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Sixty years ago, in the industrial heart of the West Midlands, the town of Smethwick became the epicentre of one of the in modern British political history.Ìý

The 1964 general election saw Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths win on an openly racist platform, one defined by the vile slogan, “If you want a n for a neighbour, vote Labour.�

Griffiths had bucked the national trend, unseating Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker in what has been referred to as the most racist election campaign in British history.

In the year prior, a strong anti-immigration lobby in the Midlands which cut across formal party lines was whipping up a moral panic about the small but growing population of Black Asian workers in the region.

This was a period where both trade unions and labour clubs sought to enforce colour bars. Black and Asian people made up just 6% of the population but it was their presence that dominated political discourse.

The Conservative campaign highlighted Gordon-Walker’s opposition to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill which restricted migration.

Lesser known was Gordon Walker sowing the seeds of his own demise by providing legitimacy to his opponent’s arguments in December 1961.

While debating the Commonwealth Immigrants bill, he said "Of course, there is a real problem, a problem of social relations, housing, and overcrowding, which produces racial tension. Hon. Members who represent the affected areas — I am in one of them — know that there is deep and genuine feeling on this matter. We have all been told by constituents, 'If you had to live in the conditions in which we live your mind might well be changed'. I have always thought that there was force in this argument."

Instead of dismantling such moral panic and changing the narrative, Walker had instead allowed his opponents to dictate the political agenda.

60 years on, how much has really changed?Ìý

What Labour doesn't tell you about migration

In response to the growing threat from the far-right Reform Party, our governing Labour Party boasts about deportations with Starmer adopting Farage-esque talking points, the Conservative Party’s "one-nation experiment in open borders," at Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament last week.

A number of Labour MPs in the North and Midlands have formed a group called the "Red Wall Caucus" who see being more vocal about immigration as being key to tackling the Reform Party threat in their constituencies.

In one recent meeting, reported that the group allegedly talked about how Labour should be more vocal about the Home Office overseeing mass deportations of migrants from the UK. Nigel Farage might not be Prime Minister but he is certainly in power.

This summer we witnessed the worst instance of racist rioting in living memory. Mosques were bricked, shops were smashed up and hotels housing refugees in Tamworth and Rotherham were set on fire. Our political and media class quickly moved on from the riots.

In the few instances that these horrific events have been acknowledged, the narrative has focused instead on notions of "community cohesion" — absolving our political and media class of their own responsibility in fanning the flames of bigotry.

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Sarah Edwards, Labour MP for Tamworth, described the attack on the hotel housing refugees in her constituency as ‘shocking and disgraceful’. Just a week prior to the attack, Edwards said in Parliament that "the Holiday Inn has been used for asylum purposes for years and the simple reality is that residents want their hotel back."

There was no concern whatsoever for the welfare of the asylum seekers in that hotel. A year prior, refugees from Libya, Afghanistan and Chad shared with the BBC about why they had sought safety in the UK, the difficult journeys they had made and the racism they had encountered.

In Libya and Afghanistan, Britain has been actively involved in wars that have devastated these countries and contributed to a refugee crisis.

More recently, Syrian asylum seekers have been after the Home Secretary said the government was pausing their claims.

Whilst there has been much jubilation about the fall of the Assad regime, the country remains unstable and the pause has left many applicants anxious about their future.

Alongside whipping up a moral panic about refugees, it has been incredibly rare for politicians to champion the contribution that immigrants have made to Britain both historically and in the contemporary context.

Instead, years of sensationalist newspaper headlines and political sloganeering about "stopping the boats" have depicted them only as a threat to be dealt with in the public consciousness.

It is no coincidence that the "stop the boats" slogan used by the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a press conference in 2023 was emblazoned on a banner in front of a hotel housing refugees during riots in . Politicians and journalists don’t just respond to public sentiment on migration — they actively shape it.

According to a recent , 45% of Brits believe that most migrants come to Britain illegally. But the truth is of migrants come to Britain through legal routes.

This is a classic example of availability bias — where people assume something is more prevalent than it is based on how frequently they see it.

Boat crossings account for a very small number of the increase in migration in recent years with international students, care workers and humanitarian visa schemes for Ukraine and Hong Kong contributing to record net migration. And as much as politicians will bemoan increases in migration, they are well aware that the UK economy and our public services depend so heavily on it.

Britain, with an ageing population and declining birth rates has for many years recruited migrants to work in adult social care, the NHS and numerous other sectors.

These workers are often subjected to exploitation and abuse - stories that seldom receive attention in the nation’s press. And even then, these industries struggle with labour shortages. The social care sector currently has vacancies.

In construction, with high levels of retirement among an ageing UK-born workforce and a loss of EU workers since Brexit, there are very real concerns about labour shortages.

The industry will need over a more skilled workers if the Government is to meet its target of building 1.5 million new homes in the current Parliament.

A convenient scapegoat for Britain's political class

Just as it was after the Second World War, where Black and Asian immigrants from the former colonies worked the most undesirable jobs in the factories, the mills and the foundries of Britain, migrant workers are fulfilling a similar role today. They are the most exploited workers in Britain whose contribution is completely ignored and whose presence is actively despised.

Clamping down on exploitative practices in these sectors would improve the lives of migrant workers and make such jobs attractive to British workers too.

Investing in skills and training for British-born workers is a laudable aim and one that politicians have pontificated about for over a decade. But the skills shortage won’t be reversed overnight and politicians know they will depend on migrant labour for the years to come.

Tackling anti-migrant sentiment means dispelling the myths about immigration and being honest about the contribution they make to Britain.

But it will also require addressing the poverty and deprivation that the far-right pounce upon in order to play their divisive blame game.

In areas disproportionately impacted by deindustrialisation and cuts to public services, anti-immigrant sentiment has salience. It’s a winning formula for politicians who’d like to absolve themselves of their own responsibility in failing to invest in these communities.

It’s far more convenient to scapegoat migrants for housing shortages than acknowledge the reality that Britain has not built enough social housing since the 1960s.

of the most deprived parts of the country were hit by racist riots this summer. In deprived seaside towns and former mining communities, the far-right are feeding on alienation and despair.

These are communities that have not just lost their industries but have seen the steady erosion of their social infrastructure too as a result of austerity cuts - community centres, libraries, youth clubs and leisure spaces that keep communities connected. The end result is a lack of social interaction and increasing polarisation.

These communities require investment and adequate infrastructure. Instead, they are being fed anti-immigrant sentiment by politicians from across the political spectrum. The atmosphere of hate that fueled the riots neither began this summer nor ended there. 60 years on from a racist election campaign, where fear eclipsed facts and division was sown for political gain, it increasingly feels like very little has changed.

Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Metro and the Independent. He is the former editor of Tribune Magazine and is currently writing a book on the history of British South Asian political activism in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of °®Âþµº, its editorial board or staff.