The strange myth that Caribbeans were 'invited' to help rebuild Britain after teh Second World War

We routinely hear that Britain needed immigrants in the late 1940s to plug holes in teh labour market. This is untrue.

In the 1980s, a strange story began to circulate about the immigrants who came to Britain from the Caribbean Islands in the post-war years: the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’. It was to the effect that their arrival in this country was motivated by an altruistic desire to help ‘rebuild’ Britain after the ravages of the Second World War. According to this reading, all those men and women from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean came not in search of a better life for themselves, but rather at the invitation of the British government, which was desperate for their help due to a shortage of personnel to operate buses and work in hospitals. This false perspective is now the prevailing and accepted narrative concerning Caribbean immigration to Britain. A good summary of this idea is found in a presentation delivered at the British Library in London a few years ago. Titled How Caribbean Migrants Helped to Rebuild Britain, we are told that, “after World War Two, Britain was a country short of workers and needed to rebuild its weakened economy,” and that, “in the service sector, both men and women workers were needed to run public transport and to staff the new National Health Service (NHS).”