[BretLudwig]

Like the Roman, forty years and ten million immigrants ago

Here is the full text of Enoch Powells speech to the Annual General
Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, at the
Midland Hotel, Birmingham on 20th April 1968.



"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable
evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted
in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not
demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there
is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By
the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current
troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting
temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at
the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing
troubles and even for desiring troubles: €œIf only,€� they love to
think, €œif only people wouldnt talk about it, it probably wouldnt
happen.€� Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the
word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now,
avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most
necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it
deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come
after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a
middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our
nationalised industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he
suddenly said: €œIf I had the money to go, I wouldnt stay in this
country.€� I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this
government wouldnt last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued:
€œI have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two
of them married now, with family. I shant be satisfied till I have seen
them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years time the
black man will have the whip hand over the white man.€�

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a
horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by
repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent,
ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to
me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in
for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and
think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of
thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps,
but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to
which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three
and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is
not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the
spokesman of the Registrar Generals Office. There is no comparable
official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to
seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and
approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly
distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen.
Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by
sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant
descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same
route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the
native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates
the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is
hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the
present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments
ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a
prospect is to ask: €œHow can its dimensions he reduced?€� Granted it be
not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers
are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element
introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according
to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent. The answers to the
simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping,
or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum
outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative
Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant
children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week -
and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those
whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad,
literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some
50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future
growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation
busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we
actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding
a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail
off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a
year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per
annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of
existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all
for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that
the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible
proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative
measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words €œfor settlement.€� This has nothing to do with the
entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this
country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications,
like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of
their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded
faster than would otherwise have been possible. There are not, and never
have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of
growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be
substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the
population would still leave the basic character of the national danger
unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of
the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last
ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the
Conservative Partys policy: the encouragement of re-emigration. Nobody
can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would
choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other
countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.
Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only
say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to
time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If
such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the
gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could
appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Partys policy is that all who are
in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there
shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public
authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no €œfirst-class
citizens€� and €œsecond-class citizens.€� This does not mean that the
immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or
special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to
discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one
fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as
to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than
another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is
entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it
€œagainst discrimination€�, whether they be leader-writers of the same
kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the
1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it,
or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes
pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and
diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of
alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with
those among whom they have come and are still coming. This is why to enact
legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk
throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about
those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth
immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the
United States, which was already in existence before the United States
became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the
franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they
have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth
immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no
discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly
into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free
treatment under the National Health Service. Whatever drawbacks attended
the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from
administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which
cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be
different from anothers.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to
privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing
population was very different. For reasons which they could not
comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were
never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own
country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their
children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods
changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future
defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the
immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of
the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more
voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that
a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which
cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their
grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the
agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on
this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which
was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are
used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and
alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people,
writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they
had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed
themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I
had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they
were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which
is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which
are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly
imagine. I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak
for me:-

Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was
sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives
there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the
war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding
house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put
something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing
fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became
a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

€˜The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two
Negroes who wanted to use her €˜phone to contact their employer. When she
refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was
abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her
door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she
always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates,
she has less than £2 per week. She went to apply for a rate reduction and
was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house,
suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she
could get were Negroes, the girl said, €œRacial prejudice wont get you
anywhere in this country.€� So she went home.

€˜The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help
her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a
price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his
tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go
out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box.
When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming,
wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they
know. €œRacialist,€� they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is
passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so
wrong? I begin to wonder.

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or
otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word
€œintegration.€� To be integrated into a population means to become for
all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at
all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of
colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible.
There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in
the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to
be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that
direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great
and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous
misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of
circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of
integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population -
that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers
and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which
normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against
integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of
racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual
domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the
population. The cloud no bigger than a mans hand, that can so rapidly
overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown
signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they
appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a
Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:-

The Sikh communities campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in
Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the
public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and
conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or
should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society.
This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another
it is to be strongly condemned.

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that,
and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the
Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the
means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate
their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and
to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant
and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with
foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see €œthe River Tiber foaming with
much blood.€�

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the
other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history
and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own
volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical
terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the
century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will
be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I
know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal."

--
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[Jenn[_2_]]

In article
outaudio.com,
"BretLudwig" wrote:


Like the Roman, forty years and ten million immigrants ago

Here is the full text of Enoch Powells speech to the Annual General
Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, at the
Midland Hotel, Birmingham on 20th April 1968.



"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable
evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted
in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not
demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there
is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By
the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current
troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting
temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at
the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing
troubles and even for desiring troubles: €œIf only,€� they love to
think, €œif only people wouldnt talk about it, it probably wouldnt
happen.€� Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the
word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now,
avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most
necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it
deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come
after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a
middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our
nationalised industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he
suddenly said: €œIf I had the money to go, I wouldnt stay in this
country.€� I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this
government wouldnt last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued:
€œI have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two
of them married now, with family. I shant be satisfied till I have seen
them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years time the
black man will have the whip hand over the white man.€�

snip

Well, it took a few paragraphs, but you finally got around to it...