Pakistanis in Britain: The Second Generation

Alison Shaw’s study of the Oxford Pakistani community was published a while ago, 1988, and the third generation of British Pakistanis is now grown up and quite the handful. Still, her information on the attitudes of her subjects toward us is worth reading -- and some of those attitudes, I think, cannot easily be dismissed as unjustified. Also important is the explicit contrast Shaw draws between the Pakistanis and the English in the levels of support they can expect from family and their wider communities.

From Alison Shaw, A Pakistani Community in Britain (Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, 1988):

Tariq had been seeing Rubina regularly for about one year without his parents’ knowledge before deciding to ask his father’s permission to marry. Despite their initial disappointment at their son’s intentions because they were already arranging a good match with a relative’s daughter, Tariq’s parents agreed to speak to Rubina’s parents. They rejected the proposal and so Tariq and Rubina decided to elope and get married elsewhere. When Rubina returned home to tell her parents of her marriage, her enraged father took her back to Pakistan, where, several months later, she was married to a relative.

When incidents like this occur, it is common for western observers to view them as evidence of the clash between cultures which they expect the second generation will inevitably experience as a result of being brought up and educated in Britain. The assumption is that because the second generation have been at school in Britain and imbued with western values, they will reject a culture which is seen to deprive them of many fundamental liberties, such as choice of career and marriage partner.
Have there in fact been any such changes in attitude among the second generation educated in Britain? Are they less likely to comply with their families and biradari over participation in family and community events and over arranged marriages?

[p.156]

[…] the attitudes to marriage and respect for the biradari of those born here are not easily distinguished from the attitudes of newly arrived Pakistanis. Indeed, a rebellious attitude may be found among fiancés from Pakistan. For instance, Jamil, brought over to marry his cousin, soon deserted his new family for the delights of London, whereas Pervez, who was born here, readily agreed with his parents’ plans and married his cousin and now works in the family shop. This range of experience and backgrounds is an important feature of the present generation of young adults in the Pakistani community. It means, for instance, that when there is conflict over education, work or marriage, it is likely that conservative pressures will be exerted over the second generation not just by parents but by their peers as well.

[Additionally] the young adults of the community always include a substantial proportion who have only recently come from Pakistan. The preference for marriage within the biradari, ideally with cousins, means that marriages are still being arranged between Britain and Pakistan and girls and boys from Pakistan are still joining prospective husbands or wives in Britain. It is therefore likely that the young adults of the Pakistani community will always include at least some who have not been born or have not been to school in England.

[p.157]

[…] These young men are westernized in that they are fluent in English, interested in western music and Sport, and comfortable in English company, where they move with a sophistication that their parents lack. What does this imply about their attitudes to their family and biradari?

It is striking that young men such as these retain very strong social and financial links with their families; even those who live and work away from Oxford come home whenever they can and hope to get work locally when the opportunity arises. These young men tend to spend their leisure time with each other and their peers within the community rather than with English friends and also participate in family and community social events. Rather than regarding themselves as financially and therefore socially independent of their families, they contribute their earnings to the joint family budget. For instance, Khalid’s salary has enabled the family to take out a mortgage on a third house near the house in which the whole family at present lives. The plan is that when Khalid marries he will move with his wife, parents and unmarried siblings into the new house, leaving his married brother and sister-in-law and their growing family in the first one. Mohammed Ali has used his salary to help his sister and her husband to buy a house; Zahoor gives his parents the balance of his earnings after meeting his own living expenses and Akram hands his earnings to his mother. In other words, although these young men have successfully broken out of the circle of semi-skilled and manual labour, their attitudes to the family and views of work are essentially the same as those of their fathers before them. They consider it their duty to earn money for the benefit of the family, even if this means spending time living away from home, as their fathers did when they first came to England. Significantly, these young men said that they had chosen their particular careers because these are ones which gave them skills that would be useful in Pakistan were they to return there. As will be discussed below, these young men also accept that their parents will arrange or have already arranged their marriages.

[p.158]

[…] Many young Pakistani schoolgirls themselves (like many white British girls too) see a career on the one hand and marriage and family life on the other as mutually exclusive, and consider that a career has little value in comparison with the advantages they have at home. Indeed some girls are confident that within their culture they have many opportunities that their English peers are denied and that they choose their lifestyle as freely as most other girls do. Several girls have commented to me that they find condescending and offensive the attitudes of teachers who assume that the girls must be experiencing conflict between school and home. Most girls leave school because they see their role within the community, in the years before and after marriage, as a more attractive proposition than the opportunity of qualifications and a career that school offers.

Moreover, it is important to note that, contrary to the popular belief that Pakistani girls are forced into early marriages, most girls who leave school at 16 do not get married straightaway. Many girls who leave school take on responsible positions within the family and community before marriage. Kaniz, Raila and Fiaz spent the first few years after leaving school and before they got married at home, where they took on a large proportion of the household tasks, looked after younger siblings, worked in family shops where, as fluent English speakers, they had an important role, or returned for lengthy visits to relatives in Pakistan. Girls who work in family shops may continue to do so after marriage. Shakila, who left school at 16, worked in her father’s shop, where she served at the till and dealt with large grocery orders, and since her marriage at 17 she has been working in the shop that belongs to her father-in-law, who is her mother’s brother. Her unmarried. cousin, who also left school at 16, also helps in the shop. Similarly, Farida, who left school and got married at 16, works in the shop that is owned by her father and his brother, now her father-in-law. Her presence in the shop has enabled her husband and mother-in-law to run the family’s second shop, bought at the time of the marriage. In the evenings after school and at weekends Farida’s younger cousin also works in the shop. She is excited at the prospect of having a larger part in the running of the shop and says she can hardly wait to leave school. She shares with many of her white teenage friends a dislike of school and impatience to start a family; unlike them, however, not only can she depend on a large network of biradari members to help with childcare, but she also can expect a relatively responsible role in the family business and participation in the full extent of lena-dena relationships, and hence a say in biradari affairs. In this respect she has more to look forward to and is better provided for than many of her white contemporaries.

[p163]

[...] Most young men have much the same attitude to women and sexuality as their fathers; there has been no obvious change due to school, feminism, or the supposedly liberalizing influence of the west.

[…] Men and woman should avoid all contact with the opposite sex, apart from their spouses and immediate kin. For women, in most people’s view, this involves confining activities to the home. Men and women should also dress modestly. Men should cover the area just below the navel to the knees, whereas women should cover their hair and their bodies to the ankles and the wrists and conceal the shape of the breasts. Young women themselves hold these views of purdah, emphasizing that it is to protect men. Shabnam, who was eight when she came to Britain and is now in her twenties, said, ‘Especially before marriage, but also after it, women should not reveal their legs, should tie their hair, should cover their heads and chests with a scarf and should not wear make-up. This stops men from succumbing to temptation.’

It is believed that despite these preventative measures men do succumb to temptation and it is held that both men and women will then be punished by God. In practice, however, the woman is considered more blameworthy, for she is regarded as the temptress. A young married

[p.171]

woman gave this account of the punishments for failing to follow these rules:

The Prophet Mohammed was out walking one day when he saw a woman in torture, hanging by her hair, but still alive. A little further on, he saw a woman being hung by her breasts and then he saw a woman being put into a huge fire, screaming. Horrified, he asked Allah, ‘Why are these women being tortured like this? Please let them go free!’ But Allah replied, ‘The first woman used to tantalize men with her hair, the second used to reveal her breasts to strange men and the third slept with a man who was not her husband. That is why I cannot set them free.’

At the same time it is considered that women must be protected because they are the dependants of men. As one mosque committee member, whose views were shared by many younger men, said:

If you have something valuable, you keep it safe. If you have a diamond you lock it in a case. You don’t leave it for anyone to take. A woman is like a diamond. She is precious. You should keep her inside the four walls of your house. She should look after the house and children, and you look after her. Inside the house, she is in charge. My place is outside.

The corollary of this is that a woman who is ‘outside’, among men, unprotected, is ‘free for anyone to take.’ Western women in particular appear to break all the rules of purdah. They are regarded as sexually promiscuous, moving freely from one man to another, behaving and dressing in order to provoke men. A woman out alone is in effect asking for sexual relations with a man. Rape, young and older men have insisted, is always the woman’s fault, because it is the natural result of a woman dressing provocatively and being out alone. In this view, western women are simultaneously exciting and despised for having no sense of shame and being ‘used by more than one man; like prostitutes’. As the mosque committee president quoted above said, ‘Women are exploited in English society. They are like toys for men to play with. They are cheap. Women are out on the streets, in shops, on the television. They work like slaves for a pittance in factories, in shops and as cleaners. There’s no respect for them.’

The same man’s wife showed what she thought of English women by pulling her shalwar tight across her buttocks, loosening her hair and swaying her hips, in imitation of how an English woman attracts a man.

