The Britain that Enoch Powell addressed in April 1968 was a much freer and more self-confident place than it is today. There were signs of impending trouble, but it was still recognizably the civilized, gentle country that had defeated the Nazis (even if the Empire had slipped away). As Tennyson says: “So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.”
Prominent amongst looming social difficulties was “the color problem” or “Negro question” (as it was then termed unblushingly). In 1939, the non-white population of Britain was only 30,000, most of whom were recent arrivals. But by 1948, thanks to the Labour government’s ill-considered British Nationality Act 1, large-scale immigration had commenced, first from the Caribbean and then from the Indian subcontinent, fuelled by economic depression or upheaval at home and a real or perceived labor shortage in Britain (did Britain really need so many bus conductors?). This large-scale movement of peoples has continued to the present day, with even ostensibly Conservative governments presiding over large influxes, such as when the Ugandan Asians were admitted en masse in the mid-1970s by Edward Heath’s government. Both main parties are to blame; as one modern historian has noted: “It was not a policy but a complete lack of one which best explains the phenomenon [of mass immigration].” 2
Accurate figures about immigration are notoriously difficult to obtain, both because classification categories are constantly changing and because politicians twist the figures to suit themselves. But by 1971, there were approximately one million “New Commonwealth” residents. The 1991 census (the most recent figures available) indicated that the non-white population was 3,018,000, approximating to 5.5% of the population. 3 Today, the figure is estimated at 4,000,000, of whom about half, and the majority of adults, were born outside the United Kingdom. 4 Some forecasts predict that London, Birmingham and Leicester will have non-white majorities by 2010, and that whites will be in the minority nationwide by 2100. Accordingly, race relations are among the most pressing of today’s social issues, psychologically affecting every area of life and physically affecting many parts of the country.
One of the most succinct descriptions of the problem and its causes appeared recently in an American magazine: “Through the folly, arrogance and sentimentality of their well-insulated ruling class, and by their own inattention, deference, disorganization and reluctance to appear unkind, the English have given up large tracts of their country to foreigners, whom they dislike and who dislike them right back.” 5
But it could have been otherwise, had enough people listened to Powell – and if he had been prepared to organise extra-Parliamentary opposition to mass immigration.
Powell was not the first, nor the only, Conservative to think about such gloomy topics. Although large-scale immigration really began under his governments, Winston Churchill himself had said that he was vehemently opposed to “the magpie society” 6 – an opinion that was echoed by his eponymous grandson, then also an MP, in May 1994. Lord Salisbury warned repeatedly of the dangers of mass immigration. In 1958, the public-spirited Tory MP Cyril Osborne famously burst into tears when the Conservative Party’s influential 1922 Committee of MPs refused to say anything about immigration, despite his impassioned pleas. And over the years there have been many others who have combined shrewd knowledge of human nature with a profound concern for their country – Sir Patrick Wall, Sir Ronald Bell, Sir Keith Joseph, Sir George Young, Harvey Proctor, Alan Clark, Nicholas Budgen, Lord Tebbit, Lawrence Robertson and Gerald Howarth. Even Kenneth Clarke, now one of the Tory Left’s standardbearers, co-authored a pamphlet in 1968 that called for a moratorium on further immigration as well as English language tests and health checks for putative immigrants. 7 Beyond the Conservative Party, concern was manifested in the National Front, which came very close to being a major political force in the late 1970s, until its voters were lured away by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She had made a speech saying that she understood why people felt they were being “swamped,” the implication being that the Conservatives would do something substantive to slow immigration (they did not).
But virtually everyone on the Left and more myopic Conservatives thought that Powell was suffering from what one prominent Conservative called “an excess of logic,” and exclaimed “That sort of thing will never happen here!” This kind of wishful thinking has persisted to this day. Other Conservatives had private misgivings, but were afraid to speak out.
In 1968, the then very recent crimes of the German National Socialists had discredited the whole idea of even talking about race, let alone discriminating on grounds of race, and the opinion-forming classes, caught up in a spasm of chiliastic optimism, found any discussion of race to be at best irrelevant, at worst positively abhorrent. 8 The Times said that Powell’s speech was “evil,” while Labour politician Tony Benn compared Wolverhampton to Belsen. Edward Heath, then leader of the Conservative Party, promptly sacked Powell from his position of Shadow Defence Spokesman.
