Given at the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative
Party, Powell's reference to Virgil's prediction of war, during which the
Tiber would foam with blood, it has become universally known as the "Rivers of
Blood" speech.Powell's speech was to say the least "contentious", and generated considerable
debate at the time.
Many saw Powell as a true visionary, voicing the concerns which were held at
the time. Others were shocked by his language. Edward Heath, the Leader of
the Opposition, sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet, condemning his speech
as "racialist", and Powell never held a seniour political position again.
Powell recived over a hundred thousand letters in support of his stance
against immigration after his infamous speech, and London dock workers marched
through the streets in support of his views.
Many others were equally vocal against his apocolyptic visions, and the result
of his speech, which lead to an increase in inter-race tensions in the UK.
The importance of Powell's speech, whether one supports or rejects his views, is
undeniable. It was probably the one speech which brought the debate on
immigration, anti-immigration, and racial integration to the fore. It brought
views held behind closed doors into the open, and revealed the simmering
tensions in the UK on the matter.
Britain has moved on since 1968, but immigration is still high on the political
agenda, with refuges, both economic and political, displaced by conflict and
intolerance hoping to make Britain their home.
The debate on immigration is as intense, and as complex, as ever; on one hand
the government has opened Britain's doors to short-term immigration for those
it believes can fulfill job vacancies in the UK, while with the other, closing
the doors to those who seek asylum without meeting the government's criteria
for entry.
There are more immigrants, and those born of immigrant families, in the UK now
than there was in 1960, and there is a greater tolerance now than it appeared
when Powell made his speech, however, racially motivated crime has not been
erradicated, and there are still many who hold anti-immigration, and
anti-immigrant views.
Powell's "Rivers of Blood", speech is by far the most widely acknowledged as
being pivotal to the debate in the late 1960's, it is refered to by both sides
of the debate, and it is still quoted by the National Front today.
Despite the widespread knowledge of his speech, which is what has defined the
persona of Powell since he made it, very few people have heard the speech in
full, and many were not even born when he uttered his words. Powell is judged
not on what he said, but on the sound-bite echoes that the speech has left
behind.
The entirety of Powell's speech is given here, without comment, other than to
say that I do not agree with what he says, and that I do consider his views
to be racist.
The language used by Powell may be abhorant to many readers now, and it gives an
insight into how immigrants were viewed by many at the time. It is a speech
which has been recorded in the history books of race relatuions, and it is a
speech reflecting sentiments which are still held by some Britons today.
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 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.