These views constitute a general stereotype of English women, but are not confined to them, for the same is thought of women within the Asian

[p.172]

community who are known, or suspected to be, sexually promiscuous. Asian girls who go to college, or work, or cut their hair short, or wear western dress are assumed to be very ‘modern’ and to have several boyfriends, like English girls. The rumours that circulate about them are based on the same prejudices with which English women are viewed; indeed, such girls have been slandered as desi goris (literally, ‘home-made white women’). One man regarded the Asian women he had slept with as ‘no better’ than English women.

What these attitudes amount to is that the same double standard held by many first-generation men is now held by many men of the second generation. A man’s own wife, sisters and daughters are regarded as, and expected to be, pure and chaste, while all other women are regarded as potential sexual partners. Many married men who do not expect their wives to go out in mixed company go themselves to attend mixed gatherings where they socialize with women. Pre- and extra-marital sexual affairs are generally kept hidden from all other family members. Moreover, many second-generation men, like the first generation before them, believe that because most English women do not share Islamic moral values, there is no contradiction between upholding the Muslim community’s moral values on one hand and taking advantage of women who do not share these moral codes on the other. Izhar, for instance, is an unmarried twenty-two year old who has recently applied for his father’s brother’s daughter to

[p.173]

come to England as his fiancee. Unknown to his family, he has had a number of English girlfriends:

The point is, English girls don’t mind; there’s no restriction for them. In fact, they chase you and laugh at you if you don’t go with them. It was like that at school: the girls chasing men. I know I shouldn’t have, it’s against our religion, but how could I refuse? It’s natural for a man to feel like that; you can’t really avoid it. I blame the western system. I was in a mixed school and it was too free - all the boys thought about was the girls, and all the girls thought about was the boys.

Izhar is not unusual in his attitudes and behaviour. Almost all of the unmarried men among the young adults surveyed above have had clandestine relationships with English girls, yet do not feel that this contradicts their acceptance of an arranged marriage or the Islamic moral code. It is tacitly accepted by most men and women that men will have girlfriends because ‘men are like that’ and because English girls are easily available, yet parents avoid discussing the subject of pre-marital sex, unless to condemn it, and the sons keep their relationships hidden from relatives and people who know them in the community. However, one mother, unusual for her bluntness, admitted that she had encouraged her son to find a girlfriend:

When he first started at university, he kept on asking us to arrange his marriage as soon as possible. I was worried, because I thought it would be better for him to wait about five years, until he was qualified and had got a job. After all, he is only twenty, and when you marry, it’s for life. We talked about it, and it seemed that he was worried about sex. All his friends had girlfriends or were married or getting married. So I told him he should enjoy himself first, before he gets married. A boy should have some experience, and there are plenty of English girls around.

Incidents like those involving Rubina and Jamila are therefore only public versions of what goes on, and is even expected to go on, in private. The difference, however, is that when a sexual relationship with an Asian girl becomes public knowledge everyone else, including the men who have English girlfriends, becomes morally indignant, for they have to be seen to be upholding the community’s values. Jamila’s brothers and their friends, who included boys like Izhar, were furious when they heard of Jamila’s elopement; they retaliated by assaulting her boyfriend’s brothers. One of the assailants said, ‘Jamila is like my sister; she could have been my sister - it’s my duty to take revenge on him for his insulting us like this.’ When I suggested that the speaker was just as guilty because the English girl he went out with was also someone's sister or daughter, he said:

[p.174]

That’s different. The difference is, English people don’t care. The girls don’t mind; you tell them you can’t marry them, you’re just passing your time, and they don’t bother. They’re just passing their time too. If their brothers or fathers got angry, we would understand, but they don’t bother. Mostly, they are not even living in the same place. How can you respect men like that? They just say it’s the girl’s choice, it’s her life, and that’s what the girls say too.

[p.175]

Pakistanis in Britain: Leadership and Political Mobilisation

More from Alison Shaw, A Pakistani Community in Britain (Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, 1988). Previous posts here and here.

My emphases in bold:

I once had to interpret in court for Mohammed Anees who had been charged with shoplifting. He had been in England for over fifteen years but his knowledge of English was poor. Under cross-examination he had to answer one main question. Was there some sort of commotion going on in the street outside the shop, and if so what? Anees replied that he thought something might have been happening in the street outside the shop but he could not remember what. At this point the court adjourned, and Anees, his solicitor and I withdrew to a private room. The solicitor then explained, with unmasked irritation, that Anees had just contradicted his written statement given to the court the day before. This statement said that some youths fighting in the street outside the shop had distracted Anees’ attention just as he was going to pay for his goods. The solicitor then asked Anees why he had just contradicted in court the previous day’s statement. It emerged that Anees had relied upon a Pakistani community representative from a local welfare association to give the original statement, the details of which Anees did not know. In view of Anees’ contradictory evidence, the solicitor’s advice now was that Anees should change his plea to guilty. Anees accepted this. The court reconvened and Anees was fined.

Afterwards, I felt that I had somehow let Anees down, that had I known more about the case beforehand I might have helped him steer his way through the proceedings. However, Anees said, in a somewhat condescending tone, that I was worrying unnecessarily because things did not happen that way. He had already done all that he could by approaching a community representative who was a ‘big man’ (bara admi), capable of getting him let off. He seemed to have assumed that this patron would ensure charges were dropped by providing a story, of which the details did not really matter, and, more importantly, by negotiating with the solicitor and other members of the court. This had obviously not happened. Even

[p.135]

though Anees had been let down by his patron, who, by not furnishing Anees with the details of the story, had allowed him to contradict himself and thus worsen his case, Anees bore his patron no grudge. Anees felt that he had been unlucky this time, but this did not cause him to question the procedure he had followed. For him, the case had already been decided by the ability of his patron to negotiate with the solicitor. He felt that this had been unsuccessful because of his choice of a patron, not because of the procedure he had adopted. If his patron had had sufficient influence and if the court had liked him, he would have been let off anyway and it would not have mattered that he had contradicted himself. He protested his innocence in the eyes of God and seemed quite unconcerned about how the English court viewed him, as if he did not believe in justice on earth.

This incident, contradictory and confusing to the lawyer and the court, only makes sense when Anees is seen to be drawing on his own tradition and experience of law and justice.

Patronage in Pakistan

To understand Anees’ case, and many like it, we need to consider the significance of authority and leadership in Pakistan; the following picture is drawn from incidents and conversations with villagers there. Villagers frequently spoke of police corruption. In particular, they described how the rich bribe the police when someone has to be charged for a crime, and induce them or compel them to charge an innocent party who cannot afford to bribe. One bank-clerk reported that police had arrested a colleague of his while he was travelling on a train and had imprisoned him for a crime someone else had committed. For such people, survival lies in strengthening their biradaris, extending the network of people bound to each other by mutual obligations and doing favours for people with authority to ensure the return of a favour when necessary; the biradari network is trusted rather than the system of police or the law. An individual will not go to court until he has found someone, such as a barrister, ideally from within his own biradari, who has some obligation to him and would be sure to win the case or get it withdrawn.

[p.136]

[…] Influential biradari contacts may also mean that people can escape punishment for a crime that biradari members may themselves have set up.

Thus, many villagers regard the wealthy owners of land, villages, or factories, government officials or army officers as being in a position to dispense patronage; as a result they are treated with deference and respect. One landlord, who had recently returned to Faisalabad district after spending twenty years in Glasgow where his sons still run businesses, had bought a large farm, with a large pakka house (built of kiln-baked bricks and mortar), a tube-well and tractors with money earned in Britain. He had also purchased an ice factory in town and given his brother the task of running it. He now employed landless labourers from a nearby kacha settlement (built of mud bricks) who treated him with respect and subservience; on one occasion an employee knelt at his feet to ask a favour. As the landlord himself proudly pointed out, they now also call him chaudhri, a title or respectful form of address which literally means ‘head man’.

[…] The result is an attitude towards institutions that differs from traditional British expectations of their function and operation. In Pakistan, one cannot appeal to the justice of the system, to the rules and principles embedded in the bureaucracy, to deal with a problem. Each official is seen first as a member of someone’s biradari and only second as an official.

[p.137]

Business will be attended to if an official is a biradari member; if he is not, he may have to be bribed, or some other biradari member may have to exert his influence.

Britain: local politics and patronage

In Pakistan, for those without influence or biradari members in positions of authority, legal and government institutions are to be avoided. For those with influential contacts, things are different. As one young man boasted to me: ‘If a policeman tells me to come to prison but I refuse, what can he do? His superiors are my father’s friends. He can do nothing.’ Consequently it is not surprising to find that first generation migrants from poor village backgrounds assume that their first recourse, in dealing with British authorities, must be to enlist the aid of a patron.

