WI: No Post-War British Immigration

I think there is one point that most have missed here - those immigrants brought connections back to their homelands, and brought skills to Britain. If those skills and connections stay in the colonies, does that help development there?
 
I don't know anything about that - what happened in Germany?
They've still got huge numbers of Turks. They still live there, form ghettos, etc...
All the problems as with the worst of the worst low class Pakistani communities in Britain.
The only difference is they're not actually counted as German. And I don't think they got as many positive contributions out of them as we did either (or so the Germans would say, I've no first hand experience myself)

Make the country physically bigger so population pressure doesn't mean too much wealth is sunk into property? :D
Que?

Once again I ask - what about the Swiss option? A possibility in the UK? Or no? If no, is it just the wealth question - not enough money for Swiss style Champagne Socialism?
Would be way too expensive I'd think back then (though today working class jobs often do bring in a lot more money than middle class ones). Surely Switzerland hasn't had this since the war?

TheMann said:
I think there is one point that most have missed here - those immigrants brought connections back to their homelands, and brought skills to Britain. If those skills and connections stay in the colonies, does that help development there?
They didn't bring skills to Britain.
The point of them was they were unskilled labour for factory work and the like.
Sure there were quite a few doctors and the like coming over too but I'd think this is more referring to the waves of working class people rather then the few skilled people.
 
Where would Britain be without postwar immigration

Probably neither extreme. Certainly not more prosperous as immigration was encouraged to deal with labour shortages. When he was Minster of Health, Enoch Powell actively encouraged recruitment of nurses and health service workers in the Caribbean. Wages for the less skilled may have risen more rapidly owing to labour shortages but the economy probably wouldn't have grown so no one would have been better off as any wage rises would have been eaten away by inflation.

Britain's place in the world? Probably no effect. In the past plenty of people from the Caribbean and the Indian sub continent have fought for the crown not to mention Somali seamen in two world wars. The bulk of the people arriving on the Empire Windrush were ex servicemen.

Crime? There are still areas where crime levels are high and there are few immigrants. Crime tends to occur in certain socio economic conditions and these are often the conditions that immigrants tend to live in. Mods, rockers, skinheads and football hooligans are largely home grown.

When Enoch Powell made his infamous speech nearly 40 years ago there were more people leaving the UK. Currently large scale immigration to the UK is from Eastern Europe.

We would obviously have had a less diverse society but hardly a problem free one.
 
They've still got huge numbers of Turks. They still live there, form ghettos, etc...
All the problems as with the worst of the worst low class Pakistani communities in Britain.
The only difference is they're not actually counted as German.

I don't understand, if they are guest workers shouldn't they leave when their time is up? I'm thinking like when I was a young man and went to visit Australia from England - It was possible to get a visa permitting me to work for a fixed period of time and then when it was up I had to leave. It seemed both fair and equitable to me.


I'm no economist but it seems to me that one of Britain's problems (particularly in the SE) is the cost of housing and that the amount of wealth that gets sucked in to paying for homes sharply reduces disposable income. As I say I'm open to correction, but one of the reasons for the problem must be that the pressure of population on usable land area drives prices up.

Would be way too expensive I'd think back then (though today working class jobs often do bring in a lot more money than middle class ones). Surely Switzerland hasn't had this since the war?

I don't know when it was instigated and suspect it is the sort of policy that only the wealthiest countries could afford.
 
Well, it's a lot easier to take the moral high ground when you haven't lived alongside another race for years yourself...although even in the 1940s London had a fairly large nonwhite population...

That's basically what i was thinking.
 
What if there were simply no attempts to solve the labour shortage?
Let the labour market re-organise with the new reduced supply.

Some industries would fold but in the long term atleast that might not be a bad thing.

Indeed, but it would really have hurt in the short-term, and of course much more political cloud for the workers. And the Empire gone more quickly, with less remorse.

I think maybe even a Socialist Britain could've been possible in those circumstances.
 

Neroon

Banned
I don't understand, if they are guest workers shouldn't they leave when their time is up? I'm thinking like when I was a young man and went to visit Australia from England - It was possible to get a visa permitting me to work for a fixed period of time and then when it was up I had to leave. It seemed both fair and equitable to me.
Laws don´t execute themselves. After their time was up, many simply wanted to stay and because of certain issues in Germanys past no politican back then dared to actually make them leave again. Instead they were allowed to bring their families along, too. While officially they were still called guest workers, so no one left or right worried about integration. Not out loud anyway.
 