This speech put him beyond the political pale, and abruptly ended any possibility of further political advancement. As a left-wing British newspaper put it: “The speech that made him also destroyed him…the more popular he became the more unacceptable he became to the political elite.” 9
There is no doubt that he could have led effective opposition to large-scale immigration from outside parliament, had he chosen to do so. Within two weeks of his speech, he had received 120,000 supportive letters, and London’s dockers and meat porters had marched in his support. But he was unwilling to relinquish his position in the Commons. He once described how he had fallen under the spell of the House of Commons as a new MP: “The only thing worth having is to be a member of this place and remain a member of this place”. Something of this infatuation always remained with him, to Britain’s detriment.
Margaret Thatcher may have misled working-class voters in 1979, but at least she mentioned the topic. By contrast, in the 1997 election, her successor John Major forbade even his cabinet ministers to discuss the issue at all. His successor as Conservative leader, William Hague, seemed oblivious to the facts that multiculturalism and large scale, poorly-controlled immigration are not only bad for his party but bad for the country - although he did call for faster treatment of asylum claims and removal of failed applicants, and did criticise the Macpherson Report. He too seems to actually believe that “diversity” within a nation is a strength rather than a weakness. Hague attended with great fanfare the Notting Hill Carnival, the black street party held every August (he called the often violent and always crime-ridden Carnival “Britain’s greatest cultural event”). When Tory peer Lord Tebbit criticised Hague’s statement, he was told rudely “to play with us or get off the team.” Speaking at a reception hosted by the powerful Commission for Racial Equality 10 at the 2000 Conservative conference, Hague said: “I want to see Asian and black MPs in Conservative cabinets and I look forward to the day when Britain has a black Prime Minister.” He also signed the CRE’s “Leadership Challenge,” which obliged him to take personal responsibility for ensuring that the Party is free from discrimination. But none of this obsequiousness did any good, with his political opponents smearing him as “mad, bad and dangerous.”
One can only hope that the next Tory leader, whoever he is, will not play the Left’s unwinnable game, but the precedents are not reassuring. If he also chooses to dodge the issue, then perhaps another party will have to appear to plug the gap.
The most recent Conservative to dip his toe into the race-realist waters was John Townend, then Conservative MP for Yorkshire East (he retired at the election). On March 16, 2001, he made a wide-ranging speech to a constituency meeting, during which he said: “Our homogeneous Anglo-Saxon society has been seriously undermined by the massive immigration, particularly Commonwealth immigration, that has taken place since the War…I believe Enoch Powell was right in his pessimistic forecast…many come from violent societies without our traditions of freedom, free speech, tolerance and the rule of law and inevitably crime is already beginning to rise in the areas where they are…we will sink under the weight of numbers and our country as we know it will be destroyed.” 11 While “homogeneous Anglo-Saxon society” might have been an oversimplification, the audience loved it.
The same could not be said of the media, which had a collective fit. The Leftwing press, naturally, screeched about “Tory racism” while the Rightwing press offered only patchy support. In the Sunday Telegraph, columnist A. N. Wilson wrote that Townend was an “silly old fool” and that his views were “ungenerous and unpleasant.” 12 Writing in the Spectator, former Tory MP Matthew Parris said that Townend had “idiotic and nasty opinions.” In the same issue, Bruce Anderson described him as “a nasty piece of work.” 13 With friends like these, one can see why he felt increasingly isolated.
His sense of isolation must have been compounded by William Hague, who said immediately that he “totally repudiated” Townend’s “offensive” comments. Initially, he refused to remove the party whip from Townend, but later ordered him to keep quiet on pain of expulsion. Lord Taylor of Warwick, a black barrister made a Tory peer by John Major (after he had lost a safe Conservative seat in the 1992 election) said that he would resign from the Party if Townend were not disciplined. The Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, Francis Maude, even denied that Britain had ever been homogeneous. 14 Support was offered by Tory peer Lord Tebbit, Christopher Gill, (another retiring Tory MP) and by Laurence Robertson, MP for Tewkesbury, who admitted that “cramming” different races together caused tension - although Robertson later withdrew his remarks on pain of having the Conservative whip withdrawn. Sixteen Conservative parliamentary candidates also expressed support for him, or at least for his freedom to hold such views. Conservative Central Office admitted that its telephone lines had been “inundated” with messages of support for Townend.