It might be thought that such attitudes would disappear after a few years in England, but there are two main reasons why they have persisted. The first is that in the early years of settlement a patron’s aid was required to cope with life in England. The second reason, discussed below, has to do with defending the Islamic values believed to be essential for the maintenance of the community once settled in England.

When Pakistani men first came to Britain, the majority of them had a very poor knowledge of English and had great difficulty in finding accommodation and employment, in handling the D.H.S.S. and so on. The British economy needed labour in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the government, while encouraging immigration, made no concessions to accommodating and meeting the needs of the immigrants once they were here. Migrants therefore turned to biradari members and fellow villagers for help. In this situation, it was relatively easy for a fellow migrant who appeared to be educated, to have good English, and to be able to cope with British institutions and make contacts in departments of the local council or the Pakistan Embassy, to achieve a position of influence among his fellow Pakistanis. Migrants themselves tended to put into a position of influence and authority someone who appeared to be educated and able to offer them the help they needed. Such a person, having attained this status, generally confined his welfare activities to members of his own biradari and this led to biradaris competing with each other for such positions and for the resources which they provided.

Welfare associations arose from the genuine need for welfare in the 1960s. Although the associations are in theory open to all and have elections to each post, the presidents can be seen to operate as patrons do in Pakistan. The first Pakistan welfare association in Oxford, founded in 1961, provided a free and popular welfare service, which included

[p.138]

negotiating with the Home Office and the Pakistan Embassy and filling in tax forms. […]

The threat to Islamic values

As the majority of families can now manage reasonably well in dealing with British institutions, it might be supposed that the need for patrons would diminish and that attitudes to authority would change. However, a new need is perceived, the need for protection from the threat of western values. By appealing to fears of the erosion of Islamic culture certain individuals have come to acquire in the eyes of many Pakistanis the same status as patrons in Pakistan. This ideological element is a second aspect of the persistence in Britain of traditional attitudes to authority.

The force of the ideological influence of these new patrons lies in the complex views Pakistanis hold of English society. In Pakistan, Britain is admired for its wealth, education and health services. Comparing Britain with Pakistan, people would often comment on the apparent absence of nepotism and bribery in political and administrative circles, and spoke with admiration of the health and social services. ‘England’ one man said ‘is the most civilized country in the world.’ In Pakistan, people spoke with pride of the role of the British administration in organizing the building of the canals, irrigation and settlement of the canal colonies. The president of the Pakistan Welfare Association who arranged for improvements to be made

[p.139]

to his village in Pakistan had been impressed by the fact that British cities have community centres and British cemeteries have walls around them. Goods made in England are much sought after in Pakistan, and in general anything man-made is highly valued. Locally produced cotton is considered inferior to silky man-made colour-fast fabrics. In Pakistan, English is compulsory in higher education and considerable status is attached to schools where English is the medium of instruction and which are to some extent modelled on English private schools. Pakistanis praise the British education system and first generation migrants hope that the second generation will obtain professional qualifications in Britain; qualifications obtained abroad, especially from Britain, are respected and coveted in Pakistan.

There are also racial connotations in the ways in which English people, or what might be regarded as ‘Englishness’, are admired. In Pakistan, fairness of skin is coveted; it is desired in a bride and associated with the high castes who traditionally keep their women in purdah. Magazines abound with pictures of pink, round-faced babies in advertisements for dried milk, and with pale-faced women in advertisements for cream to lighten skin colour. Relatives of families in Oxford would ask about the skin colour of their relatives in England, for they expected it to lighten in Britain, and mine to darken in Pakistan. Pakistanis refer to themselves as kale log (black people) inferior on the grounds of skin colour to the gore log (white people). Within the kale category though, there are gradations of colour: dark skins are associated with low caste status and inferior racial origins. One man described people of kami status as black and of a different ‘race’, (using the English word). On the same grounds, east Oxford Pakistanis consider Bangladeshis inferior to them, while people of Afro-Caribbean origins rank lowest. The word habshi, usually translated as negro, is used as an insult.

Among Pakistanis in Britain, however, English people are regarded with considerable ambivalence. While the aspects of English society and western civilization mentioned above are admired and whiteness itself is still coveted, at the same time the British administrative and political system is one which hunts down immigrants, has betrayed their rights as British subjects by successive changes in immigration and nationality laws, and treats them as inferior. While only some of the first generation speak openly of racial discrimination, many of the second generation born here speak bitterly of it. Thus the term gora is an ambivalent one, and the phrase gore log can be used insultingly, to separate Pakistanis and outsiders. But what is usually perceived to lie at the heart of this ambivalence towards English people is the fact that their social and sexual mores contrast starkly with the Islamic values of purdah and sexual segregation.

Many Pakistanis hold a low opinion of western social and sexual mores and particularly of the position of women in western society. English
[p.140]

women are seen to break all the rules governing sexual morality. The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a number of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women. Pakistani women often cite Britain’s high divorce rate and the increasing proportion of illegitimate births as evidence of the low moral standards of the west. Furthermore, their views are often coloured by the fact that some Pakistani women had to cope with husbands who have, or had, English girlfriends and even wives. Not surprisingly, many Pakistani women are suspicious of English women who visit them and it has sometimes taken many years for me to be accepted in their homes. Knowing me has not changed their beliefs. For my close women friends, who have always been curious about my views on the position of women and on Islam, which I have not concealed from them, it is a matter of great concern that I will ‘burn in hell’ for the sin of not believing in God and for other sins such as preventing pregnancy.

Manipulation of ideology

Because of these feelings about western society, Pakistanis’ support will be easily mobilized if the need for it is expressed within the framework of Islamic values. When there was a proposal to close the only all-girls secondary school in Oxford, attended by many, though not all, of the Pakistani Muslim girls in east Oxford, a Community Relations Council survey was carried out which showed that while some parents sent their daughters to that school because it was single sex, there were also those who sent their daughters to a mixed secondary school because they thought the education there was better. For them, the religious question at that stage was not as important as the quality of the education that their daughters were receiving. However, once the issue had been presented in terms of a threat to Islamic values, many of these parents sided with those campaigning to maintain the all-girls’ school.

[p.141]

[…] Similarly, the emotive issue of protecting the community’s young women and girls from western influences figured prominently in establishing the role of the president of the All Pakistan Women’s Association in the community. At an Eid celebration which she organized, she spoke to the assembled women of their duty to ensure that their daughters keep their hair tied up and covered with a scarf, wear the shalwar, or at least trousers, rather than skirts, and do not wear make-up. At another gathering, she referred to someone’s daughter as a desi gori (a ‘home-made English girl’), and warned mothers to take care that their daughters do not become desi goris too. This phrase is used as a term of abuse for a girl who wears jeans, make-up, cuts her hair short and may work or go to college.

[p.143]

[…]

Community leaders as patrons

Taking a public stance as defender of the community’s values does not of itself make a person into a patron as they exist in Pakistan. This comes about because some people, once elevated into prominence by their position as the community’s protector, are keen to impress on their fellows that they are indeed such patrons. The individuals who champion the cause of Islamic virtue belong to a group sometimes referred to as ‘community leaders’ or ‘community representatives’. As other commentators have noted, this is a heterogeneous category. Writers agree that most leaders are in many ways on the periphery of the community. Some leaders have been described as ‘integrationist’ in that they are self-appointed, atypical, committed to western values and are regarded with suspicion by the ‘mass of rural uneducated Pakistanis’, even though they may have official status in the eyes of the British authorities. On the other hand, there are also the ‘accommodationists’ drawn from the educated but poor middle classes who are ‘culturally aligned with the uneducated peasantry’. Of the ‘Asian immigrant brokers’ who organize the welfare societies in Manchester, ‘the majority tended to be less religious and to have certain exceptional attributes (of regional or denominational affiliation) which set them apart from the Punjabi Sunni majority. In other respects, however, they were very much of the “centre” ’. Writers have also noted that there is frequently considerable competition between leaders for positions as representatives of their community on, for instance, community relations councils. In Oxford, this has involved, for example, accusations and counter accusations of elections being rigged.

Once elected or appointed, successful candidates generally do very little work for their councils and rarely attend meetings; much of their role is, as has also been noted for Manchester, ‘validatory and symbolic’. Given this situation, observers find it difficult to understand why such positions are so sought after. The fact that some of these leaders act after the fashion of the Pakistani patron has not been so widely discussed. However, this explains

[p.144]

many aspects of the way in which Pakistani community leaders in prominent positions behave. For instance, one community representative would drop the names of Pakistan Embassy officials or local white councillors in order to impress fellow Pakistanis with his apparent power and influence. Another such leader claimed to be from one of Pakistan’s twelve largest business families, with influential contacts in Pakistan’s government. In conversations with fellow Pakistanis from rural backgrounds, he would talk of recent visits to the Pakistan Embassy in London and of personal telephone calls from the Pakistan Ambassador and even from the President of Pakistan himself. This name-dropping, and the ambition to hold office in the welfare associations, is, as one Pakistani put it, ‘for status, so that when he (a community representative) walks into a meeting, everyone will treat him with respect, even the elders who are his seniors’. Some Pakistanis are impressed by such individuals, and, assuming that they do have influence, give them their allegiance, invite them to dinner and give presents and money at Eid.