Indeed, but it would really have hurt in the short-term, and of course much more political cloud for the workers. And the Empire gone more quickly, with less remorse.

I think maybe even a Socialist Britain could've been possible in those circumstances.

Its possible, but unlikely I think. Well unless you consider Britain under Atlee to be socialist.

As I see it there would be greater blows to Britain's prestige as areas such as Empire and defence get cut, but on the whole that doesn't really effect the average Briton. Demolishing Britain's craft-based industry and replacing it with something more like the American/German model would have been profitable in the medium to long term. Workers having more rights might be profitable as well. In OTL neither workers or employers could quite best the other so you had alot of strikes which never really changed anything. In this situation there is likely a big arguement early on but then a settlement rather than on going disputes.
 
Its possible, but unlikely I think. Well unless you consider Britain under Atlee to be socialist.
It's about the closest we got, but I'd still say social-democratic, not socialist. There was no attempt made, nor any demand to attempt, a subversion of the established democratic institutions, in the name of the people, the workers or anyone else.
As I see it there would be greater blows to Britain's prestige as areas such as Empire and defence get cut, but on the whole that doesn't really effect the average Briton. Demolishing Britain's craft-based industry and replacing it with something more like the American/German model would have been profitable in the medium to long term. Workers having more rights might be profitable as well. In OTL neither workers or employers could quite best the other so you had alot of strikes which never really changed anything. In this situation there is likely a big arguement early on but then a settlement rather than on going disputes.

An interesting aspect of that system - it is claimed in this book that the tiny space programme we did have was actually helped by the lack of mass-production, split-everything-up-into-tiny-repetitive-tasks methods. The people who were putting together the rockets actually knew enough about the whole process, and how a change in one system would affect others, that we didn't need the same quality-control measures as the vast US space programme - it was nearly all all done at the design and manufacturing stage by the people involved.
Not tha I want to derail the thread, but something to consider...
 
Well I wouldn't really call Atlee socialist. I doubt Britain would ever become 'socialist' in any manner beyond the socialism undertaken by the western Europeans. I could see British politics leaning more to the left. Actually.. possibly not. If workers are getting more money for their labour they will be less inclined to have it taxed away to acquire services they don't need (and subsequently don't want).
 
This is a very interesting question.

Firstly, mass immigration was encouraged by successive governments both Labour and Tory, so it wasn't a completely "natural" process, i. e. it was not inevtiable.

There would have been severe labour shortages in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the health service. Could this have encouraged greater investment in mechanisation? Might we have been spared the high unemployment of the 1980s?

Studies show that "ethnically homogeneous" states, like Spain and Ireland in the post-war years, do not perform as well economically as those countries whic encourage immigration. Would Britain have performed poorly without the immigrants?
 

Valdemar II

Banned
Studies show that "ethnically homogeneous" states, like Spain and Ireland in the post-war years, do not perform as well economically as those countries whic encourage immigration. Would Britain have performed poorly without the immigrants?


The chicken and the Egg. Beside Spain is not ethnically homogeneous.
 
Well I wouldn't really call Atlee socialist. I doubt Britain would ever become 'socialist' in any manner beyond the socialism undertaken by the western Europeans. I could see British politics leaning more to the left. Actually.. possibly not. If workers are getting more money for their labour they will be less inclined to have it taxed away to acquire services they don't need (and subsequently don't want).

Well Sweden (in the 70s more than now probally) is the most advanced a country has ever come on the old feudalism-capitalist-socialist-communist scale.
 
Well, it's a lot easier to take the moral high ground when you haven't lived alongside another race for years yourself...although even in the 1940s London had a fairly large nonwhite population...

Indeed, at a recent free showing of films in Trafalgar Square organised by Film London there was a silent film from about 1920 portraying life in the East End and of course it showed a very diverse community. The interesting bit was a scene showing racism in a pub, where the landlord refused to let a coloured man dance with a white woman-the incident portrayed the landlord as evil and the message appeared to be 'racism is wrong' based on the reaction of the lead characters and the crowd

Now of course, its inappropriate to attribute contemporary values, etc but it was interesting to see a very 'modern' belief in a time when many would expect a more 'racist' attitude.
 
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