p. 1 The history of decolonialisation has traditionally been dominated by accounts of formal negotiations between metropolitan and colonial governments. But this account demonstrates that the decolonisation period also offered unusual opportunities for informal influence on policy making. No one took better advantage of these opportunities than Sandys who became the most successful of a number of ‘diehard’ Conservative rebels seeking to slow the process of decolonisation through irregular channels. Sandys cut a prominent figure in the early 1960s as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and the Colonies in the Conservative Governments of Harold Macmillan and Alex Douglas-Home. He played a critical role in bringing Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ to the colonial world. His ministerial career came to an end with the General Election of 1964, and after a short period as Shadow Secretary of State for the Colonies until 1966, his official role was over…. Won considerable parliamentary and popular support, and became a serious if short-lived Rightist threat to Edward Heath’s leadership on an emotive and distinctly colonial blend of racial fears and dreams of ‘Great Power’ status. He was the first prominent conservative in the mid-1960s to galvanise opposition to withdrawal from Aden, majority rule in Rhodesia, race relations legislation and, most effectively, immigration from the ‘New Commonwealth’.
p. 143 “Sandys launched a vociferous attack on the Labour Government’s race relations and immigration policies in mid-1967. Sandys was the first prominent politician in the late 1960s to lead a popular campaign against both immigration and racial integration. At the heart of the controversy lay two related questions: how far immigration should be limited and the degree to which immigrants should be integrated having arrived. Going beyond the official Conservative Party policy of limited entry and assisted voluntary repatriation, Sandys called for “a complete stop on all immigration, including the entry of relatives” and going further, demanded that the government should “reduce the number” already living in Britain. At the same time, he also called for the repeal of the Race Re;ations Act of 1965, drawing on his colonial experience of ‘multi-racialism’. Sandys’ activisim opened the floodgates of anti-immigration reaction, later exploited to even greater effect by Enoch Powell.
About