[...] The willingness of local council authorities to accept the role such community leaders adopt, assuming that ‘community representative’ means for most Pakistanis what it means for most whites, tends to encourage the patronage system. Council staff or councillors may be aware that existing provision within the statutory agencies frequently fails to meet the community’s needs. They know, for example, that there is a lack of interpreters, and so are prepared to accept at face value people who present themselves as representatives working for the benefit of the community; what they may fail to see is that such links are also being cultivated so that the representatives can extend their patronage within the community.

[p.145]

There are sometimes attempts to forge links with local council officials in much the same way as they are established within the community through lena-dena (taking-giving). A few weeks before one Christmas, one patron was apparently in such financial difficulty that the people he patronized brought him sums of £20 or £30 once a week, or gave money when he visited them. The money was spent on china, cut glass and other goods which were sent as Christmas gifts to local City councillors, the Lord Mayor, barristers, head teachers, and other locally influential figures.

Representation on the local community relations council, the Oxfordshire Council for Community Relations (OCCR), is another way of attempting to build up links with the statutory agencies and local councillors and provides access to committees of other bodies where ethnic minority representation is required, such as on the police liaison committee or on the City Council’s housing committee. These patrons may then use their positions to demonstrate within the community their apparent power and authority, making it appear that others are beholden to them for appointments. Moreover, through such positions patrons may promote themselves or their relatives as applicants for posts in community relations. This aspect of their role in relation to the Asian community is generally hidden from the English, Afro-Caribbean and other representatives on the OCCR executive or other committees.

[…] All I am emphasizing here is that Pakistani perceptions of how the local system operates derive more from Pakistan than from knowledge of British politics and institutions, and their resort to patronage has its roots in a Pakistan where bureaucracies can never be relied upon.

Reasons for Treasons II

I have posted before about successive governments’ clear determination to import dangerous and troublesome populations and individuals:

It has been apparent for years that the more hostile and problematic immigrant groups gain official and NGO support in their efforts to immigrate and remain here while the most affinitive have obstacles put in their way. The perverse bias persists despite near unanimous public opposition and politicians’ oft-stated ‘outrage’ at the situation. [...]

It is axiomatic that governments usually act in such a way as to increase their powers, and this is the most parsimonious explanation for the systematic discrimination in favour of the hostile, criminal and least assimilable. The more havoc the [radically dissimilar immigrant groups] create, the more public support is gained for legislative and social controls that would otherwise be opposed on civil liberties grounds. Immigration by the [similar] is discouraged because it dilutes the toxic effect of immigration generally, and because the [lives they will live here] would present such an obvious contrast to the government's favoured immigrant cohorts.

A story broken yesterday in the Sunday Times shows how the de-facto policy was enforced at ministerial and administrative level during the Blair years:

From The Sunday Times November 8, 2009:
Home Office covered up immigration risk

Labour's “open door” immigration policy knowingly risked allowing dangerous people to settle in Britain unchecked, according to documents seen by The Sunday Times.

The Whitehall correspondence, which was illegally withheld by the Home Office for four years, shows how ministers were told by the country’s most senior immigration official that his staff were to be “encouraged to take risks” when granting visas, work permits and extended residency to hundreds of thousands of new migrants.

The cover-up of this policy of risk-taking was so concerted that Richard Thomas, the then information commissioner, sent a team of investigators into the Home Office to trawl all the relevant papers. Earlier this year he rebuked the department for breaking the law and ordered it to release the material under the freedom of information (FoI) law.

The documents help to explain the huge rise in the flow of migrants into Britain as the Home Office rushed to clear a backlog of 45,000 cases.

Officials agreed to fast-track 337,000 applications with minimal checks. This led to a rapid rise in immigration. In 1999, 170,000 visas were granted; by 2002, this had risen to 300,000.

As officials were being ordered to take risks, several potentially dangerous people entered the UK. In late 2001, more than 20 Taliban, who had fled from Afghanistan after their defeat by American and British forces, were allowed to stay in the UK.

The documents cast new light on the row over past immigration policy, highlighted by the recent rise of the British National party.

Last week Alan Johnson became the first Labour home secretary to admit the government had made mistakes in its handling of immigration. He said ministers had ignored problems about failed asylum seekers and foreign national prisoners. They had also failed to grasp public unease about the growing pressure on jobs and public services.

Johnson’s remarks signalled the government’s belated recognition that its immigration policy has alienated its white working-class vote, tempting a significant minority to back the BNP. The documents indicate that, far from being a mistake, there was a deliberate policy — apparently endorsed at the highest level in the Home Office — to promote concerted risk-taking by immigration staff whose job was to decide whether non-European Union migrants applying to work, study or marry in Britain were genuine.

A key figure in the scandal was Sir Bill Jeffrey, who was the director-general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Britain’s most senior immigration official. He is now at the centre of controversy as the senior civil servant in charge of the Ministry of Defence.

The other key figure was Beverley Hughes, then minister of state for citizenship and immigration. She was later forced to resign after it emerged she had misled MPs about whether she had been warned that Romanian and Bulgarian crime gangs might want to exploit the UK’s decision to open its borders to those seeking work from eastern Europe.

In March 2003, shortly after the 2001 entry permits to the Taliban had come to light — to an outcry in the press — Jeffrey spelled out the policy in a note to Hughes.

“We are still in a situation where some risks have to be taken, and staff should feel that if they are encouraged to take risks they will be supported when something does go wrong,” he wrote.

The minister’s office replied by e-mail three days later:

“Beverley Hughes has seen and noted your submission of 7 March . . . Beverley feels the basic point is that while staff have to take some risks, this was a decision that flew in the face of common sense.”

The e-mail was copied to David Blunkett, then home secretary, and Sir John Gieve, his most senior mandarin. The words “to be withheld” were later scribbled across the top, an apparent instruction not to comply with an FoI request for its release.

The same words appear on a note, prepared by Jeffrey, sent to Hughes a few day later. In it, in response to Hughes’s insistent complaints about the need to clear the 45,000 backlog, he outlined the new “risk-taking” policy. This involved fast-tracking all 337,000 applications, with little or no regard as to whether they were merited.

The policy, codenamed Brace, meant that officials had to make quick decisions based on the paperwork in an applicant’s file, regardless of whether it was complete. No further follow-up checks were to be made.

Jeffrey said staff were given guidance that “Brace is about pragmatic (ie not pursing every angle that could conceivably justify refusal) grants rather than pragmatic refusals”.

In other words, the official policy was in principle to grant applications rather than to refuse them.

This telling exchange — and equally significant evidence of a concerted cover-up — is buried deep in a batch of documents that ministers tried desperately to prevent being made public.

Their illegal activity followed an application by a Whitehall whistleblower, Steve Moxon, to force them to release the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

An immigration case worker whose ultimate bosses had been Jeffrey and Hughes, Moxon was sacked after telling The Sunday Times about the fast-tracking process in 2004. He has spent five years trying to obtain the truth about the policy, which Hughes always claimed publicly was implemented by junior officials without her knowledge.

Not only do the papers expose her claim as untrue; they go further in showing that Hughes and Jeffrey were happy to encourage the culture of deliberate risk-taking.

When an FoI application was made to see their exchanges, ministers argued that the material was exempt from disclosure because policy advice given by officials to their political masters should remain confidential.

In official correspondence with the information commissioner, the Home Office said that “a Home Office minister” had ruled that the documents should not be released.

But in March this year, Thomas ruled: “The public interest in favour of maintaining the exemption does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure.

“The commissioner requires the (Home Office) to disclose the information which has been withheld . . . In failing to release information, the commissioner finds that the (Home Office) breached sections 1 and 10 (of the Freedom of Information Act.”

The government reluctantly conceded, placing the documents on an obscure part of the department’s website, apparently in the hope that nobody would notice.

Yesterday, the Tories said they would be demanding an urgent explanation of the documents from the government.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “This is shaping up to become one of the major political scandals of recent times. Ministers quite clearly broke the law and deliberately misled the public to cover up a policy which most reasonable people would say was utterly irresponsible.”


Whiff of a smoking gun

Why did new Labour secretly open Britain’s borders, while pretending to control the numbers under its so-called “managed migration” policy?

Two weeks ago Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, wrote an article saying Labour had allowed immigration to rocket in order to turn Britain “truly multicultural” and “to rub the right’s noses in diversity”.

The heart of his claim was that uncontrolled mass immigration had been a deliberate, covert policy to change the country’s demographics.

