‘A Class Apart’?: South Asian Immigrants and the White Working Class Left, Yorkshire 1960-1981

During the 1960s many thousands of South Asian immigrants arrived in the United Kingdom. At first they were, by and large, economic migrants looking to fill British labour shortages and send remittances back home. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, the arrival of wives and dependents, and the growth of a British-born or raised generation of South Asians, led to the creation of a permanent settlement in the UK.
This thesis aims to examine the reactions of the white working class Left in Yorkshire to these new arrivals from 1960 to 1981, analyse the factors which prompted these reactions, and assess the implications of this reaction for our understanding of concepts such as ‘class’, and ‘identity’.