Contrary to popular myth and media image, migrants and minorities are nothing new to the British Isles: the British population is composed of just such people. In this issue, Socialist History provides a range of different perspectives on some of the peoples who have inhabited various parts of the islands.

Shivdeep Grewal's article on Southall derives from his documentary film Remembering Southall April 23 1979, a date on which the lives of local residents intersected with contemporary political conflicts, particularly the racial politics of the National Front and authoritarian right. In a wide-ranging argument, Grewal also considers the responses to the racialisation of British politics both of the organised labour movement and other sections of the British left.

In very different ways, and in different period contexts, Keith Copley and Cronain O'Kelly offer comparable perspectives on the attitudes of British labour to Ireland. Focusing on the Irish in Britain in the Chartist period, Copley provides evidence not only of the racial stereotyping characteristic of the Victorian period but of the common involvement of Irish and English workers in radical politics and their protests at the actions of the British state. Cronain O'Kelly in his sketch of official Labour policy on Ireland argues that it was fundamentally no different from that of other upholders of British rule.

In our final article Stephen Hipkin looks at property relations and rural conflict in early modern England, taking as his reference point the work of Robert Brenner. Hipkin argues that there are complexities not addressed in Brenner's positing of class structures and class conflict as the 'key to the problem of long-term economic development'.