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"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 he 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 fiances 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 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 news papers 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 15 years 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 they 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 immigrator 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.
Original source: the Sterling Times
web site -
http://www.sterlingtimes.org/text_rivers_of_blood.htm
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