A very British hidden history (original) (raw)

2020, Patterns of Prejudice

The Department of Education and Science (DES) produced Circular 7/65 on 14 June 1965, launched by the Labour Party but devised by the previous Minister of Education for the Conservative Party, Sir Edward Boyle, in 1963. It recommended that schools with more than 33 per cent immigrant children on the roll should disperse them (5). The ensuing practice of dispersal continued until it staggered to a halt between 1976 and 1986 (129), continuously obfuscating its purpose until its final demise. The vagaries of this particular dispersal policy are the focus of Olivier Esteves's The 'Desegregation' of English Schools. This is the first book-length study of the dispersal policy, bringing together archival sources, interviews and secondary materials to examine English bussing during a period of increased immigration to postwar Britain. Esteves provides a fascinating account of this period by 'reading against the grain' (5) and using a 'paucity of sources' to surmise intentions and expose what is a dramatic narrative. In his narrative, Esteves situates bussing at a particular moment in time: when white people were escaping areas of ethnic minority clustering, and politicians were advocating an official policy of integration for non-Anglophone Asians. This confluence, occurring after the implementation of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), intended to curtail immigration but led rather to a sudden and large influx of women and children, and alarming media stories about the consequential formation of ghettos (203). Esteves compares bussing in Britain to the same concurrent practices in the United States that gave rise to the phenomena of so-called 'white flight' and 'white backlash'. These comparisons to the United States act as counterpoints throughout the book, serving both to globalize the history and to provide an ideological mirror in which to reflect it. For instance, British legislators invoked the American model as justification: 'The natural ethnic clustering of Asians in Southall was, to Boyle, Southeys etc. tantamount to Jim Crow Mississippi or South African Apartheid' (41). This was an example of the resulting distortion, as in a carnivalesque hall of mirrors, since the Asians in Britain 'were not trapped or forced into segregated schooling as they would have been in the south-side of Chicago' (41).