Our poor, tired little island just can't cope': race, immigration and 'decline' in the post-war EnglishMidlands, c.1958-1981

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Inspired by Stuart Hall's observation that 'the notion of decline is caught up with the question of an embattled national identity', this study will examine how hostility to immigration in Britain c.1958-1981both stemmed from and contributed to popular perceptions of 'national decline'. This period is critical, containing the high-point of Commonwealth immigration (and legislation to restrict it), the end of empire, perceived economic underperformance, and myriad other social changes, conflated in the concept of 'decline'. Temporality is overlooked in relation to these issues; conceptions of the past (memory) and future were central to how immigration was imagined in these years, and to ideas of decline. For example, in his invocation of an apocalyptic future resulting from immigration in his infamous 'rivers of blood' speech, Enoch Powell collapsed the future into the present, creating a sense of urgency through his words which prompted a huge popular response. I will examine these questions through the cases of three Midlands cities, each interesting for its own reasons: Nottingham was the location of notorious 'race riots' in 1958, Leicester became well-known for its large Asian population and as a National Front stronghold in the 1970s, while Birmingham and the West Midlands area saw an infamously racist election campaign in Smethwick in 1964, plus Powell's aforementioned speech in 1968. They also experienced different patterns of demographic and economic change. I found connections being drawn between immigration and decline in my undergraduate dissertation research on 'South Asians in Leicester, c.1970-1990', both in terms of competition over resources, unemployment and deindustrialisation, and the linked notion of an 'embattled national identity'. Through local examples, we can complicate and de-centre orthodox accounts written from the centre, and also trace similarities and contrasts between how race relations evolved in different contexts.On the basis of my undergraduate record, I was awarded Nottingham's Tranfield Scholarship for 2019,covering the cost of tuition on the History MA course. I would be pleased as part of M4C to work with Nottingham's Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies, Birmingham's Centre for Modern British Studies, the East Midlands Oral History Archive at Leicester and the Modern Records Centre at Warwick. My proposed supervisors put me in excellent position for doctoral study in this subject: Dr Blackburn is a specialist in twentieth-century British political ideologies, Professor Schaffer in the formulation and dissemination of racial ideas, and Dr Peplow in Black British political participation.