• People have been fleeing
persecution or suffering since time began.
• The Israelites fled slavery and persecution
in Egypt and still remember that today with the festival
of Passover.
• Jesus was a refugee when he fled from the persecution
of Herod and so too was the Prophet Mohammed.
• The British Isles is probably one of the most
homogenous countries in the world. We have integrated
centuries of off-shore peoples. Romans, Angles, Saxons,
Jutes, Danes, Vikings and Normans and then later on French
Huguenots, Jews, Black and Asian Peoples and the Irish.
• We have regularly maltreated those 'foreigners'
as well. In 959 King Edgar of Wessex, father of Ethelred
the Unready was criticised for inviting people with 'evil
customs' to England.
• In 1255 the chronicler Matthew Paris observed
London to be overflowing with Poitevins, Provencals, Italians
and Spaniards.
• In 1290 the small community of Jews who had
become established here since the Norman Conquest were
expelled by King Edward the First.
• In 1572 came the first wave of Huguenots (French
Protestants) escaping from the massacres of Protestants
by the King of France. 50,000 settled here over the next
200 years.
• They called themselves 'refugie' which is where
our word 'refugee' comes from.
• The Huguenots brought skills in weaving, lace
making, cloth and paper making. They introduced cutlery
to this country, table wine, biscuits and oxtail soup!
• Geneologists reckon that one in four Londoners
is descended from a Huguenot refugee.
• We continued to react against 'foreigners'.
Elizabeth 1 said in reaction to black people in England
'of which kind of people there are already too many here.'
• In the 1650?s Oliver Cromwell allowed the return
of Jews to this country.
• In London the area of Spitalfields that had
been populated by French Huguenots became home to Jews.
First the Sephadic Jews generally wealthy and involved
in Banking and Engraving and then Ashkanazi Jews from
Eastern Europe who brought skills of Tailoring and Shoe-making.
• Similarly the area of Cheetham Hill in Manchester
was home initially to Jews and then home to the Asian
Community.
• In 1851 the Jewish population grew to 120,000
due to the pogroms in Eastern Europe.
• In the 1850s the Irish came not because of
war or persecution but because of famine in Ireland.
• Black people have been here since the time
of the Romans. There was a Black Cohort of Soldiers stationed
on Hadrian's Wall. Slavery has meant that Black people
have lived on these shores for hundreds of years.
• A common fear and complaint down the ages has
been that the foreigners threaten jobs and houses and
are a threat to people's well being. History records riots
against the Huguenots in London, against the Jews in York,
and against Black and Asian people in more recent times.
• In 1903 came the Report on the Commission on
Alien Immigration. This questioned Great Britain's long
standing policy of granting 'right of asylum' to foreigners.
• In 1920 the Work Permit system was introduced
to check and control numbers arriving in the wake of the
World War One.
• In the 1930s in the build up of National Socialism
came Jews from Europe who were Poles and Lithuanians as
well as Germans and Austrians.
• 30 million people were displaced by World War
Two.
• The end of Empire brought workers from West
Indies and the Indian sub-continent. These people were
crucial to the reconstruction of this country after the
chaos and destruction of the War years.
• Since the War we have had people fleeing war
in Somalia. Chinese and Vietnamese fleeing war and persecution
and Asians from Uganda who were expelled by Amin. More
recently with the ending of the Cold War, ethnic and nationalistic
tensions held at bay by Communism have erupted in Eastern
Europe and so we have Serbs, Croatians, Kosovars, Albanians
and Roma Gypsies coming here for safety.
• At different points in the last 50 years we
have had Arab peoples coming here for safety from Iran
and Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.
• Terrorism has added another dimension to the
fear that people have of the 'foreigner'. Previously all
migrants were seen as 'dirty, superstitious and disloyal'.
After September 11th Arab peoples are now also seen as
dangerous. During the activities of the IRA, Irish people
were also often perceived as a threat.
• Nothing has changed deep down. We continue
to see 'foreign' as a threat to our well being, even though
our culture and history as a nation has been enriched
by all these peoples. We each of us need to take responsibility
to counteract this negativity by working to build bridges,
to see the value of 'difference' and to learn from that
difference for the benefit of all.
