ABSTRACT
Talking to a group of foreign Jews who had arrived in London at the end of the nineteenth century, Ben Tillett, pillar of the ‘new unionism’ of the 1880s and 1890s, is reputed to have extended what must count as one of history’s most reluctant formal welcomes: ‘Yes, you are our brothers and we will do our duty by you…but we wish you had not come to this country’ (Russell and Lewis, 1900, p. 198). The remark neatly captures the ambivalence with which the indigenous British labour movement has usually reacted to the arrival of any significant number of foreign immigrants. It certainly summarises the predominant attitude of the Labour Party during the past fifteen or more years, after nervousness about white backlash among its supposed traditional supporters and about its reputation for being ‘soft’ on immigration and on race relations generally moved it sharply away from what one might call the ‘brotherhoodof-man’ attitude that had been current in the 1950s and early 1960s.1
