Smethwick and the 1964 general election

Who: Peter Griffiths, the Conservative candidate; Patrick Gordon Walker, Labour's sitting member and Shadow Foreign Secretary; Harold Wilson, who became Prime Minister; and Smethwick's residents, among them Punjabi Sikhs and the Indian Workers' Association (IWA).

What: After the Second World War Smethwick, an industrial town in the West Midlands, drew many Commonwealth immigrants, and the largest group was Sikhs from Punjab (Wikipedia). The Sikh community bought a former Congregational chapel in the High Street in 1961 for £11,600 and made it the Guru Nanak Gurdwara (The Birmingham Mail, 2012).

Griffiths ran an explicitly anti-immigration and segregationist campaign, according to Tribune magazine. A slogan telling voters that if they did not want a person of another race as a neighbour they should vote Labour appeared on posters (Verso). Wikipedia says Colin Jordan's British Movement claimed to have produced it, and that Griffiths denied it was racist, calling it "exasperation, not fascism". On 15 October 1964 Griffiths won with 16,690 votes (47.6 per cent) to Gordon Walker's 14,916 (42.6 per cent). Smethwick swung 7.2 points to the Conservatives while the national swing was 3.5 points to Labour (LabourList). Labour won the country, and Wilson, Wikipedia reports, called Griffiths "a parliamentary leper".

Local white residents asked the Conservative council to buy houses in Marshall Street so that non-white buyers could not move in. The council took up the idea, but Richard Crossman, the Labour housing minister, refused to let it borrow the money (Wikipedia; Verso). The IWA invited Malcolm X, and he walked Marshall Street on 12 February 1965, nine days before he was killed in New York, saying he had heard that people there were being treated as the Jews were under Hitler (Verso; Tribune magazine).

Where: Smethwick in the West Midlands, including Marshall Street and the High Street.

Why it mattered: Marc Collinson's study of the election says Smethwick became shorthand for "racial politics", shaped the national debate on migration and affected the new Labour government's agenda. Labour regained the seat in 1966, when Andrew Faulds beat Griffiths by 18,440 votes to 14,950 (LabourList). A blue plaque for Malcolm X's visit was put up in 2012 at the request of the Nubian Jak Community Trust, Sandwell Council, the African Caribbean Self Help Organisation and the IWA (Verso).