Academic Historian Gad Heuman on Post-War Caribbean Emigration to Europe

I found this paragraph on Caribbean emigration to Britain and other Europeans countries after World War II in Gad Heuman’s The Caribbean: A Brief History, 2nd Edition (London: Bloomsbury 2014):

‘In the period after the Second World War, migration patterns chanted: large numbers of Caribbean men and women migrated to the metropole. In labour-starved post-war Britain, for example, hospitals and transport services organized massive recruitment schemes to bring in workers from the Anglophone Caribbean. The first West Indian immigrants arrived from Jamaica on board the Empire Windrush in 1948, and one estimate put the total of migrants to Britain in the decade after 1951 at roughly 250,000. Concerned about the effects of this immigration, however, Britain passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962, severely restricting the flow of future migrants. Elsewhere in Europe, France received about 200,000 migrants from Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, and the Netherlands in 1980 had roughly the same number of immigrants from its former colonies in the Caribbean. The Netherlands has had a particularly large number of migrants from Suriname. When Suriname became independent in 1975m roughly 40,000 Surinamese, mostly of Indian and Javanese descent, fled the country, fearing discrimination by the new regime.’ (p. 184).

After another paragraph about Caribbean migration to the US, which is measured in millions, Heuman talks about the effect of emigration on the Caribbean on the next page. He writes

‘Migration has inevitably had significant effects in the Caribbean itself. It has created problems in that it has deprived the Caribbean of some of its most productive people. Since a large proportion of emigrants are relatively young, it has meant that the demography of some parts of the region have been badly skewed, leaving behind an unbalanced population of generally older people. At the same time, the remittances of of Caribbean migrants have been a very significant element in many Caribbean economies. As an example of the impact of remittance money, Bonham Richardson reported that Carriacou, a small island in the Grenadines with a population of around 6,000 people, received over $500,000 in remittances in one year in 1970. Remittances, then, are a major contribution to the GNP of most Caribbean countries. Moreover, without emigration, much of the Caribbean would now be overpopulated, creating unsustainable social and economic tensions in those societies.’ (p. 185).

It’s struck me that the importance of remittance money and the problem of overpopulation has been one of the factors driving emigration from the Developing World, not just the Caribbean but also Africa and India. Modi made a speech a little while ago stating that India would continue producing top-class technicians for the rest of the world. Apart from the graduates employed in call centres owned by western firms, it struck me that this was a policy designed to send highly educated Indians abroad because there wasn’t the work for them available in India and that the country also depended on them for their remittance money.

Official Invitation to Work in Britain Shown on Beeb Antiques Programme

A little while ago I put up a piece about a video posted by Simon Webb on his History Debunked channel about the Windrush migrants. Webb claimed that the travellers on board the ship weren’t actually invited into this country, but did so merely to take advantage of the opportunities made available to them. The ship hadn’t managed to sell all its cabins, and so offered them cheaply to anyone wishing to go to Blighty. This was the reason the first group of Black and Asian commonwealth migrants came to Britain. This has been challenged by some of the great commenters here, one of whom distinctly remembers Birmingham council advertising in the Caribbean for people willing to work on the buses. Further evidence supporting the official invitation of BAME workers from the Empire to work in Britain appeared the other day on one of the Beeb’s afternoon antiques shows. I’m afraid I can’t remember which one it was, but one of the members of the public, who appeared on the programme showing their prized possessions, was a lady with her father’s official invitation from the British authorities to come over here and work. The invitation was made in the name of Her Maj. She said that these had been issued when their very many jobs available. She said that the inclusion of the Queen on the official document had allowed her father to make an excellent rebuff to the racists questioning his presence in the country. When one of them asked him why he was over here, or why didn’t he go back to his own country, he waved the invitation in their face and replied that he had an official invite from the Queen. And you can’t really argue with that.

History Debunked Demolishes the Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory about the Empire Windrush

One of the elements of modern western Fascism is the various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about mass non-White immigration. According to these, the Jews are deliberately promoting such mass immigration in order to dilute the White race as part of their wider scheme to destroy it and enslave humanity. Some of these nasty, bizarre myths also cite the Kalergi plan, named after the half-Japanese Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Count Kalergi. He also advocated the racial dilution of Whites and so the mass immigration is being organised and led by the global elite in accordance with the scheme. These myths also claim that the Empire Windrush, the ship that introduced the first wave of Caribbean migrants to the UK, was therefore Jewish-owned and ferried its West Indian passengers to Blighty as part of this covert scheme.

