As a young boy in the 1950s and early 1960s, Dave understandably felt different, given his dark skin. At the time, the population of England was overwhelmingly white, especially in small towns and villages in southern England, where Dave grew up. However, over the time period of the novel, the United Kingdom gradually became a multiracial society. From 1945 to 2010, about one million people immigrated to the United Kingdom from South Asia, amounting to 16% of total immigration during that period. Immigration from the West Indies also increased, reaching 400,000, or 6.4%. One million immigrants came from Africa (16%)—Hector Bishop in the novel is one of them—290,000 (4.6%) came from Arab countries, and 320,000 (5.1%) from China. Nonwhite immigration therefore made up 48.1% of total immigration during this 65-year period.

In response to the increasing racism that immigrants often faced, the British Parliament passed the Race Relations Act in 1965. This act made it illegal to discriminate against anyone in a public place based on their race or skin color. In the novel, when Hector mentions the Race Relations Act to Dave after they are refused a room at a bed and breakfast in Devon, Dave points out that in practice, it is difficult to prove that race is the reason for the refusal. In 1968, another Race Relations Act was passed, which banned discrimination in employment and housing. The changing attitudes toward racism are further apparent in the novel when Dave goes to the Bampton old boys’ reunion, around the year 2000; the school now offers a Race Relations seminar.

However, the horrifying incident that results in Dave’s death during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic shows how racist hatred persists into the modern era. The novel mentions that according to police reports, hate crimes against Chinese people in the United Kingdom tripled during the three months from January to March 2020 (a statistic from Britain’s Independent newspaper in May 2020).