ABSTRACT
The account of Cabinet responses to postwar Commonwealth and colonial migration to Britain explored in the previous two chapters has pointed to the potential of a realist approach. Such an approach, it was argued, insisted on the inappropriateness of a notion of race as an explanatory concept in social science, whilst the example itself showed that such a notion was unnecessary to a sociological account of immigration and nationality policies. However, this account has drawn a good deal of attention to the role played by race ideas as a feature of political identities, as a basis for political mobilization and as a resource for the projects of actors and agents. This raises some important questions.