In this video, Simon Webb demolishes this conspiracy theory. The Empire Windrush was not owned by Jews, but by the British government. It was managed by a New Zealand shipping company, which had bought out a Jewish-owned line. However, this company had been completely absorbed and its old, Jewish directors sidelined. As for Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the author of the plan, while he did write approvingly about the dilution of the White race, he was never in a position to put it into practice. Webb also states that it was accidental that the Empire Windrush carried Black passengers. He says that it was simply because half its cabins were empty and so it advertised for passengers. This may well be true, but he also seems to believe that the West Indian immigrants were not coming to Britain as result of government invitation. I think this is a dubious claim at best. There was a labour shortage in Britain after the war, and the great commenters on this blog have assured me that the British government or at least local authorities did advertise in the Caribbean for workers to come to Britain.

Even if this part of the video is incorrect, I’m confident that what Webb says demolishing the conspiracy theories about the ship and Black and Asian immigration, the Jews and Kalergi is absolutely true.

Lobster also has a review of a recent biography of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, HITLER’S COSMOPOLITAN BASTARD – Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and His Vision of Europe, by Martyn Bond (Kingston (Canada): McGill-Queens University Press, 2021), £25, entitled, ‘When Freemasons Ruled the Earth?’ by Simon Matthews. From the review it appears that Kalergi was chiefly concerned with creating a united Europe following the breakup of the European empires in the aftermath of the First World War. Part of this was to be a customs union between France and Germany. This may have got somewhere but was abandoned following the deterioration in Franco-German relations with the rise of Hitler. He was again trying to promote his idea of a united, federal Europe after World War II, but he was in competition with a number of other groups and intellectuals promoting the same idea. He and his organisation were sidelined and the modern EU doesn’t really owe anything to him. The review doesn’t mention any plans for the dilution of the White race. But it does say that he tried to interest the British government in a transnational state uniting the new countries of eastern Europe. If Britain promoted such a state, then its peoples – Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks and so on would willingly immigrate to Britain’s colonies to help expand their White population.

See: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue82.php

It seems from all this that the Great Replacement and the Kalergi plan conspiracy theories really are nothing but malign myths promoted by the far right to create hatred against Jews and non-White immigrants.

History Debunked on Bristol University’s Statue to Henrietta Lacks

There was news yesterday that Bristol University had put up a statue of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman outside its medical buildings. This was accompanied with rather grandiose statements hailing her as the mother of modern medicine. This surprises me, as you would expect from such a description that Lacks herself was a doctor, surgeon or biologist of some kind. As Webb’s video shows, she was actually none of these. She was an ordinary Black American woman, who died of cervical cancer. What makes her different is that cells were taken from her body, cultured so that the line has carried on, and were studied by doctors and biologists. This has led to a number of cures and treatments for diseases like the Polio vaccine. Some of this research was done at the university. Hence the statue. I think the decision to put one up to her may well have been influenced by a book that was published about her a few years ago, The Case of Henrietta Lacks.

Webb considers that the statue is part of a general campaign to pull down monuments to White men and put up statues instead to Black women, even if their contribution to British history and culture is actually quite minor. He talks about a monument put up in Wales to honour a Black headmistress. He feels that while the woman would hardly warrant a statue if she were White, at least she did something more worthwhile than Smiley Culture. He was a pop star in the 1980s who was promoted yesterday as a hero of Black British history in an article in the Metro by Alicia Adjoa. But Culture’s end was rather less than heroic. He committed suicide after being caught importing a massive amount of cocaine. Bristol, in his view, is trying to put up a statue to a Black person to replace the one of Edward Colston, pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters.

There is indeed pressure to put up statues of great Black British figures. The argument is that there are too few monuments to Black people and that this doesn’t represent to the diversity of contemporary British society. The problem is that while Blacks have been present in Bristol since the 16th century, they’ve only been here in large numbers since the Empire Windrush. And the majority of Black Britons led largely humble, unspectacular lives. Hence the fact that many of these statues honour people, whose achievements, while worthy, are relatively small.

