Roughly 2 million people with origins in the so-called New Commonwealth lived in Britain during the Callaghan years. Some 31 per cent came from India, 13 per cent from Pakistan and 3 per cent from Bangladesh; another 25 per cent came from the Caribbean; just over 8 per cent were East African Asians; and the rest came from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nigeria and elsewhere. […] Many were not, strictly speaking, immigrants: they were black and brown Britons, born and brought up on British soil, with local accents, local friends and local tastes. Yet although not all their neighbours agreed that, as the skinhead song put it, ‘there ain’t no black in the Union Jack’, old prejudices died hard. When the Schools Council published a survey of primary school children’s racial attitudes in 1978, the results were often shocking. Even the more tolerant white children, the report found, betrayed an ‘unquestioning feeling of superiority’. ‘Black people are nearly the same as white people … They are sometimes very nice,’ wrote one child from an all-white Midlands school. ‘They can’t help being black,’ wrote another. ‘They look like normal people,’ agreed a third.

Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979 (2012)