Of Roy, Runnymede and Rory
Race, 1966, and All That
“I define integration… not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. This is the goal.”
(Roy Jenkins1)
“The uncritical use of public opinion and the misuse of data and polling have legitimised so-called populist politics and mainstreamed far-right ideas.”
(The Runnymede Trust, “Reactionary Democracy”2)
“In the 1980s there were 170 million Sub-Saharan Africans living in extreme poverty. Now there are 450 million.”
(Rory Stewart3)
This is the third in a loose trilogy of pieces where I set out a broad theory of race relations in the UK; of how we are (I believe) at the cusp of moving between models of how communal relations are managed in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith “empire”; here I called it moving from Michaela Multiculturism to Milletisation. In this piece I will look at some recent mood music on the topic, but will mainly look back to the 1960s, when the last transition was managed. For ease, (and with apologies) I will directly repeat what I said previously here:
“There are three broad models of managing community relations, and each has its own logic, dependent on the level of immigrants in society:
Integration: at low levels of immigration, incomers are expected to integrate into the host society. They may keep their traditions alive in private settings: the family and religious establishments or social clubs; but they are expected to conform to societal expectations more generally, and the wider society does not make any particular efforts to alter its institutions or behaviours for them. Immigrants, particularly those from close cultures and similar races, may essentially assimilate in as little as a generation or two.
Multiculturalism: as immigration grows, separate communities are retained. This is the “melting pot”: whilst not living in absolute “ghettos”, there are identifiable areas where communities congregate: think Little Italy or Chinatown in New York. But, communities still mix: for example schooling (state schooling at least) in undertaken together. This brings costs, as Birbalsingh enunciated above; inevitably, these are borne more by the native population. Laws are codified in favour of the minority groups, but the law is still universal. Yet there is still a national myth to which all groups are expected to adhere: “British Values”, “The American Dream.”
Milletisation: (“Millets” was the name given to the separate “nations” of the Ottoman Empire.) Communities now run themselves as separate entities within a wider polity, with a leader (or leaders) given autonomy to run their own internal affairs, so long as these do not directly counter the interests of the state. Schooling is separate, and different legal systems may apply internally. Pretence at race or religious equality may be abandoned, and different jobs or industries may be segregated, or protected. Customary laws (over dress, or acts like the ability to carry weapons) may apply. Intermarriage stops. The communities are not held together any longer by the “soft” idea of a national myth, but rather the “hard” means of elite law - which is ultimately comes down to power.
(Of course, the particular historical dynamics of how this comes about will be very different between the Ottoman case of conquest, and the mass immigration we see across the West.)
The important point here is that, each model is the stable way of managing community relations at different levels. The cut-off point is not hard and fast, but the logic is inescapable. It makes no more sense to run integration at our level of immigration than it would have done to operate millets in the Britain of the 1950s, as the first generation of Commonwealth immigrants dripped in.”
But before we go back into the history, we’ll start with perhaps an unlikely source - Rory Stewart.
The podcast mafia
One of the clear ways that “alternative” voices are being sounded in the media these days appears to be through a select group of podcasters interviewing ex-politicians and key advisers, who are presented as being insiders but able to speak truth be being “outside (or above) the system.” Long term readers may recall my writings (and broadcasts) on Dominic Cummings. Two sources in particular have sprung to my attention, both US based - the British expat Chris Williamson and West Coast Indian-American Dwarkash Patel.
Both have achieved a platform rapidly, and to be fair both a capable interviewers. But it is a little surprising just how they have secured such heavyweight guests over short periods; both have (for example) interviewed Cummings recently; Williamson has also hosted Tulsi Gabbard as well as Rory Stewart; Patel, Tony Blair himself, as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreesen. (Blair came out with the priceless line, “Government is a conspiracy of distraction”.)
Their intended audiences cross over but with subtle differences: Williamson, an ex Love Island contestant (me neither) also hosts fitness and self-improvement types, along with people formerly known as the “intellectual dark web” such as Eric Weinstein and Jonathan Haidt. Patel, a young computer graduate, is more tech focused. So it’s clear that both are looking towards the right, but different elements of it.
Both, I would suggest, are being pushed, and therefore taking note of what is being pushed through them is revealing.