I also think the statue has been erected for reasons quite specific to Bristol University. The University has considerably benefited from donations from the Colston charities. This, not surprisingly, is resented by Black activists, and so the University responded a few years ago by appointing a Black woman to be its first professor of the history of slavery. As far as I can make out, her job is really to work out what to do with the money from the Colston charities in the way of anti-racism and pro-Black policies.

The University was also in the local news this week for having set up a bursary solely for Black students. BBC Points West announced that the current Black population on campus is only less than 3 per cent of the total. This seems to me to be a response to another accusation. Bristol has a large Black population. I don’t know what the situation is now, but London, Birmingham and Bristol were the cities with largest Black populations in the UK. But the number of Black students at the university was small. The problem with this criticism is that Bristol, as one of the country’s leading universities, has, or used to have, very high entrance standards. Blacks perform less well academically than the other races, and so consequently have less opportunity to enter further education without the benefit of such affirmative action programmes. Also, when I was at school back in the 1980s you were actively discouraged from applying to the university in your home town. Thus it wouldn’t have mattered how large Bristol’s Black population were, they would have been advised by their teachers at that time to apply to universities and colleges elsewhere. Of course, this has changed somewhat with the ending of the student grant and the introduction of tuition fees. More students are applying to local universities through the sheer necessity of keeping costs down by staying in their home town.

Now the statue of Lacks is all very well, but I feel that if statues are going to be put up, it should be to people with some connection to the city. If we’re talking medicine, perhaps the first Black nurse to serve in one of the city’s hospitals. Or the person or people who started St. Paul’s carnival, if there isn’t one already. My mother also remembers there being a Black Bristolian boxer of her parents’ generation. A statue could have been put up of him as a local sporting hero. You could even go back to the depictions of Black Bristolians published in the 19th century.

While these people wouldn’t have been great scientists, they would at least have had a genuine connection to the city.

Beeb’s ‘Horrible Histories’ Pushing Myths and Falsehoods as Black History

One of the major aims of the ‘History Debunked’ YouTube channel is attacking the myths and sometimes deliberate lies, which try to present past British society as far more ethnically diverse and multiracial than it really was. This is being done in order to create an image of the past that fits and reflects today’s racially diverse society. Although undoubtedly well meant, it is a fabrication. Simon Webb, the YouTuber behind the channel, is a Telegraph-reading Conservative, but I don’t think he can be fairly accused of racism. He’s a published author, who does know his history and the reality behind the falsehoods he tries to debunk.

On Tuesday he put up a video attacking the latest editions of the Beeb’s Horrible Histories programme. This is a children’s history programme based on a series of best selling books. This is intended to present history in a fun way with much comedy, though Webb, with rather more serious tastes, decries it as slap-dash and inaccurate. A recent edition of the programme was on Black British history, and was simply full of myths and falsehoods presented as solid, historical fact. So much so, that Webb said he couldn’t go through all of them, and described the programme as propaganda aimed at children. So he confined himself with a couple of the more egregious.

The programme began with the Empire Windrush and the statement that its passengers had been invited to England to help with reconstruction after the War. This is a myth that’s been promoted by a number of people, including Diane Abbott. The truth is that Blacks weren’t invited to Britain by anyone and definitely not the British government. They were appalled at the immigrants’ arrival because they didn’t have anywhere to accommodate them. Webb states that some ended up living in air raid shelters because of the lack of proper housing. The truth is that the Empire Windrush was a troop ship that was returning to Britain from South America. There was hardly anyone on board, so the captain decided to open it up to paying passengers to reduce costs. The adverts for places aboard the ship in the Jamaican Daily Gleaner simply gives the prices of the various classes of accommodation. There is no mention of work in Britain. As for the motives of the people, who took passage aboard the ship, the Sheffield Daily News in Britain reported the comments of a Jamaican businessman, Floyd Rainer, who said that the immigrants had come to Britain because they were dissatisfied with pay and conditions in the Caribbean. They were seeking better opportunities for themselves, not to help Britain.

