Addressing Immigration: A study of Conservative and Labour party election manifestos and individual candidates’ election addresses, 1964-1979

Abstract

Black and Asian immigration into Britain after the Second World War has received enormous scholarly attention due to its association with decolonisation and the search for a post-imperial identity. However, historians still argue whether race and immigration were potent electoral issues throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the thesis will focus on Conservative and Labour manifestos and election addresses from the six general elections between 1964 and 1979. The goal is to understand how Britain’s two major parties competed on race and immigration, using various languages and rhetorical devices. The analysis will reveal the fundamental significance of manifestos and addresses for the study of electoral politics and race and immigration issues. Although manifestos and addresses have received some attention from prestigious publications such as the Nuffield Election Studies, the contents of these sources remain largely unscrutinised. This thesis is based on a massive dataset of comparable material that differentiates between original messages and texts copied from national manifestos, revealing the complex interchange between candidates’ leaflets and the parties’ manifestos. Instead of relying on a sample, the thesis explores the quantity and quality of the promises which candidates made about immigration and other related issues across all 630 parliamentary constituencies in Britain. Finally, using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, the thesis assesses the interconnections between immigration and domestic issues such as crime and housing. It also engages with international problems like Europe, Rhodesia and the Commonwealth. It will be shown that since1964 discourses on race and immigration have undergone numerous far-reaching transformations. By 1979, political and public discourse on race and immigration had shifted decisively to the right. Whereas this process was driven in part by the individual agency of right-wing Conservative MPs, it was met with fervent opposition from the Labour Party and its candidates.