So, then, Rory Stewart. He shares a lot of the cynicism towards how politics actually functions with Cummings (and indeed Blair); note that there much talk of the problems of democracy in these circles, together with praise for technocratic solutions. But the largest chunk of the interview is devoted to immigration. His positioning shows a remarkable degree of scepticism, being happy to mention talking points with which few of us could disagree: there are “genuine concerns” about immigration, people “feel that democracy is not delivering for them, that the country is unrecognisable”, and “wealthy countries with big welfare states cannot function with open borders”. This is unexpected language from the any-party centrist; I do not believe that he mentions any “benefits” of immigration at all.
But all is combined with darker undertone. The UK, he says, is not the sixth biggest economy in the world; London is. He compares places like Middlesborough, Carlisle and Rochdale with West Virginia, Tennessee and Ohio, or parts of France. And then - and I find this absolutely remarkable - to Native American tribes such as the Dakota, or Australian Aboriginals, beset by drug and gambling problems!4 It is a world of “trauma” for (what are in a Transatlantic drawl) “communidies” and “sociedies”; beyond just “fixing the local park”, more youth clubs are not on the agenda.
Williamson comes up with a telling phrase for the rage of the working class: Ambient Discontent. And then, in a strange metaphysical turn (which makes no sense on the surface), Williamson seeks to draw highlight “an odd symmetry between what’s happening inside Westminster and what’s happening in these working class communities… They’ve become their own hostage-taker… they’ve got Stockholm syndrome for a kidnapper that’s no longer there.”
The interviewer is pre-empting the interviewee. The message: that they are both captives of an outdated paradigm.
Of course, Stewart has no formal position, and I don’t expect native Brits to be shipped off to reservations in Tyneside. But, following the riots, the talk from Keir Starmer downwards has been consistently on “communities”.
The messaging is clear. The pretence of multiculturism is ending. Let’s look back to when it started.
1966 and all that
1968 is often seen as a pivotal year for the West: the year when Russian tanks crushed the Prague Spring and the May evenements in Paris just failed to oust De Galle. Vietnam raged and no fewer than four submarines sank. The outgoing Lyndon B. Johnson administration passed the enabling act which three years later led to Nixon coming off the gold standard. And (as taught in schools) two key events in race relations: the assassination of Martin Luther King and Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. But, in the UK, 1968 was the end of a series of changes in race relations, not the beginning.
The Wilson government in 1965 introduced the first race relations act: the Act banned racial discrimination in public places and made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of ‘colour, race, or ethnic or national origins' an offence. This was subsequently strengthened in the 1968 Race Relations Act (Wilson had increased his majority from four to 98 at the 1966 general election), which extended discrimination provisions to housing and employment. These acts also created for the first time bureaucratic oversight into race relations through the Race Relations Board and local “conciliation committees”.
But the tone for race relations was set as much in a speech given by then-Home Secretary Roy Jenkins two months after his party’s 1966 election success. For such an important speech, the headline quoted earlier is often referred to, but the entire speech does not appear to be online5. Jenkins vacillates somewhat between using the “old” term of integration, but the thrust of the speech is quite different. I’ll quote some chunks from it here, from the start.
Integration is perhaps rather a loose word. I do not regard it as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and cultures. I do not think that we need in this country a ‘melting pot’, which will turn everybody out into a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced version of the stereotyped Englishman.
It would be bad enough if that were to occur to the relatively few in this country who happen to have pure Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins. If it were happen to the rest of us, to the Welsh (like myself), to the Scots, to the Irish, to the Jews, to the mid-European, and to still more recent arrivals, it would be little short of a national disaster. It would deprive us of most of the positive advantages of immigration, which, as I shall develop in a moment, I believe to be very great indeed.
I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. This is the goal…
In present circumstances we are bound, as almost everyone now recognizes, to contain the flow of immigrants within the economic and social capacity of the country to absorb them - the social factor being for the moment, I believe, more restrictive than the economic. There are of course differing views about that absorptive capacity, but the Government has a clear responsibility to see that it is not put so high as to create a widespread resistance to effective integration policies. Equally it must not be so unreasonably low as to create an embittered sense of apartness in the immigrant community itself…
For centuries past this and every other country which has played a part in the mainstream of world events has benefitted immensely from its immigrants. Some of them came in much more aggressive ways than those we are discussing today, but at least from the Norman Conquest, to the wave of German and Austrian and Czechoslovak refugees in the thirties, we have been constantly stimulated and jolted out of our natural island lethargy by a whole series of immigrations…
What we do have in this country is a great absorptive and adaptative tradition. For three centuries we have softened civil conflicts and adjusted our political systems to the demands of constantly changing economic and class structure. The problem we are discussing today makes less demands upon our capacity for tolerance and change than many we have successfully surmounted in the past.6
Jenkins sets out a programme of multiculturalism which has ruled for fifty years. The speech lists no downsides to immigration, no costs; in fact it has cured “our natural island lethargy”. We have the trope that no (or very few) Englishman are wholly Anglo-Saxon, eliding recent immigration with ancient. Immigrants are presented as doctors and nurses, builders and transport workers; “our doctor shortage would become still more chronic”. Immigration enriches our universities and cities. And, finally, it is we who must adapt our systems, our attitudes, to immigration.