But Labour’s core vote, the white working class, were drawn to the BNP at the resulting pressure on jobs, homes and schools.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has said Labour was “maladroit” on the issue: the immigration door was left wide open because of “cock-up” not a “conspiracy”. But Neather’s account may be only half the story.

Chris Mullin, a former minister, recalled in his memoirs that ministers had “barely touched the rackets that surrounded arranged marriages . . . terrified of the huge cry of ‘racism’ that would go up

. . . There is the added difficulty that at least 20 Labour seats, including Jack (Straw’s), depend on Asian votes”.

With up to 80% of ethnic minorities voting Labour, it is obvious that the more immigrants who get the right to vote, the greater is Labour’s electoral share. Perhaps Mullin has stumbled on a smoking gun.

In the third of Dan Dare’s terrific series on the evolution of anti-discrimination law in Britain he writes of one particularly egregious attack on our freedoms:

In its zeal to eradicate the evil of racial hatred the Conservatives had managed to outdo even the anti-racist zealots in the Labour Party. That it should have fallen to a Conservative government, trading on its law-‘n’-order credentials, to enact repressive measures of such an Orwellian character would have been literally incredible to Winston Churchill.

I am sure history is about to repeat itself. Following deliberate increases in ethnic diversity and the fostering of social problems therefrom, the future Cameron government will quite easily find excuses, themselves probably manufactured by the state, to extend the limits on free -speech and -association.

Pakistanis in Britain: Early Years

More from Alison Shaw, A Pakistani Community in Britain (Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, 1988), again touching on the economic, and ultimately evolutionary, advantage of extended-family and ethnic networking common to south Asians, rare among us, and also covering some of the issues relating to intermarriage covered in a prior post. Emphases in bold are mine.

Pakistanis in Britain - Early years

What was the effect of the British environment on the aspirations, values and activities of the ‘bachelor status’ Pakistani men who first came to Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s? The range of possible ‘western influences’ is very wide, but many of the relatives in Pakistan of the migrants who came to Britain and some of the migrants themselves feared that life in Britain would exert a potentially corrupting influence over the newcomers. They had, and many still have, ambivalent attitudes to Britain. On the one hand, it was regarded as a rich country where a man can earn huge sums of money after only a few month’s work; but on the other hand, it is a land whose people are lax in their moral standards, particularly their sexual morals. Various myths prevailed which were generally associated with the fact that English people eat pork, the meat of a beast with no sexual shame, and drink alcohol to enjoy its intoxicating effects, both activities being forbidden in Islam. One myth was that every Englishman would carry a bottle of whisky upon his person and encourage any newcomer to have some; another was that every English woman, being sexually promiscuous, would try to seduce any Indian or Pakistani man who might be out wandering on the streets. No doubt these preconceptions were reinforced by the fact that most Pakistani men first arrived in Britain without their wives during the 1960s, the decade of the mini-skirt and the contraceptive pill. To what extent were there grounds, in the early years of settlement, for fears that the men would succumb to these particular western influences?

[p.33]

By living in multi-occupation lodging houses, often sharing a room with many other Indians and Pakistanis, the men were able to circumvent the discrimination which they encountered in seeking accommodation with white landlords and which forced prospective tenants back into houses owned or occupied by Pakistanis. But migrants also continued, and in some cases chose, to live in such conditions because despite its discomforts, living with other Pakistanis in multi-occupation lodging houses had the advantage of offering a man a cheaper way of living than would generally have been possible were he to rent his own room. A man who worked as many as 75 hours a week as a labourer, by taking all possible overtime, would have little time, energy or opportunity to do anything other than work; often the houses in which the men lived were no more than dormitories. Men working on night shifts would share beds with men on day shifts and further reduce their rent. In the early 1960s, a man could in this way earn between £12 and £18 a week, spend £2 per week on lodging and food and save the rest. By keeping expenses to a minimum, some men were able to save as much as £500 in one year. Apparently Indians in London were even able to save from their unemployment benefit and national assistance benefits when they were out of work. Indeed, saving itself became a source of status among migrants. A man who saved large sums of money for the benefit of kin at home gained considerable status among the relatives and friends with whom he was living in Britain; on the other hand, if a worker saved less than £25 a year, he would be ashamed to admit this to others. There was therefore also a moral pressure from relatives and fellow villagers which tended to ensure that migrants continued to live frugally, save and remit money home. To do otherwise would involve a loss of face.

[p.36]

Saeed was one of the few Pakistanis who continued to be employed at the COD (Central Ordnance Depot) after the transfer of the Didcot depot to Bicester had taken place, for most of the Pakistanis were employed there on a short-term basis for a relatively low wage of between £6 and £7 a week. These men then found employment with the Post Office, the hospitals and the bus company where they would earn between £10 and £13 per week. During the 1960s, the quota for black and Asian bus drivers and conductors was gradually increased following the pressure exerted by local voluntary organizations to end racial discrimination by local employers. Later, following the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Act, the quota was abandoned altogether. A number of men also obtained work in foundries outside Oxford, at the paper mill in Sandford, and at the Mother’s Pride bakery in Osney which became a major source of employment at this time. Subsequently the bakery closed in February 1982 and the paper mill closed in January 1983. While some men moved to other cities in response to reports of work opportunities elsewhere, two kinship groups of Mirpuris, one from Sheffield, the other from Bradford, came to Oxford specifically to work at the Osney bakery; one group settled in east Oxford; the other settled in the ‘Mirpuri’ area in Osney.

The most significant change in employment opportunities, however, took place at the British Leyland (or BL, now known as the Austin Rover Group) car factory in Cowley. From after the war until 1965, there had

[p.39]

been an unofficial colour bar on the employment of black and Asian workers at BL. Several Pakistani men described an incident at BL which led to the end of discrimination on the grounds of colour. The incident involved a West Indian who had obtained work at BL in 1964, and was the first black to do so. White workers apparently refused to work alongside the West Indian until an English convener (Bobby Fryer) told the white workers to hand in their notice if they objected to working with a black. The white workers gradually returned to work. Finally, a deputation from the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration successfully ended this form of discrimination at British Leyland.

From 1965 onwards, West Indians and Pakistanis were employed at British Leyland, at first for menial tasks as assemblers, painters, cleaners and storemen. Most of the Pakistanis who were working at the COD in Bicester moved to British Leyland at this time, not necessarily because they preferred the type of work available, but because British Leyland offered wages twice as high as those paid by the COD. By moving to British Leyland, Saeed for example, who had been a store supervisor at the COD, accepted a job as a semi-skilled labourer for financial reasons. […]

As opportunities of work increased, the Pakistani settlement gradually dispersed from west and central Oxford towards the east and south of the city.

[p.40]

[…] Not everyone moved from west Oxford. A number of Mirpuri ex-servicemen, for example, who bought houses in Osney in the first phase of migration, continued to live there (the area is now predominantly Mirpuri), while their former non- Mirpuri tenants bought their own houses in east Oxford. The first Pakistani grocery which opened in 1962 remained on Walton Crescent in Jericho until the mid-1970s (though changing hands seven times), before being moved to the Cowley Road. The second Pakistani grocery, which opened on Walton Street in 1964, is still there. Nevertheless, the new nucleus of the settlement gradually consolidated in east Oxford.

One reason for the residential shift was that the increase in the numbers of Pakistanis who came to Oxford in the early 1960s created a shortage of available rented accommodation in Jericho and west Oxford. Landlords would give priority to their own relatives or fellow villagers in the allocation of rooms. [recall that this sort of thing was labelled 'discrimination' when practiced by White landlords (p.34), the author offers no such value judgement here... fellist] At the same time certain parts of the old city centre, such as the old Victorian properties in Paradise Square in St Ebbes which contained one particularly notorious multi-occupation Pakistani lodging house, were being demolished by the City Council’s programme of slum clearance. Rather than move into a council house in accordance with slum clearance proposals, the Pakistani owners preferred to sell and buy a house elsewhere. The settlement dispersed in the direction of east and south Oxford mainly because cheap houses were available in these areas of the city. East and south Oxford have been officially described as ‘stress’ areas, which are overcrowded and lacking in modern amenities. During the 1960s terraced houses, lacking bathroom facilities and with outside toilets, could be bought for between £3,000 and £4,000 in east Oxford. Many

[p.41]

Pakistanis subsequently made use of City Council improvement grants which were available from 1954 as part of the Council’s urban renewal scheme to assist the improvement of owner-occupied properties in these areas.

From tenancy to house ownership

The shift in the location of settlement coincided with a move from tenancy in multi-occupation lodging houses to owner occupation. Typically, men who moved to east Oxford during the 1960s bought houses there which they paid for outright. The money was raised in several ways. Sometimes, by pooling their savings, relatives embarked upon joint enterprises in property ownership (or shopkeeping) at an earlier stage than was usually possible for an individual. Such houses were often collectively owned though usually registered in the senior relative’s name. Subsequently, as men decided to buy their own houses many of these joint arrangements ceased, the house being sold and shares apportioned out; sometimes this involved disputes over shares in the property.

