The famous speech of Enoch Powell
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.€
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Well, it took a few paragraphs, but you finally got around to it...
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