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.
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.
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.
. . . .
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 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 [United] 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.
Seth Barrett Tillman, 49 Years Ago Today: Enoch Powell, Address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, The New Reform Club (Apr. 20, 2017), http://tinyurl.com/knw5y2c
https://twitter.com/SethBTillman/status/855015540238241793
Seth Barrett Tillman, “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”—If you are searching for his monument, look around ..., The New Reform Club (Apr. 20, 2017), http://tinyurl.com/kdhjtdg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
Seth Barrett Tillman, “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”—If you are searching for his monument, look around ..., The New Reform Club (Apr. 20, 2017), http://tinyurl.com/kdhjtdg
