Ugandan Asians

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Popat, on introducing this debate today and warmly thank him. I have to begin with an apology, because when I put my name down, I thought the debate was going to start at 2 pm and I have to attend an engagement in my former constituency this evening over snow-covered roads. I hope the Front Benches will acquit me of discourtesy for not being here at the wind-up and transgressing the Companion in that way.

I did not want to withdraw my name because of my own personal background in this matter. My father was a minister of the Church of Scotland, ministering for eight years to the Scots population in Kenya and Uganda officially, and Tanganyika unofficially. As a boy, I drove with him on his preaching tours during the school holidays throughout those three territories. I have used every excuse and opportunity to go back and visit those places whenever I can, and I will be again during the February Recess.

The problem for the Asians in east Africa started not in Uganda but in Kenya, with the Africanisation programme of the Kenyatta Government. At that point, the Asian population of Kenya was less than 2% of the whole. They had come there from 1895 onwards to build the railway and develop a considerable role in trading in the colony. Sadly, in 1967-68, when they started to come to Britain because of the Africanisation programme, there was a great controversy in this country about what should be done about it—against the wishes of people like Iain Macleod and Hugh Fraser, who had been the Ministers responsible at the time of independence of these territories. They had given the Asian—in fact, the whole expatriate—population two years in which to opt either for local citizenship or to retain British citizenship. Many had retained British citizenship, but the Government of the day decided to introduce the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, which withdrew that fundamental right of entry into this country. It was something to which we in the Liberal Party at that time were very much opposed, and I was very proud of my party that we divided the House of Commons against the Second Reading of that Bill. We only had 10 Members at that time, but we attracted 62 others from the major parties into the Lobby in protest against that decision. Interestingly enough, I looked up what the vote was in this Chamber, and it was much closer. With the influence of the Bishops and other sensible people, the vote in favour of the Bill was carried narrowly by 109 votes to 85, which shows again how this Chamber was perhaps rather more principled than that of the Commons.

Anyway, I wrote a book about it at the time and that much neglected work I discovered in the Library here cost £2 at the time. I could not find my own copy, so I went on to Amazon and I found that I could get one for £44. I wish that everything I have done had risen at the same rate. That is slightly irrelevant, because the impact of that Act clearly had to be withdrawn when Idi Amin’s Government in Uganda started to expel the British population by force. In 1971, I went on a visit to Kampala to meet a member of Idi Amin’s Government who had been at university with me in Edinburgh; later I had to flee the country. The British high commission was not very happy to have a Member of Parliament on its hands, and insisted that I be driven back to Entebbe Airport for 21 miles—to which the noble Lord, Lord Popat, referred—in the daylight, getting there at 6 pm, when the plane from Nairobi was coming through at midnight. For six hours, I sat in the airport, accompanied by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who at that time was my assistant. We watched the exodus of the Asians: we watched their baggage being looted and dumped on the tarmac; we watched their jewellery and watches being taken off them. I wrote at the time:

“I have never witnessed such scenes of unbridled abusive power and virtual anarchy”.

It was a terrible episode.

I will be brief because I am not able to stay. Winston Churchill visited the colonies in 1908; he was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time. He wrote:

“It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go, or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anyone else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies perhaps the largest part of the capital yet available for business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not hesitated to recur for financial aid”.

That was written in 1908 and it was that spirit of enterprise and adventure that these people brought so commendably to this country, and for which we thank them.