Claudia Jones, the Commonwealth and the Immigration Act of 1962

Reading Claudia Jones’s broadside against 1962’s Commonwealth Immigration Act as reproduced in the latest Race & Class, a few things struck me. This first immigration act, passed by a Tory government in the year following Jones’s opinion piece in the West Indian Gazette, significantly changed British views on immigration. The targets she rages against should make us reflect on some of the assumptions we have so naturalised that we no longer recognise them as assumptions at all.