Everyone speaks about the Windrush. The boat was actually called the Empire Windrush. The full name reveals what the story was about. The boat was one of a series called Empire X, X being the name of a British river, as if each were a tributary to a common stream. Mass coloured immigration to Britain was the act of an imperial power — almost, one might say, an imperialist act. In 1948, a Labour government (Attlee’s) created a common ‘Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. Just as we wanted the raw materials of our colonies, so — later in the day — we wanted their labour. This also explains the context of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech 50 years ago this week. Enoch had been a fervent imperialist, but he believed, with the loss of India, that the Empire was no more, so he opposed persisting with imperial pretensions. The entity of ‘our great imperial family’ to which the present Queen pledged her lifelong service in Cape Town on her 21st birthday in 1947, had ceased to exist, he argued, and therefore its citizenship was a fiction. Thus did the right become the anti-imperialist reformers and the pro-immigration left the imperialist diehards — an irony so great that it has passed almost unnoticed.
The row about the ‘Windrush generation’ which has embarrassed Mrs May this week is an example of her administration’s strange attitude to presentation. Defenders of her method say that she considers substance not spin, but a truer description would be that she does not foresee presentation problems enough. When they come tumbling out before the public gaze, she spins like mad, as she did with her abject Windrush apology. The same applies even to her much more successful adventure, the bombing of the Syrian chemical warfare sites.
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