Kieran Connell's "Multicultural Britain"

Kieran Connell is a writer and historian based at Queen's University Belfast. His first book, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain, was shortlisted for the Whitfield Book Prize.

Connell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Multicultural Britain: A People's History, and reported the following:

Readers turning to page 99 of my new book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History, will find an analysis of the fallout from the racist rioting that took place in August 1958 in Nottingham in the English Midlands. I show how, in spite of the fact the rioting consisted of dozens of white men roaming the streets of Nottingham and attacking Black passers-by, the idea that it was the local white population who were the real victims quickly took root. When the sentences of five of the perpetrators were read out in court, I write, ‘there were gasps and screams from the public gallery. One woman fainted, while another exclaimed “what about the dirty Black dogs? They have started all the trouble, but you can’t catch them”’.

My page 99 in many ways encapsulates one of Multicultural Britain’s central themes. From the end of the Second World War to the first decades of the new millennium, Britain became multicultural. Yet, at the same time as this, Britain’s stubborn, endemic problem with racism was never far away. It is telling, for example, that the UK Government’s response to the 1958 riots was not to attempt to address the issue of white racism. Instead, it introduced the first legislation designed to restrict the ability of citizens from Britain’s current and former colonies to migrate to the one-time imperial mother country. As the Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, explained to his colleagues, the legislation would “operate on coloured people almost exclusively”. The racism that powered the 1958 riots had in many respects become institutionalised. This tension between increasing ethnic diversity and ongoing racism – what I call in my book the ‘dialectics of multiculturalism’ – is perhaps the defining feature, I suggest, of the momentous story of how Britain became multicultural.

Visit Kieran Connell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Handsworth.

--Marshal Zeringue