ABSTRACT
Many of the senior politicians in the Conservative government elected in 1951 drew just as strongly on the discursive field of race notions as did their Labour predecessors; for them, too, the prospect of unrestricted colonial immigration gave rise to concern about a permanent, and unassimilable, ‘coloured’ presence in Britain. Of course, a similar situational logic prevailed, but a solution based on what a Colonial Office official described as ‘devious little devices’ (CO 537/5219 minute J. Williams 27 June 1950) could only be temporary. Apart from the dubious legality of many of these ‘devices’, it was clear that they were having little impact on colonial immigration (roughly two thousand migrants per year had arrived from the Caribbean between 1950-3, but this was to increase to ten thousand in 1954). Since it could not alter significantly the demand for labour – partly because this was in the hands either of private employers or autonomous public bodies such as London Transport or the NHS, partly because the shortage of labour remained acute – the Cabinet soon found itself edging towards the legislative option raised by the Attlee government’s working party.
