Re: Rivers of Blood by Enoch Powell

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:03:35 +0000, Wolseley 6-80 wrote:

> Rivers of Blood
> Enoch Powell - 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 (material for intellectual
> nourishment – M.J.C.) 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.
>
> The Late The Right Hon. Enoch Powell 20 Apr 1968.
**************************************
A thought that has been puzzling me for this afternoon after watching
"Jeeves and Wooster" (They have a British Nationalist called Spode who
leads the Blackshorts:-)
There seems to be a strange gap of view of people who support the
nationalistic point of view.
Years ago those with the nationalist tendencies in this country were
mostly from upper crust families as was Moseley, Powell, the abdicating
king and his wife and various others.
Then there's a gap and the nationalists until recently have been regarded
as shaven headed football hooligans according to some on this newsgroup
and others about the place.
This total change cannot possibly be where are the "hidden" supporters of
nationalism? Don't tell me the children of parents as mentioned are ALL
leftie liberal pinko?
******************************

.

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