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Jack Hughes

Jun 5

I haven't reread a book in ages, but I thought this might be somewhat topical. It is a remarkable study by an Indian economist who lived amongst immigrant Sikhs in West London in the late 50s. Brave, British loving warriors invited by a grateful nation for their services in War?

The book conceals the name of the community being looked at behind the name 'Greenend'. It is really though focused on the Sikhs of Southall, the neighbouring area to Greenford.

A long forgotten issue is that migrants from India and the West Indies were able to take advantage of welfare on offer in Britain and live of National Assistance while they looked for work. This obviously lowered the risk considerably.

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Jack Hughes

@ThreeJacques

Jun 2

This book just arrived in the post. It is a reprint of a book on race relations from 1960 and contains the best academic account of The Notting Hill riots that I am aware of. Most interesting is that it predates the 1964 concensus to take many aspects of race of the table as a topic for public discussion. In common with a remarkable number of the sociologists working on this topic in the period, the author was an immigrant herself. Apparantly she came up with the term "gentrification".

I quite liked thismap of where West Indians were located in 1960. You have the settlement around Notting Hill north of the Thames, and Brixton to the south.

This table illistrates why Attlee wasn't particularly worried about West Indian immigration during his time in power (1945-51) and why it was only towards the end of Churchill's final time in office (51-mid 55) that any urgency entered the conversation, though he was too old and stroked out to do much about it.

Churchill was replaced by first Eden and then Macmillan who shared the general civil service view that it was a topic for cranks. That attitude lasted until mid-1958 with rioting in Nottingham and Notting Hill, which brought back memories of the 8 months of race riots in 1919.

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Jack Hughes

@ThreeJacques

May 28

I thought this might be interesting...

Unsurprisingly, the book opens with the Windrush Scandal, and the conventional story of "is" having brought "them" here, and hence owing them some kind of moral duty in return.

The framing of the story is quite interesting... it just focuses, like almost all Windrush scandal cases, on the profound inconvenience and moral shame after a lifetime of contribution. What is almost never said is what the basis of the claim to citizenship was, or why that was called into queston.

In this case, the individual had arrived in England in the 60s on a parent's passport and had never aquired a passport of her own. The destroyed documents would have helped, but they were never proof of citizenship.

What this comes down to is decades of immigration law, implemented to tamp down public concerns about immigration, but without any serious intention towards systematic enforcement... hence people spending 50 years living and working in the country without proof of a right to live and work in the country.

My read of this is that it comes down to a profound lack of seriousness about this going back at least to Harold Macmillan who, even though he was the one who finally imposed immigration restrictions, regarded it as a topic for cranks.

It is a situation that is impossible to deal with, to end, to ever put the lid on without creating case after case like this.

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Jack Hughes

@ThreeJacques

May 11

After hundreds of pages of Harold Macmillan's autobiography, I thought I could do with something racy. This is the account of the Profumo Affair from the swinging osteopath with whom the prostitute at the centre of the affair was living, plus the summing up of a retired judge tapped up by the TODAY magazine. This is the scandal that blew up the connection between London high society and the prostitution being run by West Indian pimps in the West End in the early 60s and finished off Harold Macmillan.

The osteopath-about-town at the centre of the Profumo scandal.

Stephen Ward handed his collection of "vividly-illustrated" dirty books over to the author of this book, who handed them over to the police. With friends like these...

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Jack Hughes

@ThreeJacques

May 8

Had this book on my shelf for a while. It explains in passing where the money came from for all those Jamaicans to hop on boats and planes and come to Britain. I've never seen this story covered in any of the accounts.

The book is from 1972 and is falling apart. It's by this Jamaican academic. I had it shipped over from Jamaica last year. What I noticed at the time was that it didn't seem to talk about emigration half as much as you'd think, so I put it to the bottom of the pile. What it does mention though, and looks interesting to me, is that an American bauxite mining company was buying people's land in Jamaica in the 50s. Reynolds Metal Company.

After the war, the West Indian economy collapsed with 30% unemployment. There wasn't a lot going on economically. The land wasn't much good for farming. The one thing Jamaica had was bauxite. It comes across a little like the control of water in Chinatown. The bauxite goes out... but where does the money go? How can you have a bauxite boom, but nobody has a job?

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Jack Hughes

@ThreeJacques

Dec 19, 2025

DANNY FINKELSTEIN'S BOOK
I thought this book might make some interesting bedtime reading. If it's not too turgid, I'll post the a summary of what it's like.🧵

Finkelstein talking about his mother, who apparently played down her experiences in a concentration camp because "it's not a competition". Supposedly, she had seen Ann Frank in Belsen.

In many ways, his early life seems pretty normal for a north London Jew in the period. Living in this Jewish area of London. Looking at it cynically, of course, much of what he is reminiscing about in that community is exactly that which more traditionalist people on the Right complain has been destroyed for the native population over and over again by mass migration. 🧵

Apparently, in 1920, with Germany still in chaos, Finkelstein's maternal grandfather went to personally confront the leader of a conservative putsch, which obviously failed, about his antisemitic view of Germany's situation. Perhaps Finklestein's own recent turn at debating antisemitism gives a window into how that went and the amount of self-awareness that the effort implies.🧵

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