Men also obtained interest-free loans from fellow migrants or former landlords and with money saved in rotating credit associations called kametis. The principle of a kameti is that every week or month all the contributors to it would pay a given sum, say £5, to the organizer and each week (or month) one person in turn would receive the total, which, if there were 20 contributors, would amount to £100. These methods of raising money enabled men to pay for their houses with cash rather than by taking out mortgages.

There are a number of reasons why Pakistani men did not take out mortgages on houses at this time. Firstly, the ownership of a house is a source of status: it was a way of demonstrating one’s freedom from dependence on a landlord or patron and was also a means of demonstrating one’s superiority to those Pakistanis who were still dependent on landlords, unable to buy their own houses. Little or no status is attached to paying rent or living on ‘borrowed money’, and very few Pakistanis are council house tenants; in fact, a substantial number of men in the present community own four or five properties in Oxford. A second reason for purchasing their houses with cash was that most men were unfamiliar with the procedure for acquiring mortgages. Many of those who did take out mortgages in the late 1960s said they would have done so earlier had they known how to, and complained that some of those who had bought their own houses with mortgages had withheld this information from fellow migrants who were tenants, in order to continue to make money from rent and to exploit their position as creditors. It might be argued that some

[p.42]

Pakistani men did not take out mortgages on religious grounds, because according to Islamic law the giving or receiving of interest is prohibited. Usury is forbidden and the correct form of loan is that given or received without interest. In theory, if interest is accrued on money kept in building societies or investment accounts, it should be given in alms to the poor and needy. However, those who have taken out mortgages were not inhibited by such considerations and justified their actions by saying that they had been compelled to pay interest for financial reasons. Perhaps the major reason for buying a house outright, rather than with a mortgage, was the perceived financial advantage, for a house paid for outright is regarded as a major investment which is easily capitalized. This was important because it meant that when a house was sold the owner would have a lump sum which he could take back to Pakistan or invest quickly in another property or in a business. This is still the major reason for the emphasis on owner occupation and completing full payments on a house as soon as possible.

‘Western influences’

During the 1960s there was therefore an increase in the range of economic opportunities, a shift in the location of the settlement and more men became house owners. Gradually, too, some migrants became less dependent on kin for welfare and assistance, more competent in spoken and written English and more familiar with procedures for obtaining mortgages, employment and welfare. Financial independence and competence in English brought a man status in the eyes of other migrants, especially in so far as they enhanced his ability to save money for remitting to Pakistan; they did not necessarily mean that a man’s allegiance to his original purpose and cultural values was weakened.

For some men, however, adapting to life in a western society involved changes which were not so well thought of. Some men succumbed to the ‘corrupting influences’ of the British environment as their relatives feared they would. While few men in the community today, especially those who hold positions of authority in the mosque or the welfare associations, would admit that they themselves had English girlfriends or visited prostitutes or went drinking during their bachelor years in Britain, accounts of migrants’ activities at that time and the rumour and gossip prevalent in the community today suggest that in fact these activities were fairly widespread. Several men spoke about the prostitutes who used to visit particular multi-occupation houses. One man recalled how he asked a prostitute who had come to his lodgings how much money she wanted, gave it to her and told her to go away. Others were not so scrupulous, but while their activities were not openly approved, occasionally spending time

[p.43]

with a woman or even drinking was tolerated and by some men considered necessary to satisfy the needs of men here without their wives. These activities were acceptable, or rather, overlooked, because they involved no commitment and were therefore not seen as conflicting with migrants’ original intentions.

However, regular drinking and extravagant spending of money were disapproved of, because they interfered with a man’s obligation to remit money to kin in Pakistan. A yet dimmer view was taken of a relationship with a girlfriend that appeared to be serious or long-term; kinsmen and villagers would exert pressure to ensure that the man concerned would ‘toe the line’. This might include threatening to withdraw assistance, ostracism, or actually summoning the leader of a Welfare Association or the imam. Amjad was one of the men thus threatened:

After a year or so of living in England, I became one of the lads, although it upset my cousin. I moved out of that crowded house we were all living in, and rented two rooms of my own in a boarding house in Cowley. I wanted to be more private and independent. I had a sports car at that time - one of those with a roof that opens up. The girls loved it; they used to hang around waiting for me. Then one girl got a bit serious - she was a good girl you know and I used to visit her parents, and her grandparents; they were good people and made me welcome. My cousin didn’t like it at all, and my brother warned me, if I got serious, he’d write home. But Younis from my village didn’t bother - in fact, he was like me in those days. Don’t say I told you. Eventually I married the girl, but by that time even my brother, who I’d helped come to England, wasn’t speaking to me.

The arrival of women and children

From about 1964 a major change took place in the Pakistani settlement as wives, children and young brides began to join the men already settled in Oxford. Most Pakistani women came to Oxford between five and fifteen years after their husbands […] and a few men are still waiting for their wives and children to join them.

[p.44]

This pattern is reflected in the city of Oxford electoral registers. There were no Pakistani women recorded on the electoral register of 1961 which showed there were 34 Pakistani (including Bangladeshi) men in five houses. Nor were there any Pakistani women shown on the electoral register for 1963, which records 130 men (one with an English wife) in 26 houses. By 1966, there were 274 people occupying 59 houses. This local pattern is similar to the nationwide picture of the dates of arrival of Pakistani women in Britain.

Several aspects of the arrival of women and children have puzzled observers. If migrants regarded living and working in Britain as a way of earning money to improve their living standards in Pakistan, then why should they bring non-working wives and children to a country where living expenses would leave little money available for saving and sending home? Furthermore, if families are concerned with maintaining their cultural and religious values and improving their social positions in relation to Pakistani society and culture, why should they risk exposing Muslim wives and daughters to what is regarded as the corrupting influence of British culture?

Some have argued that the arrival of women and children in Britain indicates that migrants stopped regarding living in Britain as a means of improving their position in Pakistan and instead became committed to making a permanent life here. One factor is said to be the effect of the immigration controls of 1962 and after. Their implementation made it increasingly difficult for adult men to enter Britain, but men already here were entitled to be joined by their families. In other words, the creation of a permanently settled population from a transient one is considered to have been an unintended consequence of the immigration controls.

However, the fact that migrants have been joined by their wives and children does not necessarily mean that they are committed to life in Britain. Also, it is not necessarily the case that the immigration controls played a causal role in creating an apparently permanently settled immigrant population. The absence of controls, or even the imposition of much tighter controls (as in the case of Turkish migrants to West Germany) is associated in other countries with a similar demographic result.

An alternative explanation is that some migrants, in keeping with their original intentions, were trying ‘to re-create the earlier situation of male-dominated chain migration within the constraints of immigration regulations’ because ‘bringing the whole family to Britain enables the man to ensure that he can be replaced by his son when he wants to return to Pakistan’.

There is some evidence for this view. As it became more difficult for adult men to enter Britain, some families adopted various strategies for bringing boys or young men into the country. In several cases men

[p.45]

brought over ‘sons’ who were in fact brothers’ sons or other relatives’ sons and in some cases boys’ ages were inflated in order that they might qualify for entry unaccompanied by their mothers. This was after the 1965 regulation which continued to permit the entry of wives accompanying children under 16, but removed discretionary rights for children under 16 to join relatives other than parents and for children between 16 and 18 to join their fathers without being accompanied by their mothers. Habib explained why families were brought over as follows:

The 1962 controls were supposed to stop us coming in, but they left loopholes because you could still bring in your son or a brother’s son and say he was yours. The Government soon realized that this was a loophole and stopped it by saying that children had to come with their mothers. That is why we brought our wives over.

However, if Pakistani men viewed calling their wives and children to Britain as a means of getting a second generation of male wage earners into the country, how do we explain the fact that the majority of Pakistani wives have remained in Britain? Although many Oxford Pakistani women have, since they first came to Britain, made one or more return visits to Pakistan of several months duration, often leaving school-age children here and taking younger children with them, they do not expect to stay in Pakistan permanently, at least while their children are at school in Britain. Only two women have returned, apparently permanently: one left a son in Oxford in the care of a daughter-in-law and the other returned taking all her children with her.

A different interpretation of the arrival of women and children is suggested here. The fact that the Pakistani settlement in Oxford had developed on the basis of family links and common village of origin meant that information about a man’s activities in Britain reached his relatives in Pakistan via letters home from fellow migrants or via men returning to Pakistan for holidays. The family in Pakistan would then take action to ensure that a man’s activities in Britain did not permanently hinder him from fulfilling his obligations to his relatives. In most cases, this involved arranging the marriage of a man who was a bachelor or arranging that a married man be joined by his wife and children. Although the head of the household generally took the formal action this required, women themselves had a direct interest in ensuring that a man continued to fulfil his obligations to his kinsmen, for his failure to do so threatened their own position in society.