The programme then followed this with an item about Black Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall. These were Moors from the Roman province of Mauretania. However, Mauretania was in North Africa, in what is now Morocco and Algeria. It was a province settled by Carthaginians, who were Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon, and the Berbers. Although comparatively dark-skinned, they had Mediterranean complexions, and were not Blacks from the modern West African country of Mauretania, has an American website claims.

It then went on to St. Adrian of Canterbury, who it was claimed was also Black. But he came from what is now Libya in north Africa, and so wouldn’t have been a Black African. However, the programme stated that he was an African, and left the viewer to imagine that he would therefore have been Black.

Mary Seacole was also shown tending British soldiers in a hospital during the Crimean War, which is also a myth. She set up a bar and restaurant and never did any actual nursing. It also showed Cheddar Man as Black. This is based on a reconstruction that was widely covered in the press at the time. However, Webb has done a previous video about it and similar reconstructions showing how flawed they are. In the case of Cheddar Man, the scientists behind the announcement that he was Black actually retracted this in a piece published in New Scientist. No-one really knows what colour people’s skins were 10,000 years ago.

I think the BBC actually means well with all this, and its presenters and compilers probably don’t think that they’re falsifying history. I’m sure they genuinely believe that they’re uncovering previously hidden aspects of the British past. I think projecting the presence of Black people back into the past is part of an attempt to deal with the continuing racist attitude towards Black and Asian Brits that still sees them as foreign, even though they have now been here for three generations. And a smaller number will have been here for much longer.

But I also think that the Beeb is also prepared to falsify history in this direction as well simply to make a programme. Back around 2003/4 the Beeb screened a series about the way modern artists and musicians were taking inspiration from the Psalms of the Bible. In one edition, feminist icon Germaine Greer went to Jamaica to meet the Rastafarian musicians, who sang the Psalms in the origin Amharic, according to the Radio Times.

Historically, this is nonsense. The Psalms were originally written, like almost all of the Tanakh, the Christian Old Testament, in Hebrew. Hence its alternative name of Hebrew Bible. It very definitely wasn’t written in Amharic, which is the modern Ethiopian language of the Amhara people. But Rastafarianism is based on the worship of Haile Selassie, the late emperor of Ethiopia, as the Lion of Judah and Black messiah. Hence, presumably, the insistence that the Psalms were written in Amharic. It seems to me that the Beeb obtained the cooperation of the Rastafarian musos for the programme on the understanding that the programme would be presented from their theological point of view. If they contradicted the assertion that the Psalms were written in Amharic, a language that didn’t exist when the Psalms were actually composed, then no programme. And so the Beeb and the Radio Times published this piece of historical nonsense.

I think a similar process may also be working behind the Horrible Histories and similar programmes present long held myths as facts about the Black past. I don’t know, but I think some of them might be made in collaboration with Black groups and individuals, who passionately believe these falsehood. The Beeb wants to make these programmes and include the views of Blacks themselves. These individuals insist on the inclusion of these myths, which the Beeb won’t challenge because its researchers don’t know that their myths, and the organisation is afraid of these organisations denouncing them as racists if they ignore these long-held Black views.

There are some excellent books and materials on Black British history out there. Three I’ve come across are Gretchen Herzen’s Black England – Life Before Emancipation, the collection Under the Imperial Carpet – Essays in Black History, edited by Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg, and Our Children Free and Happy – Letters from Black Settlers in Africa, edited by Christopher Fyfe and published by Edinburgh University press. But there is an awful lot of myth and falsehoods as well.

However well meant, these need to be rejected as falsehoods, even if they’re told as truth by the Beeb.

‘No Confidence’ Vote Needed Against Racist May’s Betrayal of the Windrush Generation

This is another issue that’s so glaringly unjust, I can’t let it go. This week it’s been revealed that Tweezer, when she was Dave Cameron’s Home Secretary, had all the landing permits awarded to the generation of immigrants that came with the Empire Windrush. And not only that, the piece of legislation that specifically protected them from being deported as illegal immigrants, was removed in secret.

How utterly disgraceful!

As a result, the people of that generation, who have every right to live here in the UK, have been denied the proof they need to show it. About 7,600 people have already been deported in ‘secret flights’, many of them shackled in various ways, including leg restraints.