Three months later, the first Notting Hill Carnival took place.
Policy through charity
The race revolution was largely completed by 1968. In that year, a small but influential charity was started which led the way in advocating for Jenkins’ vision of multiculturalism. The Runnymede Trust (with an obvious, although not terribly appropriate nod to Magna Carta) was founded by Jim Rose (a former intelligence officer) and Anthony Lester (a close associate of Roy Jenkins; later advisor to him in Jenkins’ second spell as Home Secretary in the 1970s)7. Its intention was to “combine the best of the Anti-Defamation League and the Potomac Institute in the United States”; Lester “brought with him a commitment of $5,000 a year for three years from a liberal East Coast foundation, provided it was matched by British foundations8” - the latter secured by Rose from the Rowntree Trust.
The Trust’s first director was the Bengali “academic” and “coloured communist”9 Dipak Nandy, whose career consisted of three years lecturing at Leicester University, and has appeared to find employment in and around the race industry and parts of the public sector, including the BBC. (His daughter is the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy.)
All in all, the Runnymede Trust is an early example of “policy though charity” with which we are now all too familiar; the third sector salient all too easily dismissed as grift. The Trust’s website highlights some of its political successes:
The 1976 Race Relations Act, introduced by Jenkins in his second stint as Home Secretary (and when Lester was advising). The Trust’s publicity claims that the Act “made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race for the first time”. As we have seen this is straightforwardly incorrect, but is an interesting “reinterpretation” of the facts. The 1976 Act remained in force until the Equalities Act of 2010.
The founding of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race Relations in 1985. Exactly how a charity “founds” an APPG is another question; presumably it means through lobbying; the agency of MPs is not recognised herein. The Trust seems to have acted as secretariat for the APPG on Race and Community since the start of 2010; but has not been operative since the recent Labour landslide (at least, yet). How common is it for an independent body to be the “secretariat” for an APPG?
I quote directly: “In 1997 our Commission on British Muslims first brought the concept of Islamophobia into the mainstream”.
Involvement in the “horrors” of the “Windrush Scandal” under the May administration in 2018.
In 2022, the Trust challenged the “legality and appropriateness”, under the Equalities Act 2010 (!), the appointment by then Health Secretary Matt Hancock (during Covid) of Dido Harding to lead the National Institute for Health Protection, and Mike Coupe to lead the Track and Trace programme. (This subject is beyond the scope of the current article.) Hancock was found to have breached the Equalities Act.
In terms of general race mythologising, Runnymede appears particularly proud of its “Our Migration Story” facility, (“The Making of Britain”!) designed to for teachers and schoolchildren in order to illustrate our re-written history. I sampled some pages at random. Here is just one: “An African presence in thirteenth-century Britain”, adduced by a single illustration in the Domesday Abbreviato. The site claims:
For almost two hundred years after 1095, Europeans waged war against Muslims in an attempt to take control of the lands around Jerusalem… They may have come to Britain as prisoners captured during one of the many Crusades during the period. Alternatively, they may have come to England as visitors, as there were sub-Saharan Christians from what is today Sudan and Ethiopia who took part in the Crusades on the side of Europe against the Muslims of the Middle East.
Of course, Europeans take (not take back) control; if they were “prisoners” it is not mentioned that they were likely enslaved, and their presence here possibly an act of manumission; or they may be simply “visitors”… No indication is provided of the vanishingly small scale of Africans.
This is, allegedly, “a collaboration with academics based at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester”. You could probably take apart every page, should you have the stomach.
By out current times, the Trust is warning against “Reactionary Democracy” and “the uncritical use of public opinion and the misuse of data and polling [which] have legitimised so-called populist politics and mainstreamed far-right ideas.”
There is a clear continuity, from Jenkins’ 1966 speech to the present day. Or, nearly.
1968 - revisited
But there is a twist here.
