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J. ENOCH POWELL AT BIRMINGHAM IN
1968
Rivers of Blood
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Go here for more about
 Enoch
Powell.
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Enoch
Powell's Rivers of Blood speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech, delivered at the
Midland Hotel in Birmingham, England — April 20, 1968. |
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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 nationalized
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 been through grammar
school and two of them 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
minimized 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 be 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 "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. They 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 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 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
neighborhoods 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 willfully 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 color,
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 endeavor 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 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 practiced by one color 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 organize 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.
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