But it was not enough. On May 1st, Townend caved in, and apologised for any “ill-chosen words” that he might have used. There was a final flurry of interest in him when he told a local newspaper that he regretted having made his apology, and promised to “speak out” after the election. 15 We have yet to see if he will keep his promise.
In 1948, 11 Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee warning that “an influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life.” 16 But such views are now virtually non-existent among Labour’s ranks. Today’s new Left likes large-scale immigration because it augments their natural constituencies and further dilutes the sense of patriotism that makes them feel so uncomfortable. Tony Blair’s first government was egregiously grovelling towards real or perceived ethnic minority aspirations, and no doubt his second will prove just the same.
In 1997, when Labour came to power for the first time in 18 years, one of the first things they did was to abolish the so-called “primary purpose rule,” which inadequate measure the Tories had introduced to cut the numbers of people who went through false marriages to obtain citizenship. Then in February 1999 appeared the Macpherson Report, a study commissioned by then Home Secretary Jack Straw into the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson concluded that the police were biased against black people because of “institutional racism,” and that this was why they had failed to find Stephen’s murderers. 17
Predictably, Macpherson legitimized attacks on all institutions and professions – so far, the fire brigade, teachers, the armed services, doctors, nurses, the arts, accountants, and the legal profession have all come under fire. The chorus of mea culpa has become deafening. In July 1999, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the Church of England was “institutionally racist,” intoning, “We cannot afford to rest, either as a church or as a society, until we confronted racism at its deepest level – in our nation, in the structures of our church, in the ordained ministry, in congregation life.”
Occasionally, there are delicious ironies, such as when the Parliamentary Labour Party was accused of institutional racism, or when the famously Leftwing BBC was described as “hideously white” by its own Director General. An employment tribunal recently dubbed solicitors’ profession body, the Law Society, racist and sexist just a few years after it ditched its former Chairman for being too politically incorrect, and just a month or two after it co-sponsored a report into “racism.” 18 Among examples of this Law Society racism was the use of the word “lebensraum” and the expression “hands were going to be chopped off.” 19
In October 1999, Tony Blair made a bombastic speech to the Labour Party conference, in which he blamed “the forces of conservatism allied with racism” for the world’s ills, from General Pinochet’s excesses to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. This remarkable speech encapsulated neatly Labour’s view of the world, and set the tone for the 2001 election campaign, during which Labour energies were concentrated on trying to demonstrate that the Conservatives were “extreme” for such policies as wishing to retain the pound and asking probing questions of would-be “asylum-seekers.” 20
After Macpherson came Parekh. In February 1998, Jack Straw had created a 24 member body called the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, and promised to take its conclusions “very seriously.” The deliberations – if that be the appropriate word – were published in October 2000, in a report which became known as the Parekh Report, after the chairman of the Commission, Lord Parekh, a far Leftist of Indian extraction.
The report stated that “Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken racial connotations…it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness is racially coded.” The polite, British way of dealing with racial and cultural differences – to ignore them - was itself denounced as “deep-seated antagonism to racial and cultural differences.” The report’s authors lamented that “the idea of a multicultural post-nation remains an empty promise,” until all British people were forced to confront their internal racism and British history was re-thought or even “jettisoned.” Parekh made over 100 recommendations, including that Britain should be formally declared a multicultural society, that full appeal rights for asylum seekers against deportation should be granted, that educational authorities should be compelled to keep detailed statistics on ethnicity, that there should be an all-encompassing Equality Act and political parties should have an ethnic “audit” of their members – although most of these have not been put into effect, yet at any rate.
The report occasioned a great deal of hostile press coverage, and Straw distanced himself for tactical reasons, saying that the report was “sub-Marxist” and that he “strongly parted company” with some of the conclusions. One of the Commission’s members, a millionaire businesswoman, later said at a press conference: “It would have been great if Prince Charles had been told to marry someone black. Imagine what message would have been sent out.” The Royal Family, she added, is “a symbol of our unmeritocratic tendency and, of course, they’re all white. It is part of a rather unattractive hierarchy.”