In 1968, Kenya (just four years independent) was threatening the livelihoods of its 200,000 Asians through its policy of “Africanization” (similar to that which we see in South Africa today). People started arriving in Britain in late 1967. The Wilson government acted with rapidity: a new Commonwealth Immigration Act was passed (after just three days of debate!) in March 1968. The Act reduced the automatic right to settle in the UK to those with a parent or grandparent born in Britain; excluding the vast majority of the Kenyan Asians.
The “coloured” population of the country at the time of Jenkins’ 1966 speech was around 2% - or just over a million. Despite (or linked to) the change in rhetoric, and the legislative programme put in alongside, the flow of immigrants slowed substantially in the period: there is a notable flattening of the growth of foreign-born around this time.
Jenkins’ concern, quoted above about immigration “not [being] so unreasonably low” appears already to have been met at the time he made it: we may dream of an immigrant population of capped at a million now, but as Jenkins had identified, it was at capacity for the time (and structures) being.
Powell was not so much prescient in his speech, as acting too late. Maybe this accounts for its tone of desperation.
So, to simplify the experience of the 1960s, what we have is:
A practically unchallenged immigration policy (implemented under Conservative rule) of a substantive increase in immigration
A change of government accompanied by a rapid change of paradigm and rhetoric
a Conservative opposition adhering to the “old” paradigm of integration, against the “new” paradigm of multiculturalism (one that has lasted over half a century)
A simultaneous, in relatively short order, legislative programme creating a very different civic and legal space, and practical restrictions on new entrants
The parallels are clear. A decade and a half of Conservative rule have delivered immigration numbers that are “too big to fail”, and need intervention to be managed. “Making Multiculturism Work” is being retained by Tory fanboys of Birbalsingh, whilst being replaced by an amorphous and ubiquitous talk of “communities” elsewhere. However we see no sings yet of a more restrictionist immigration policy in this country yet, although there is increasing scepticism on the continent.
As to the legal framework towards milletisation, we have of course had for a while Sharia-compliant arrangements in areas such as finance, but it hasn’t extended into the criminal law. The areas of free speech; the discourse around misinformation and disinformation is well covered. I can’t help but think that every time somebody quotes “Two Tier Keir”, they are advancing the concept of a differentiated legal system, in the act of criticising it.
Rory Stewart, as I quoted above, is now warning against mass immigration and highlighting half a billion Africans in extreme poverty. (It should also be noted that his “effective altruism” solution is simply to pay them off - direct, in readies). But, at the same time, he is providing special pleading for Islam and taking a hard line for Elon Musk allowing Twitter/X to host accounts “inciting people to burn down a mosque”. Whether or not truly stricter immigration policies will be enacted remains to be seen, or whether this will presage nations being treated differently; Pakistan from Sudan, Somalia from Congo.
Much is unclear: in particular, what will happen to the White British population under such a scenario. My guess is that we will not see such a concept as an English millet, but rather regional “zones of deprivation” where the indigenous working class are lumped in with Lithuanians and Roma with some sort of whitewashed retread of Johnson’s levelling up agenda. London and the Home Counties will float above, as a sort of extended imperial centre.
But, as I have said before, Northern Ireland may provide a guide to how these things are managed. Here, for example, we can see what can only be described as a struggle session between New Ulstermen and “community leaders linked to paramilitary organisations”, directed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, in response to the post-Southport riots.
In our times, policy changes are not introduced though formal interviews in what still claims to be mainstream media. They are certainly not given in worthy but dull speeches by senior government ministers. We are warmed to them by semi-outsiders through semi-official channels.
Let’s keep an eye on who plays the role of Runnymede in the era of milletisation.
Quoted in “The Penguin Book of Modern Speeches”, ed Brian MacArthur, p 363
There’s much more: the Southport child murders were carried out of course by a “Christian born in the UK”; the riots evidently tried to burn down a mosque; asylum should be limited at 30 or 40,000 pa, but focussed on people like “female judges from Afghanistan. But these are less important for my general thesis.
If any sleuths find it, I will update.
MacArthur, pp 363-6.
Later still a disgraced peer, he was also a patron of the Family Planning Association.
The description is not mine, but that of Philip Larkin’s girlfriend Monica Jones
“In the 1980s there were 170 million Sub-Saharan Africans living in extreme poverty. Now there are 450 million.” White Pills from Rory
Really interesting article, thanks for pointing me towards it. If I’m not subscribed already, I will be now.