World: The Dark Million

"The Englishman is tolerant of everything, including intolerance," says a British sociologist. Only up to a point. Last week Britain's Parliament was cracking down on the intolerance that native Britons practice daily against the swelling nonwhite minorities in their midst. Passed in the House of Commons by a vote of 261 to 249 was the second reading of a bill to outlaw discrimination "on the grounds of color, race, or ethnic or national origins" in hotels, restaurants, pubs, theaters, public housing and other places of public accommodation (though not in employment or private housing). Maximum penalty would be $280, and a good deal stricter ($2,800 and two years, or both) for written or verbal "incitement to racial hatred."

"It would be a tragedy of the first order," said Home Secretary Frank Soskice, introducing the bill, "if our country, with its unrivaled tradition of fair play, perfect respect for the rights and dignity of the individual, should see the beginnings of the development of a distinction between first-and second-class citizens." Britons themselves, of course, are among the most class-conscious people in the world, but Soskice was talking about a still more unfortunate class that was not even born in Britain. For the bill was the first formal recognition of the fact that Britain, like the U.S., has a permanent and growing racial problem. "This is a problem we should have tackled years ago," confessed one top government official. "We should have established the machinery to assimilate the immigrants. Instead, we pretended that there was no problem."

The Loopholes. There was a time when the occasional Indian or African studying at Oxbridge or importing tea in London was nothing but a pleasant reminder of the many-splendored variety of the British Empire, and the exotic babble of Hindu and Jamaican dialects was merely a quaint phenomenon of sailors' families settled in remote Welsh seaports like Tiger Bay. Then, when a large number of dark-skinned Asians, Africans and West Indians began flocking to Britain in the early 1950s, the British at first consoled themselves with the thought that these tropical people had only come to earn a nest egg, and would return to buy a trawler in Barbados or a camel in Karachi.

As the influx swelled, and wives and families began to immigrate along with students and bachelors, Parliament passed the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which for the first time limited the free entry into Britain of Her Majesty's subjects from her outer domains. Even that did not stop it. Aided by loopholes in the law and a high birth rate, the number of nonwhites living in Britain since 1962 has doubled to what is darkly referred to as "the dark million." Nearly half (about 450,000) of them are West Indians, with the remainder about equally divided among Indians, Pakistanis and Africans, and projections are for 4,000,000 or 5,000,000 by the turn of the century. Recently an anxious M.P. discussed in the Spectator the likelihood that "we should be come a chocolate-colored, Afro-Asian mixed society."