Amina, Amjad’s wife (for in fact Amjad, who had married his English girlfriend, already had a wife) told me that initially she did not believe the story spread by villagers returned from England and mentioned in letters

[p.46]

from other villagers settled in Oxford that Amjad had married an English girl. Eventually, however, this was confirmed in a letter from Amjad’s brother who was living in London at the time. Amina then resolved to go to England herself. She borrowed money for the fare from relatives (including Amjad’s mother; his father was dead). She brought her children with her to Oxford and lived for almost a year in the same house as the English wife, who by then also had a child. But eventually the English wife left and the child remained with Amina. The English wife made one return visit to see her child, several years later, accompanied by the English man with whom she was living. Recalling the visit drew some scathing comments from Amina about the English woman’s scruffy jeans, her slovenly ways, her loose morality and her lack of interest in her child. Amina is still suspicious of any English woman who visits her home and although Amjad now expresses shame for his ‘misdemeanour’, and has strict attitudes towards the upbringing of his daughters, Amina feels she cannot entirely trust him and is reluctant to go back to Pakistan and leave her husband in England.

Several other married women stated explicitly that they had similar reasons for coming to Britain. Zafar’s wife Zahida said that as Zafar’s remittances became irregular and she was having to depend on kin for financial support for herself and her children, she became worried that her husband had married again, for she had heard that some men had done so. Other married women said that they came to England to ensure that their husbands did not forget that they had duties as husbands. All married women, even those who weren’t as explicit as Saleema or Zahida, said they thought a man and wife should be united after several years of separation. ‘It’s no good for a man to live alone,’ women would say, ‘his wife should be there to cook chapatis for him.’ They also said that children need a father to discipline them. Even some of the single women whose marriages were arranged at this time realized and accepted that one of the motives behind the arrangement of their marriages was to keep a check on their husbands’ activities. Imrana’s recollections of her thoughts and feelings before her marriage to Ijaz were echoed by several other young brides who came to England at this time:

You want to know how I came to be living here? Well, you might not think so now, but when Ijaz was first here, he got into bad company and his uncle was not much better. It is not surprising really, men here on their own. And he was only 19 at the time. But soon his parents got to hear that he had an English girlfriend: at least, that’s what some people from his village were saying. His parents were very worried. They had started to build a new house with the money he had been sending back. Other people got to know too, and his parents thought that because of it they would have trouble finding a girl for him to marry. A man’s family loses respect that way you know. So his parents came from their village in Jhelum to our city and spoke to my parents. Our families are the same caste - Pathans - but we

[p.47]

are not relatives; my father had known his father for some time. They said their son was returning for the marriage. You know what they did? It was his mother’s idea. They sent a telegram saying an uncle had died. It wasn’t true, but it brought him home straight away. Before the marriage, women in our neighbourhood used to talk to me about what England was like. They said there was no control. Men drank alcohol and went with women and no one bothered. They also made remarks, not directly, but I knew, about my husband’s behaviour, hinting at what sort of man he was. I don’t know how they knew. Perhaps they were jealous that I was going to England. Anyway, it made me very frightened about the marriage and I could hardly eat for weeks before it. But I couldn’t refuse this marriage. My parents had decided and were so proud to have a daughter going to England. I couldn’t shatter their hopes. But since I’ve been here, as far as I know, my husband has been a good husband to me.

In most cases, the effect of the arrival of wives was that the relationships with English girls eventually if not immediately ceased. Amjad’s English wife was not prepared to live as a co-wife, and no doubt Amina made her feelings about the situation clear during the year that they lived together. Several men and women said that most marriages or liaisons with English women ended because the women would not conform to the ideals expected of a Muslim wife; they were too independent. In one case, however, in which a Pakistani wife joined a husband married by Islamic law only (thus avoiding bigamy) to an English woman, an effect of the first wife’s presence was that the English wife started to conform to the ideals expected of a Pakistani Muslim wife. She now wears the traditional Panjabi shalwar-qamis, comprising baggy trousers and a long tunic top and covers her head with a dupatta (headscarf), behaves demurely in the presence of her husband’s kin, avoids speaking to unrelated men and only leaves the house to go shopping or to visit the doctor. For this she wins a certain approval from other Pakistani women, including the co-wife. She is considered very respectable as a white woman who has rejected English ways and Christianity.

Even when a man who had an English girlfriend or wife was not joined by a wife from Pakistan, the arrival of Pakistani women and children exerted a moral pressure that often broke the relationship. In some ten or a dozen cases where marriages with English women have lasted, the couples comprise a separate circle of friends which is not entirely independent of the community but is nevertheless regarded as morally on the edge of it. The belief that all western women are promiscuous and unfaithful continues to affect the way in which the English, or in some cases, European, wives are viewed. Pakistani men, speaking about the English wife of one prominent ex-serviceman, have remarked ‘all the men had her in the old days’; as a result, her husband commands little respect, because

[p.48]

perhaps the greatest insult to a man is to imply that his wife has been with other men.

Not surprisingly, men have given differing reasons for the arrival of women and children from the one given by women. It is possible that some men, like Habib, did regard calling their wives and children to Britain as a means of bringing sons into the country, though it seems unlikely that the majority of men, especially the unmarried men, made such conscious long-term plans. Men also spoke of the advantages for their wives and children of the superior health care in Britain compared with Pakistan which has no National Health Service. Others also greatly valued the educational facilities available in Britain and some men explicitly said that they had brought their families to Britain ‘for the education’. From the point of view of the women, however, the fact that they felt they would have an important role to play and on arrival found that this was indeed the case is important in understanding why women have stayed in Britain.

It cannot be assumed that because Pakistanis are now living in Britain permanently, fundamental changes in their values and intentions will necessarily take place. Indeed, given the intentions of migrants’ relatives in Pakistan and of wives joining their husbands in Britain, it is more appropriate to ask whether, and how, over the years, the arrival of women and children has contributed to ensuring that obligations to kin continue to be fulfilled and that the culture is maintained in the new environment.
[p.49]

Pakistanis in Britain

Alison Shaw is a social anthropologist who turned her Ph.D thesis into a book, A Pakistani Community in Britain (1988). Her four years of research into the Oxford Pakistani community was funded by the Social Science Research Council and included a seven month stay in Pakistan with the relatives of her Oxford subjects. Her book is a sympathetic study of that community but does not avoid revealing some troubling - for us - aspects of Pakistani culture and conduct. I shall be posting some excerpts from the book over the next week or so.

These extracts from the introduction echo a previous post about the biraderi/biradari - extended family networks offering mutual support - that went some way to explaining why Pakistanis turned up here in large numbers buying our land and property so soon after driving us from their country: a social solidarity that is largely absent among the English.

From Alison Shaw, A Pakistani Community in Britain (Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, 1988):

It is commonly assumed that the Pakistani minority will inevitably ‘assimilate’ western values (however these may be defined), and for many English people ‘assimilation’ carries a positive value, while ‘non-assimilation’ carries a negative one. Rather than entering into the debate on whether ‘assimilation’ is a good or bad thing, I am concerned to portray the Pakistani community as far as possible on its own terms rather than from a western perspective and to show how there is much more continuity of tradition than is generally recognized. The reasons for this lie in the migrants’ historical background and in the social organization of their communities.

Pakistanis come from a society with a history of previous migrations within the Indian subcontinent, both within Pakistan and to Pakistan from India. These previous migrations have not made a dramatic impact on cultural values and social organization; rather, the migrants have carried their cultural values with them and have generally regarded their migrations as a means of enhancing their status and bettering their existing position. It is therefore not surprising that their culture and social organization should be capable of adapting to migration to Britain.

The biradari, or extended kinship group, continues to have a major influence over individuals’ activities and over their expectations of life in Britain. […] The biradari perpetuates itself through the institution of arranged marriage, crucial to its persistence and stability. Traditionally marriage is with first cousins, and this has the effect of maintaining the biradari as a kinship group. When a family’s immediate relatives have remained in Pakistan, marriages may be arranged with relatives there or new links may be formed across the boundaries of kinship and even caste with other Pakistani settlers in Britain. For example, two men in Oxford became close friends of a man from a different caste to whom they eventually arranged for their sister to be married. This arrangement, apparently going against the traditional ideal of cousin marriage, was nevertheless accepted by the families concerned, and was justified by reference to Islamic ideology which denies caste differences. It cemented a friendship and forged new links which proved crucial to a joint business venture. The biradari is therefore not static but flexible; it can even, as in one or two cases, accept English women into it through marriage, providing they fulfil the expectations made of them.

One important way in which the biradari ensures this flexibility is through the principle of giving and taking, called lena-dena (taking-giving) which underlies many social relationships within the community. The ties created through lena-dena maintain old relationships and permit new ones with non-kin to develop. These ties, backed up by ideologies of community and

[p.3]

religion, enable the biradari to adapt to a new environment and at the same time have a cohesive and conservative influence.

