IMMIGRANTS
The skin game
RAWLE KNOX
Last week I listened to a Conservative MP telling his local association members that one of the objects of the next government, to be formed by their party, would be to make Britons once again proud of their country. 'And how,' asked a front row lady, elderly but far from frail, 'can we be proud of a country that is being flooded by West In- dians and Indians and Pakistanis ...?'
The MP, a staunch Heathan, began by answering that we were not being so flooded and that he was in favour of the Con- servative policy of stricter control on im- migration. (Reserved murmurs of agree- ment). But he would never say that any man was inferior to himself simply because of the colour of his skin. (Silence, nigh upon dissent.) He must say, however (indeed to make anything of a peroration now, he had to) that while the British were being told to get out of so many places in the world. he thought that anyone who wanted to come to Britain should be expected to conform to the British way of life. (Non sequitur unnoticed; warm applause).
No one asked the next question — what happens if immigrants don't conform? Because they won't, of course. An alien com- munity clings even to illogical customs and traditions, familiar straws in the unknown stream. (Shades of young Scottish mercantile bankers practising Highland dancing in gym shoes every Wednesday evening in the height of a Persian summer.) I think it was that fine Indian Civil Servant Mr H. V. R. Iyyengar who wrote, a little sadly, of meeting on his travels a Sikh in California—third generation in the United States—who was buying a house with cash (he had never used a bank) and whose family, whenever a young man came of marriageable age. always sent back for a bride from its village. in Punjab. Repatriation is no answer. The immigrants are here to stay. They are also here to stay in defensively bunched little communities, what- ever good-hearted plans for 'dispersal' may be made. Immigrants don't disperse, gener- ally speaking, any more than they change col- our.
A Dublin civil servant I know, needing better Irish to pass some government ex- amination, did the customary pilgrimage to the Gaeltacht a few years ago. They still had trams in Dublin then, and one evening in a pub beyond Galway my friend got talking to an Irish-speaking character (he denied all knowledge of English) who was prepared to discuss trams all night. But he did leave in the end and the civil servant commented that he had been remarkably intelligent about trams, considering he was never in Dublin. 'He should be.' said the landlord. 'He was driving them things in Chicago for thirty years.'
The BBC has programmes for Britain's Urdu-speaking immigrants, called Make Yourself at Home and New Living. In fact these turn out to be musical essays in nostalgia, interspersed with queries from befuddled listeners about various regulations they are supposed to comply with. (These helpless cries alone should be enough to answer people who believe the blacks come here just to get the free health service and the dole.) But the immigrants need com- miseration as little as they do abuse. As far as the Indians and Pakistanis are concerned they have not 'fled to escape desperate poverty', as is so often stated. The Pakistanis come from West Punjab where they are bet- ter oft and more enterprising than most of their compatriots — which is how and why they have come to Britain. The Indians come from East Punjab, where the same applies, or Gujerat, which has a tradition of pro- ducing commercial wizards.
The West Indians are in a different category. Their problem is socio-economic rather than purely social. They are as godless and detribalised as most Britons, but they have drifted into the lower paid jobs that the British apparently will no longer take, whatever the state of the unemployment figures, and therefore are busy identifying poverty with blackness. This relationship, apart from the fact that they will stay black, could be changed by two generations of schooling.
Indians and Pakistanis will however con- tinue to worship their own gods and to fry up garlic at the hour of the morning when their neighbours are least resistant to strange odours. And when you've finished retching it's really no good saying that they ought to be eating porridge. (Anyway, we can't have it both ways. About ten years ago an attempt by Hamburg shipbuilders to attract unemployed Scottish shipyard workers with good wages and all mod, con. foundered because the immigrant Scots declared the porridge inedible.)
The BBC has its programmes on the new
life for the Indians and Pakistanis but none on the new life for the British. I suppose most Englishmen would be surprised if told that a Sikh thinks they smell terrible. A Race Relations Act, and a Board, and a Com- mittee, treat outspokenness like the plague. Until we start discussing the whole problem of black and white in black and white, and in glorious technicolour too, we shall never have our 'integrated' society. Without in- termarriage—and there's hardly going to be any intermarriage—integration can only mean a tolerant understanding. That might be something to be proud of.
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