Back in the 1970s, a slogan sometimes heard was “if they’re black, send them back!”, a reference to the removal from the UK of what might be called “the blacks and browns” who had come to the UK in increasing numbers since 1945. Indeed, the 1970s (the time perhaps most significant in my own initial political development) was the halfway point between the almost entirely white Britain of my childhood (I was born in 1956) and the Britain largely composed of non-whites which emerged in the 1980s and has carried on in ever-intensifying form to the present day.

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