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RIVERS
OF BLOOD SPEECH Below is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on 20th April 1968. At the time it caused an absolute uproar, and cost Powell his job as Shadow Defence Secretary in the Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath. Thirty years later Heath commented that Powell's remarks on the "economic burden of immigration" had been "not without prescience." This was vindication indeed for Enoch Powell who had been a victim of political correctness, and the desire of the liberal-left elite to stifle freedom of speech in the UK, especially in respect to any debate on the subject of immigration. These dangerous social experimenters attempted then, and still attempt today, to prevent any reasoned, intelligent debate on immigration. They use the device of labeling anybody who broaches the subject in public as a racist. It is little wonder that there is a powder keg of resentment building up amongst the ordinary folk of the UK. At the time of the speech, an opinion poll taken suggested that 74% of the UK population agreed with Powell's views. Personally speaking, from what I hear in conversation during the course of the average working day, I would not be surprised if the percentage figure today was about the same.
Rt Hon Enoch Powell MP 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 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.
The
Tottenham riots of August 2011 which spread nationwide 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 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.
Welcome to London 2012 - a city undergoing massive change 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 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
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 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 "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 legacy of mass immigration to the UK and the failure of previous governments to listen to reason, can clearly be seen in recent figures for the cost of this unsustainable and damaging influx below. With unrestricted migration from the less developed EU nations in the east, the situation is only going to get worse. Indeed it has reached the point that only total withdrawal from the EU can rescue the UK, and that may well happen within the next five years.
©Copyright - James of Glencarr |