These are men and women, who came to this country to work. They were given the worst, dirtiest and lowest paid jobs that we didn’t want. But we benefited enormously from their hard work and their skills. You think of the various Pakistani doctors and Jamaican nurses, who entered and expanded our health service. Quite apart from all the others, who worked as cleaners, street sweepers, domestic staff, or on the buses. They had to put up with horrific racist abuse. In Bristol there was a colour bar on the buses against employing Blacks. Bristol’s Black citizens launched a campaign against it, which was backed by the great socialist legend himself, Tony Benn. And the Whites, who befriended them could also get abuse and vilification from the racists. One of my aunts had it done to her in the 50s or 60s, because she had a Black friend. It’s commonplace now, and almost completely unremarkable. But at the time people were attacked for having Black friends. Never mind interracial romances and marriages.

It should be very obvious to everyone that these deportations are monstrously unjust, and that the person responsible for them should be sacked. Which would be Theresa May.

May, however, did what Tories always do, and started lying to protected her sorry rear end. First of all she claimed the decision to destroy the documents had been taken in 2009 by Labour. A lie. It was taken by her, a year after in 2010. Then she blamed that convenient scapegoats, civil servants. I’ve absolutely no respect for the upper ranks of the civil servants, many of whom have been promoted way beyond their ability, and seem to be as snobbish and class-ridden as the rest of the establishment. You think of the name of their ‘staff association’ the ‘First Division’. That’s so smug and self-congratulatory, that it just about says it all about the mentality of the people who named it. But civil servants don’t take action except on the authority of ministers. Someone must have told them to do so. And that person was Tweezer.

She’s now got herself into the papers, saying that the decision was wrong, and no-one will be deported. Too late. People have been. And the British public aren’t happy. Mike put up a stream of comments from his Twitter feed from people condemning May’s decision, and the racism that underpinned it.

Yes, racism. The Tories have always been against immigration. I can remember the Mail and Depress railing in the 1980s against the hordes of ‘unassimilable’ immigrants. There was one article I remember in particular, which complained how disgusting it was that Black folks from the Caribbean had a greater right to enter this country than Whites from Canada under the-then immigration rules. And a few days ago I blogged about how I found in Bristol Central Library a book of articles, arguing that the British regarded race as the defining feature of ethnicity, not culture. With contributions from the extreme right-wing Salisbury Review, and journos from the Torygraph, Mail and Express.

One of the best comments I’ve seen from the peeps on Twitter was from Michael Rosen, the children’s poet laureate. He said that May’s demands for documentation, which she had deliberately arranged so that the Windrush people couldn’t provide it, wasn’t Fascist, but was certainly Fascistic. Mr Rosen’s Jewish, and so I’m confident that his family know about this from personal experience of Nazi persecution. As do so many other British Jews.

Mike was so outraged, that he urged people to get on Twitter and demand a ‘no confidence’ vote on May. Absolutely. I totally agree. It’s too early to call a general election, but May should go, because of the immense harm her government is doing to the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, the way they’re destroying the welfare state and privatising the Health Service. And, of course, because of their carefully camouflaged racism. Despite all their smooth assurances, nothing has been done for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. And in fact the Tories have repealed even more fire safety legislation, so that horrific accidents like that are now even more likely.

And then there’s the issue of the vans May sent round, trying to encourage illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. Some Tory called Nick Timothy got on Twitter to claim that May was against them, and that the decision for them was taken when she was absent on holiday.

Well, as the host says on the Beeb panel game, Would I Lie to You, ‘it was a lie’. May wasn’t happy with the message on the vans, but only because they weren’t nasty enough. She thought people might think the Tories were being too soft on illegal immigrants.

Which tells you all you need to know about the Tories, the people who vote for them, and the supporters in the press. Since Thatcher, governments have been desperate to curry favour with them and particularly with Murdoch. Enough’s enough. May’s the racist leader of a racist party, although I know individual Tories, who are very definitely anti-racist. Tories, who will be as shocked at this as people on the Left. The time’s long past that May and the rest of her vile crew were gone.

I back Mike’s call for a ‘no confidence’ vote. She’s a disgrace, and this attack on people, who came here seeking a better life and to make our great country their home, is particularly deplorable. And her wretched decision then also has implications for the children of people, who came here from the EU, after Brexit.

Get her out, before she and her storm troopers humiliate and deport even more decent, law-abiding people.