Ugandan Asians

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vara]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He is absolutely right that not everyone was hostile. Indeed, Sir Peter Soulsby—until recently a colleague of ours—said that Leicester was a stronger place because of the Ugandan Asians.

Edward Heath rightly took the decision that both morally and legally Britain had an obligation to take in the refugees. The position was best summed up in a statement in Parliament on 7 August 1972, when Alec Douglas-Home, the then Foreign Secretary, said:

“We accept a special obligation for these people who are British passport holders”.—[Official Report, 7 August 1972; Vol. 842, c. 1261.]

There was, of course, a fair amount of frantic international diplomacy on Britain’s part, and we managed to persuade 29 other countries to take some of the people concerned. Those countries included the United States, Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan, New Zealand, some Scandinavian countries and some Latin American countries.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I hope this is not the most important point I will make, but will my hon. Friend remember the Falklands, which asked for a couple of doctors and then a plumber?

[Mr Vara]

As always, my hon. Friend makes an apt intervention that enlightens the debate.

As a consequence of so many countries agreeing to take refugees, Britain ended up with 28,000 people—28,000 British passport holders who came here frightened, homeless, penniless and with only the clothes on their backs. They arrived at Stansted airport, and some at Heathrow airport, and were met by demonstrators holding placards saying, “Go home! You’re not welcome here.” The fact that they were British passport holders and had no home to go to was by the bye as far as the demonstrators were concerned.

Britain hastily set up the Uganda resettlement board, whose job was to give immediate assistance to the refugees, find them homes and jobs and, importantly, ensure they were resettled in the community at large. To start off with, they settled in 16 resettlement centres scattered throughout the country—former military bases that were mostly bleak and isolated. But this was a time when Britain was at its best. Having accepted responsibility for these refugees, voluntary groups, church groups, charity groups and ordinary citizens came out to help them. They showed their warmth, their compassion and their care for their fellow human beings. Many of the indigenous population did not have much themselves, but what little they had they were happy to share with the newcomers, giving them food and shelter.

Councils throughout the country also responded. In south Wales, Pontardawe rural council offered three council homes, Aylesbury rural district council offered six and Peterborough city council—I represent part of Peterborough—helped too: the then leader of the council, Councillor Charles Swift, went to Tonfanau resettlement centre in Wales with local employers and offered 50 council houses, provided the people agreed to take on the jobs offered by those with him. For his efforts, Councillor Swift received hate mail and death threats, and for a while required a police escort to take him to work as a railway driver.

This was also a time when individuals opened their doors. Some had only one room spare in their house and took in one individual, but others had more space and took in whole families. This was the British character at its best—but there was a little humour as well. There was the incident of two refugees in a resettlement centre being quite miserable, but suddenly finding that in Britain the shops closed at 5 o’clock and during the weekends. They smiled, and one said to the other, “We’re going to be rich.”

Very soon the refugees moved from the resettlement centres into the mainstream community. Rather than seeing the expulsion as life-destroying, they looked at it as a setback. They picked themselves up and started all over again. They took whatever jobs were available, worked long hours, made a success of their jobs and their lives and built a better future for their families; and now, many of those people employ hundreds and thousands of our fellow citizens. One such example is Mr Shabbir Damani in Peterborough, who came here penniless but now has nine pharmacies employing 100 full-time staff and another 100 or so on an ad hoc basis. There are many other such examples.

There were successes not only in business but in the professions, the military, the police, politics, media and entertainment, charities, sport and so on. There is also the case of Dr Mumtaz Kassam, who was expelled at the age of 16 and went to a resettlement centre in Leamington Spa, but ended up being, until recently, deputy high commissioner for Uganda serving in Britain—serving the country that had once expelled her as a teenager. The precise contribution made by the Ugandan Asians is difficult to quantify in economic terms, but it is generally felt that the south Asian community—or those with origins there but who are now settled in Britain—number 2.5% of the population, but are responsible for 10% of our national output.

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[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I am happy to do that, Mr Deputy Speaker. I shall make just a few short comments.

First, let me thank our hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) for his timely and persistent attempts to secure the debate. He naturally wanted to ensure that it took take place, but the rest of us are happy to associate ourselves with his wish.

Although she has left the Chamber, I also want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). She worked for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants for a long time, and did a very reputable and important job in that organisation. Her continuing commitment to the cause of immigrants to this country, and to others who have not come here but may wish to do so—and have a claim to do so—deserves to be put on record. She paid tribute to others, and I think that she deserves a tribute herself.

The backdrop to today’s debate is the legislation of the 1960s, which was not our country’s most glorious hour, and the mercifully much better response to that terrible “90 days” threat to an entire community, the entrepreneurial heartbeat of Uganda, in 1972. Thank God we responded as we did and other countries in the Commonwealth and elsewhere responded as they did, and thank God there were enlightened local authorities in Britain which, as was pointed out by the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire, were positive in their response.

