This book is about the history of Sikh immigration to Gravesend. It's a town East of London on the south bank of the Thames associated with Dickens. OK, so in common with almost all books on British race relations and immigration, the book is written by a foreigner. In this case, an American protestant marries to an Indian Hindu woman. It seem like the book is based on two studies of the Sikhs of Gravesend and a study in the Punjab of the area they came from. The first study was 1970-71, and the second was in 1983 by which time the community had changed substantially and the book was substantially rewritten. I've ordered the first edition to try and get his uncontaminated earlier impressions.

THE SIKHS IN BRITAIN
Not a lot of people know that the Sikhs originally arived after the war as non-English speaking illiterate peasants on forged passports who turned living standards back to Disckensian squalor.🧵

https://x.com/ThreeJacques/status/2063011640686059945

They brought with them peasant Communism & linked up with British Communists to put down local opposition to the ethnic displacement of the natives. There were famous riots and roving bands of Sikh youth patroling to violently confront the white youth.🧵

https://x.com/ThreeJacques/status/1968296870893224349

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.

Next book on the list. Bristol has always been one of the more liberal, studenty places that has seen significant postwar Commonwealth immigration. The actual invitation of the Windrush Generation...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Books on the actual mechanisms by which people have been illegally transported into Western Europe are exceedingly thin on the ground. I thought this might be an interesting window into the topic...🧵 Wow! First paragraph of the introduction, and this is already the most reactionary academic book on immigration I have ever read.🧵

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. 🧵

DERSHOWITZ: THE TEN BIG ANTI-ISRAEL LIES
I just discovered this book. Given all the Ben Shapiro bashing currently going on at the moment, I thought it might be interesting to look at Dershowitz's take on what the core arguments are. Updates to follow...🧵 In his introduction, Dershowitz does as you would expect & is careful to start things in 1948 with the UN dividing the land between different groups with different claims that the Muslims refuse to accept because they are religious radicals intent on taking over the region.🧵

THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
Along with Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, this book represents a view of the working class and "progress" being about their struggles that died as the 50s turned into the 60s. From the perspective of today, both books are prescient of a type of rooted, conservation, reactionary cultural analysis. In it's day, this book was hugely influential.

I read this a few years ago when my thought was less developed, but it has floated around in the back of my mind. Time to return to it, I think...🧵 The book opens with an attempt to define the working class that blows me away. Very much like Richard Hoggart, the working class are a historically contingent lived thing made up of diverse elements that are united within the lives of real people. To talk about the working class in isolation is meaningless. They exist in their relationship to other classes.

I feel it has enormous crossover to the modern sophistry of demanding definitions of the English and the British. No definition, no matter how good, would be enough to satisfy people who wish to deconstruct such things, but it is still perhaps good to be clear in one's own mind what one means.🧵

I've had this little booklet kicking around for a while from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. It's about the rioting in the 70s as post-war Punjabi immigration took over Southall in London.🧵 I thought this was rather illustrative of what I object to. It's a celebration of the resilience and strength of the Punjabis in forging a community in the face of prejudice. The thing is, there was a community there before them that waves of non-English speaking Punjabis on forged passports flooded into and then that previous community was broken and gone.🧵

I have such sights to show you... The postman just brought me a present. Back in 1964, the British general election was dominated by racial questions, particularly in relation to the Conservative candidate for Smethwick. Kind of a pre-Powell Powell. I now have his book about the election. Not only that, but the copy I have is the review copy of Jamaican author Andrew Salkey and has newspaper clippings and old hand-typed pages stuffed in it! He begins with a quote from Disraeli. I strongly suspect Disraeli's views on race were wildly more problematic, if taken seriously, than those of Griffiths, with all Disraeli's talk of pure bloodlines in novels like Coningsby. 🧵