Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" Speech:
Full Transcript of the Speech Text. Highlighted sections in bold.
Given to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 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 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.
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 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."