ABSTRACT
In previous chapters we looked at why it was that the downward spiral in the Metropolitan Police’s relationship with London’s West Indian community, which began in the 1950s, continued in the following decade. As we have seen, difficulties in the relationship were largely a reflection of the unwillingness of many in the host community to embrace the concept of multi-racial Britain, coupled with a desire to maintain racial inequalities in all aspects of economic and social life. Successive British governments must shoulder much of the blame for this state of affairs. Inertia and indecision were ever-present factors, particularly from the early 1950s, when the government failed to deal with escalating social problems resulting from large-scale West Indian immigration. A major impediment to integration/assimilation was the failure of governments to educate and inform the host community why such immigration was occurring. Whitehall severely underestimated the likely numbers of Caribbean immigrants who would come to Britain from the late 1940s onwards and kept no accurate figures on numbers arriving during the peak years of migration. The duplicitous scheming of Conservative governments in the 1950s: arguing, on the one hand, that it was the right of all Commonwealth citizens to settle in the ‘mother country’ while all the time looking for ways to end black migration from the Caribbean and elsewhere, virtually guaranteed that the road to multi-racial Britain would be beset with difficulties.