It was not easy for the people who came here in 1972. The weather, as I recall, was grim, and, as we have been reminded, conditions were often grim as well. Those people had a very difficult start. Not only did they come with, literally, the clothes that they could take from their homes and the suitcases that they could pack—often with no finances, and with young children in tow—but they then went into pretty grim accommodation, which we provided in various parts of the country at short notice. The fact that their conditions were made much better was due solely to the wonderful volunteering spirit of members of the community who offered their help, as well as the work of those for whom it was a statutory duty.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

On 15 August 2005 an article was published by Martin Wainwright, describing how our former colleague Richard Wainwright, who was Member of Parliament for Colne Valley, took in one of these families. That description gives life to what Members are saying today.

[Simon Hughes]

I knew that, and, as my hon. Friend would expect, I know Martin Wainwright well: he is Richard Wainwright’s son. Many others did the same.

My constituency has a proud association with Uganda, because King Freddie of Buganda settled there and made it his home, thanks to the generosity of, in particular, the Carr-Gomm family. It was Richard Carr-Gomm, a former Liberal MP for Rotherhithe, who set up the Carr-Gomm Society and the Abbeyfield Society. In what was, in those days, a very white Bermondsey, hospitality and recognition were given to King Freddie and his family, and that spirit has continued through the ages. What happened then changed the cultural mood of a community, transforming white docklands London into the wonderfully multicultural community that we have now.

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[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) reminds me that I try to end most speeches by saying that we can look with affection to the past, with admiration to the present and with confidence to the future. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) has managed to secure this debate, as I have learned a lot from those who have spoken.

My grandmother took in a Russian after the great war; my parents, when I moved out of my bedroom, took in a Hungarian refugee after the uprising; and my wife and I were delighted to go to an RAF camp in Kent to collect Razia and Roshan Jetha, who came to live with us for a year and a half. We learned a great deal from them, and I was also grateful for the £5 a week they gave us, which helped with the housekeeping.

The key point about the Ugandan resettlement is that within two years the resettlement board had produced its final report and almost none of the evacuees were out of work. We cannot say that all the problems had been solved, but the job had been done. If people look at the record of the Adjournment debate that David Lane, the then MP for Cambridge, had on 29 July 1974, which was responded to by Alex Lyon, they will see those who helped to contribute to that—the voluntary groups, the Churches and the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, among others.

Nationality is one of the issues in this debate, which must be seen in the context of the see-saw in Britain between justice and racialism, both of which we have had and perhaps still have. J. B. Priestley, during the war, asked us to name our eight great-grandparents. Most of us cannot do that, so we cannot actually know precisely who we are. Dorothy Sayers, in an essay or talk she wrote during the war called “The Mysterious English”, which was published in “Unpopular Opinions”, one of Victor Gollancz’s yellow-covered books, tried to explain to people what it was to be English. She said that we were “a nation” rather than “a race”, but to go into her argument would take up more time than I have available. It is worth remembering that when Idi Amin went mad it was in the context of Kenya and Tanzania doing the same kind of thing as he was doing and when the UK was in the middle of passing a succession of immigration laws in 1962, 1968 and 1971. In 1968, James Callaghan openly said that in these sorts of circumstances, which he would not have foreseen directly, we would take in the people of British nationality. As it happened, Idi Amin wanted to get rid of the 23,000 Asians who had Ugandan nationality as well, so we are not particularly talking about those who had chosen one kind of passport rather than another.

I pay tribute to Sir Charles Cunningham and the resettlement board, because they managed to bring the resources together. They asked for help, they provided it and they brought in the evacuees at £70 a head for each flight. As well as taking the offers from other parts of the world, they provided the basis for letting the Asians from Uganda join in our community in a way that was just regarded as natural by most who met them. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) referred to King Freddie, and two of my children were at school with King Freddie’s children or nephews and nieces. It was perfectly normal and natural; although everyone has backgrounds, some happier than others, some grander than others, at that age people accept each other as they are. That is one of the contributions that the Ugandan Asians have made, and the same can be said of the Kenyan Asians and the Tanzanian Asians.

We ought to try once a year to have a debate on inclusiveness. Others might think of it as “diversity” but I think it is inclusiveness; it is about how we give people the chance to make a contribution to their own lives, to their communities and to the nation. If we can do that, we can be proud of being on the right side of the see-saw: on the side of British justice rather than racialism.

I end with some words about a man I first knew when he was the vicar of Tulse Hill—after other jobs, he later became the Archbishop of York. I turn around words that he had once used in my hearing by saying, “They came, they saw and they stuck to it.” He put it as “Veni, vidi, velcro.”