Immigrants treated differently in UK

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): There are two problems with running a global empire. One is that all your far-flung subjects feel they have a right to come and live in the 'mother country'. The other is the left-overs.

Left-overs is the issue in Britain at the moment: the 13 'dependent territories', mostly islands, that remained under British rule after Hong Kong's return to China last June. They are a wildly varied lot, ranging from Bermuda in the North Atlantic (population 60,000), to Pitcairn Island of Mutiny on the Bounty fame in the South Pacific (pop. 51), to the uninhabited British Antarctic Territory. They have a total of only 160,000 people, but it's amazing how much aggravation they cause in London.

Montserrat, in the Caribbean, had half its surface covered by lava due to volcanic eruptions last year, and most of the population are still refugees. But at the height of the disaster last August Clare Short, Britain's International Development Secretary, complained that the people of Montserrat had become so demanding "they'll be wanting golden elephants next."

That pretty well sums up the British government's traditional attitude towards its colonial subjects: their job was to shut up, send money, and stay put. But last week Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hinted to a conference of the Dependent Territories Association in London that he was going to give them back their British passports.

Real ones, that is, carrying the right to live in Britain itself, like the ones they all had before 1962. That was when the British government, facing an influx of East African Asians expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin, abruptly changed the rules, giving all its overseas subjects passports that no longer carried the 'right of abode' in Britain.

This racist act unjustly deprived people of a citizenship their ancestors had held for generations (over three centuries, in the cases of Bermuda), but it had an even worse side-effect. It signaled that Britain was no longer interested in the fate of its smaller possessions -- which was perfectly true, of course, but also dangerously encouraging to neighbors with territorial claims.

After Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1981, the few thousand Falklanders and the inhabitants of Gibraltar (which is claimed by Spain) got full British citizenship back. But the other colonies did not, partly because most of their inhabitants were black, but mostly because giving them full citizenship might create a legal basis for six million Hong Kongers to demand the same rights.

The odd thing in all this is the contrast between the British people and their government. For while both the Foreign Office and the Home Office have been consistently mean-spirited and racist over the decades, the actual population has responded to the arrival of millions of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean with remarkable tolerance and flexibility.

Officially, the other ex-imperial powers have been much more generous towards their 'left-overs' than Britain. France, for example, has several million people, most of them black, living in various overseas territories, and it gives them all not only full French citizenship and the 'right of abode', but also elected representatives in the National Assembly.

But popular attitudes in France towards non-white immigrants are deeply hostile, with over ten percent of the population voting for openly neo-fascist parties that promise to 'send them home'. Huge ghettos have grown up in the bleak suburbs that surround big French cities, and police behavior is often tantamount to licensed racism.

Britain is no earthly paradise, but the contrast is huge. About five percent of the total British population (but nearly ten percent of school-age children) are non-white, and in big cities the ratio is far higher. The racial and cultural differences are, if anything, greater than those separating the 'old' and the 'new' French, but the whole experience has been far more positive.

Individuals may be racist, but there is nothing like the level of tension that typifies French (or indeed American) race relations. In the younger generation, there is an astonishingly high rate of inter-racial dating and intermarriage: 30 percent of British-born West Indians under the age of 30, for example, are in multi-racial relationships.

The British, contrary to all the stereotypes, have turned out to be rather good at living in a 'post-modern', multi-cultural society. And since they elected Tony Blair's 'New Labour'government last May, those attitudes may finally be percolating up to their rulers.

Not all parts of the British government have been transformed, needless to say. Robin Cook's proposal to restore full British citizenship to all of Britain's remaining overseas subjects met with an instant, angry rejection from Home Secretary Jack Straw, a rigidly conservative man who often seems to be in the wrong party.

But it will be Cook who finally wins the argument -- once the government finds lawyers who can draft the legislation in a way that restores citizenship to Britain's 160,000 current overseas subjects without opening the government up to claims from the Hong Kongers it handed over to China last year.

That's really what it has all been about for the past decade, at least: 'protecting' Britain from a flood of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. So they went elsewhere, mostly to Canada, Australia, and the United States (in that order), to the immense benefit of those countries instead. And Britain got exactly what it deserved: nothing. But belatedly, it is doing the decent thing for its other overseas citizens.