigots are sent to jail even as their bigotry makes its way into the statute books. In August the refugee and migrant rights program director at Amnesty International UK, Steve Valdez-Symonds, accused the new government of “reheating” its predecessor’s policies by announcing its restrictive immigration plan:
A new set of ministers promoting an age-old message of fear and hostility regarding some of the most victimised and traumatised people who may ever arrive in the UK, means that smuggling gangs and racist and Islamophobic hate-mongers at home are likely to feed off this to everyone’s detriment.
Six weeks on, the legal consequences of the summer’s disturbances continue to unfold. Police are still raking through footage and arresting perpetrators, and courts are still sentencing them. Progressives are keen to build local resistance that will thwart any future right-wing violence; news of a far-right demonstration in Glasgow attracted a counterprotest ten times the size. New cultural efforts, too, are under way: one organization, Love Music Hate Racism, is planning a series of concerts in the towns where the disturbances took place.
Meanwhile the Conservative Party appears to be doubling down. Robert Jenrick, who topped polls to become the new Tory leader, believes that immigration is the primary reason the Conservatives lost in July. As the immigration minister he allegedly ordered that a reception center for unaccompanied minors seeking asylum paint over a mural of cartoon characters because, in The Guardian’s paraphrase, it seemed “too welcoming.” During the riots he argued that any protester who shouts “Allahu Akbar” should be arrested. With the third-largest majority since 1900, Labour has the capacity to break with six decades of pandering, promote more compassionate policies, and make a full-throated defense of Britain’s multiracial reality and the right to asylum. But as of yet there is little evidence that it will.