[p.4]

From a western point of view, an individual who fulfils her or his role within the family, biradari and community, does so at the cost of individual freedom. However, most Pakistanis themselves, including the younger generation, do not see the matter in this way. They do not prize ‘individuality’ as highly as westerners do, and for most of them the sacrifice of ‘individuality’ that the culture requires is more than offset by the advantages of fulfilling one’s role within the family, biradari and community. Occasionally, of course, there is conflict between an individual’s inclinations or convictions and the expectations made of him or her by the family and community; hence the elopements and other incidents that reach the press. But such incidents are not as common as the media’s sensational reporting suggests; the conflicts are usually short-lived and rarely pose a fundamental threat to the community’s social structure. They may involve questioning and challenging and gradual change in particular aspects of the culture, but, as in any culture, such development is in part a result of the culture’s own internal dynamics as well as a response to external environmental changes. As young Pakistanis themselves point out, many of the events and changes occurring within the Pakistani community in Britain, such as questioning the importance of aspects of the arranged marriage, are also taking place within Pakistan. While such changes may be motivated at least in part by western values, the justification for them is generally made in terms of Islamic values. Some of the second generation even claim that such change is taking place more quickly among sections of Pakistan’s society than among Pakistanis in Britain, citing examples from among their own relatives in Pakistan. The fact that the Pakistani population in Britain is a minority has tended to make it more conservative.

***

Shaw identifies something here that was not widely recognised in the eighties but which would become politically significant in the nineties and in this decade: the Pakistani community in Britain is more Pakistani, more conservatively so, than that in Pakistan.

This point stands out, too, and a future post will go into this subject in more detail:

The biradari is therefore not static but flexible; it can even, as in one or two cases, accept English women into it through marriage, providing they fulfil the expectations made of them.

But only English women, of course, Pakistani men do not allow their women to marry Englishmen. According to Pierre L. van den Berghe,

The sociobiological paradigm provides a [simple] explanation. In nearly all species, the female is the scarce reproductive resource for the male rather than vice-versa. […]

[T]he ethny is a corporation of related men seeking to enhance each others’ fitness by retaining a monopoly of sexual access to the women of their own group. This, however, does not preclude men from further enhancing their reproductive success by making the most of every opportunity to inseminate women from other groups. In fact, the whole history of ethnic relations powerfully confirms this interpretation. Men jealously ‘protect’ ‘their’ women from men of other groups, deeply resenting ethnic exogamy on the part of women, while at the same time seeking access to women from other groups. […]

Between ethnies, men use power and violence to secure access to women from other groups, and this reduces the level of inbreeding. When the ethnies in presence are equally matched, male competition for foreign women takes the form of interethnic raids. After an ethnic hierarchy has been established, subordinate-group men loose all or part of their control of ‘their’ women and their reproductive success is curtailed, while upper-group men are polygynous and incorporate subordinate-group women. An ethnic hierarchy, therefore, generally results in a reduced fitness for subordinate-group males. The classical scenario for conquest is to rape the women and kill, castrate or enslave the men. [p.26]

He elaborates on that point later in his book:

Even when conquest is relatively mild and not openly genocidal, the subordinate group in an ethnic hierarchy almost invariably ‘loses’ more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa. Hypergamy (mating upward for women) is a fitness-enhancing strategy for women, and, therefore, subordinate-group women do not always resist being ‘taken over’ by dominant-group men. But subordinate-group men lose fitness by losing potential mates from their group without any hope of access to dominant-group females. It is not accidental that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines; nor is the asymmetry of the resentment surprising. No group is concerned about gaining women; every group resents losing women.

Conquest and domination mean, in the first instance, a fitness loss. The loss is felt both at the individual and at the collective level. Collectively, since the offspring of subordinate-group women who mate with dominant. group men are generally ‘lost’ to their maternal group, the subordinate group suffers a decrement of reproductive power. Over several generations, this loss can be reflected in serious demographic changes in ethnic group ratios. Dominant groups tend to grow disproportionately. Individually, there is only a fitness reduction if the circulation of women between groups is asymmetrical, as it almost invariably is. Through the suction of women into the upper group (without getting women in return), the pool of mates for lower-group males is correspondingly reduced and, therefore, so is their fitness. Females of the subordinate group also indirectly lose fitness through the lowered fitness of their male relatives. Individual females who choose the hypergamous strategy, however, can gain fitness if their children become assimilated to the ruling group and gain access to upper-group privileges (including polygyny). This sex asymmetry in fitness strategies in ethnically stratified societies often creates tension between the sexes, within subordinate groups. The female option of fitness maximization through hypergamy is deeply resented by subordinate-group males. [p.75-76]

Individualism vs. Collectivism

In 1982 BBC Radio 4 ran a series of interviews with members of Britain’s various Asian communities under the program title ‘Asian Links.’ The general idea was to gain a picture of how these migrant communities were adapting to life in Britain and also how they maintained contacts with their homelands. The CRE put out the interviews in book form in 1982 and a reprint in 1987. It isn’t very interesting stuff, but I thought this little extract makes a point quite well about what easy prey the individualist Brits are for more clannish groups.

Towyn Mason: The migration started, however, well before the second World War. Because of the rugged conditions in their home area, it became the custom during the early part of the century for young Mirpuris to go sea, and some, when they docked in British ports, decided to stay and earn a living. One such was Abdul Hakim, who arrived here in 1929. His great-nephew, Mohammed Amin Qureshi, a prominent figure in Bradford’s Pakistani community, told me about him.

Mohammed Amin Qureshi: He started going to the seaports, because a lot of our people were seamen, and whenever their ship came in, from them he collected some cigarettes, tobacco, and a lot of other things which were very cheap, and then he brought these things and knocked on the doors of the people and started the business of selling handkerchiefs, neckties, and other small things. After a few years, he went back to Pakistan and then told his children, ‘You’d better come to England.’ So one of my uncles came in 1934. Then they started buying things from the warehouses around them. But in the War, when they found out that the Germans were bombarding South Shields and Sheffield, and houses were empty there and they could buy cheap, one of my uncles bought a house in South Shields of his own. When he got his own house, then he wrote to all the others that, ‘You’d better come, we can get furniture cheap, we can get homes cheap.’ And then they came together in one place. Then they said, ‘This is our home now.’ So from then on all the other family of mine ...

Towyn Mason: How many members of your family now?

Mohammed Amin Qureshi: My family members, if I start counting, they are not less than eight hundred in this country.

Towyn Mason: When Mr Qureshi spoke of his ‘family’, he meant not just his immediate relatives but a wider grouping known as the ‘Biraderi’. This is a kind of brotherhood or clan, and it’s one of the basic elements of social organisation in much of Pakistan, as well as in India and Bangladesh.

Farrukh Hashmi: The nearest term is the extended family, but Biraderi is a kind of belief system, so to speak, where you believe that these are people who are supportive to you, and who will lend you money when you need it, who will support you when you are sick, who will help you, will come to your weddings and your deaths and join in your sorrows, criticise you perhaps. It’s a kind of a club which is supportive to you, but the condition for joining it is that you submit a certain amount of your individuality. In return, the Biraderi supports you back when you need it.

It’s nice to have a club like this when you’re either sick or old, but when you’re young you want to be an individualist, so you don’t want it. That’s why the younger people like to be out of the Biraderi, and older people like to go back into the Biraderi.

You can exclude people out of a Biraderi, and people can be included in it, through marriage or through relationship. It is the people who commit themselves to belonging to your family group.

Abdul Rashid: Even though we’ve moved into twentieth century England, this concept of the Biraderi still exists. If there are fundamental disputes between members of the Biraderi then they will be settled by the Biraderi themselves, even in England. And if a member of the Biraderi from, say, Birmingham, came to my house, I would respect him like a father, not just a guest, because he is part of our clan. It’s built into you to regard the Biraderi as your ultimate source of help, should you ever need it. If you have a dispute with your neighbour, then the first person you consult is the Biraderi, and they are there to be as fair as possible and to give you a fair deal like an English law court would.

Towyn Mason: The support provided by the Biraderi was particularly valuable to Mirpuris when they arrived here.

Farrukh Hashmi: The Mirpuris, and other Asians of course, tried to side­step prejudice by becoming owner-occupiers. If they applied for a council house and didn’t get it, they became owner-occupiers. To do that, they had to go and borrow money, and they could easily borrow money interest-free and be trusted to return it back.

Similarly, if they couldn’t get a job, they could go and borrow money and start their own business, start their own grocery shop or start their own cinema. So the Biraderi was a very supportive thing in terms of helping its members and lending them money and resources, which they knew would be honoured. And, through that, the Mirpuri community has been able to settle down and establish itself, because the weaker members were supported.