Rivers of Blood
ENOCH POWELL (UK) - 20th of 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. "If only",
they love to think, "If only people wouldn't talk about it, it
probably wouldn't 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, "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't
stay in this country". I made some deprecatory reply to the
effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he
took no notice, and continued, "I have three children, all of
them have been through grammar school and two of them are
married now, with family. I shan't 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
General's 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, "How can its dimensions he
reduced ?". Granted it may not be wholly preventable. Can it be
limited, bearing this 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 in-
flow, and by promoting the maximum out-flow. 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 in-flow of some 50,000 dependents, 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 fiances whom
they have never seen.
Let no one suppose that the flow of dependents 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 dependents 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 in-flow 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 "for 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. These 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 Party's 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 Party's 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 "first-class citizens" and "second-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 "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers
of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which
year after year in the 1930's 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 onto 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 another's.
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, "Racial
prejudice won't 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. "Racialist", 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 "integration". 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 man's 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 community's 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 "the
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.
