Report on United Kingdom which, although not apparent on the face of the legislation, would primarily affect subjects, both CUKCs and independent Commonwealth citizens, from non-white countries. Decolonisation created other new forms of immigration and new forms of discrimination. The population of South Asian descent living in the former East African colonies such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika (Tanzania) were permitted to keep their CUKC status after independence as an insurance against policies of Africanisation, an anticipated reaction to former white British rule. Much of the substantial population of mostly middle-class Asian families therefore retained their CUKC, citizenship and did not take up citizenship of the new countries. In due course, their fears were realised and they began to arrive in the UK, where, however, they faced resistance to their admission which translated directly into legislation. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 imposed entry controls on CUKCs who did not have a parent or grandparent born, naturalised, adopted or registered in the UK, thereby excluding the East African Asians.20 The 1968 Act anticipated the Immigration Act 1971 which unified controls over aliens and Commonwealth citizens and retained the model used in the 1968 Act. The 1971 Act granted the right of abode to ‘patrials’ i.e. those who could show an ancestral connection with the UK (including some non-nationals), Commonwealth citizens who had been resident in the UK for five years and female Commonwealth citizens married to a man with the right of abode. Everyone else, including non-white British citizens in the remaining colonies, was subject to immigration control. ‘Patriality’ says Dummett ‘had become a quasi-nationality’ (2005: 568). The term was later abandoned when the distinctions it embodied were reflected in nationality law in the British Nationality Act 1981 which designated CUKC patrials as British citizens, the only category of citizen with the right to live in the UK. The East African Asian CUKCs who had been made subject to controls in 1968 became British Overseas Citizens. The CUKCs who lived in the UK’s remaining dependencies became British Dependent Territories Citizens. Neither of the two latter groups had the right of abode in the UK, a position that was not remedied until early in the twenty-first century. Commonwealth citizens who were patrials when the 1981 Act came into effect retained their right of abode and form a dwindling but still extant group of noncitizens entitled to live in the UK. The modern face of the historically changing definition of Britishness was examined in the case of Elias. This concerned the unhappy resolution of the sorry tale of the civilians interned in Japanese camps during the Second World War. Diana Elias, whose British family originated from Iraq and India, had been one of those handed over to the Japanese by the British Consul in Shanghai. Decades later, the British Government decided to try to end still-continuing calls for the Japanese to apologise and make reparations, which were souring political relations, by making its own ex gratia payment of £10,000 to each British former internee. After the scheme was announced, and some payments had been made, the eligibility criteria were changed to include only those who were, or whose parent or grandparent was, born in the UK. This excluded Mrs Elias, who by then had lived in the UK for decades as a British citizen herself. She took a case and won on the grounds of race discrimination, the Government inter alia not having noticed the relevant part of the Race Relations legislation coming into force.21 20 The circumstances in which the Act was passed are a good example of how even basic constitutional rights are made fragile by the absence of entrenchment in the English legal system so that they are not more difficult to amend, than ordinary legislation. The 1968 Act was passed in a climate of high political and racial tension, in a matter of days. An MP, Enoch Powell, made a near-contemporary speech on immigration, referred to as ‘“the Rivers of Blood speech’”, which remains a widely-known and frequently-referred-to icon of establishment racism. 21 Secretary of State for Defence vs Mrs Diana Elias [2006] EWCA Civ 1293. RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-CR 2014/1 - © 2014 Authors 9