‘Coloured Dick Whittingtons in this Land of Socialized Gold’: Immigration and the Welfare State

Abstract

While the figure of the welfare scrounger is a well-worn trope in antiimmigrant rhetoric, remarkably little attention has been paid to how allegations of welfare parasitism influenced political debate and immigration policy-making in the post-war period. This chapter examines those allegations and their consideration by the British Government in the 1950s and 1960s. Right from the time when the first colonial immigrants began arriving in Britain in significant numbers, the welfare state figured in arguments about their political, economic, and social impact.