Although the Tories were lax on asylum-seekers (in 1996 there were 30,000 asylum-seekers), since Labour came to power the backlog of asylum applications has increased to the present figure of 75,000 (20% of all EU asylum applications). This is partly due to clerical incompetence, but is mostly attributable to a lack of political will. The result is that an estimated 150,000 “asylum-seekers” whose appeals have all failed are still in the country, and this is certainly an underestimate. Labour’s few attempts to clamp down on “asylum-seekers” have been inadequate – they say that even with extra expenditure of £600 million, by 2002 it will only be possible to remove about 30,000 of these people every year. These 150,000 are now effectively illegal immigrants – and these are only the illegal immigrants who have claimed asylum. Presently, only about 12 failed asylum seekers are deported each month. As a Kosovan refugee told the Daily Telegraph “Tony Blair is better for us because he helps us come into this country.” 21
Attempts are now being made to fine hauliers and ferry operators who inadvertently transport illegal immigrants, fuelled by outrage at the death of 58 Chinese immigrants who smothered in a Dutch truck when the driver closed the air vents to prevent his cargo being detected by customs officials. This conveniently allows the government to be seen to be doing something about the problem, while not having to do the dirty work themselves. Illegal immigration is reckoned to net criminal gangs £13 billion a year.
While illegal immigration is increasing, Labour ministers and polemicists - most recently David Blunkett - have been calling for more legal immigrants to bolster the welfare state and provide labour for the IT industry. A UN study has said that Britain will need to admit over one million immigrants per year until 2050, in order to sustain her present potential support ratio (the proportion of the population aged between 15 and 64) and the government seems to go along with this reasoning. 22 The European Union has also just announced that it plans to make it easier for foreign workers to migrate and take jobs legally within the Union. 23 One good example of how foreign workers are moving in to fill gaps is shown in nursing; the number of foreign nurses registering to work in the UK is about to overtake the total of new British nurses, with most applicants coming from the Philippines, India, Nigeria and South Africa. 24
There is more breast-beating and reverse racism to come during Labour’s second term. The Prime Minister’s personal policy unit has just announced the “biggest ever inquiry into discrimination against Britain’s ethnic minorities in health, education and the workplace.” 25 Blair personally approved switching between £20m 26 and £30m 27 in lottery revenues to fund black and Asian projects, while £623,000 has been earmarked to encourage applications from other black and Asian projects. The grants include £5m for a new art and photo gallery for the Association of Black Photographers, £5m for a new Asian arts centre in Southampton, £2.8m for a Chinese arts centre in Manchester, £2.7m for a Afro-Caribbean/Asian “performance space” in Nottingham, £1.5m for new buildings for the Academy of South Sian performing Arts in Bradford and £1m for the Stephen Lawrence Technocentre in London, which is designed to help members of ethnic minorities get jobs in architecture and design. 28
The next legislative delight comes courtesy of the European Union. Article 13 of the Treaty of Amsterdam deals with discrimination of various kinds, including racial. The UK will be compelled to comply with it by July 2003. Although it must first be passed by the Westminster parliament, this is likely to be a formality. It will make illegal all forms of racial discrimination in employment, training, education, access to social services and health care and access to goods or services, including housing. The European Parliament has earmarked 100 million Euros over the next six years to be spent across the 15 member states to implement Article 13. 29 No doubt national governments will also be contributing vast sums of their respective taxpayers’ money.
The chief manifestation of racial ill will and misunderstanding – and often the only thing that will make the chattering classes even think about race at all - is race rioting. The indigenous people naturally resent the forced interposition of aliens into ‘their’ territory, while the immigrants themselves sense that they are unwelcome, and resent being patronised by middle-class ‘anti-racists.’ Add to this generic unease the irresponsible rhetoric of Leftists and the existence of a small but nasty minority of hooligans who are less interested in politics than in having a fight, and it is little wonder that there are race riots virtually every year.
Britain’s first postwar riots took place in Notting Hill in west London in 1958, when black youths clashed with white ‘teddy boys.' The disturbances were also the opening shots in an undeclared racial war of attrition that has been playing itself out in British inner cities ever since. For policemen, words like Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth and Broadwater Farm carry a special meaning. It was during the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985 that PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death with machetes, to which the then local Labour MP responded: “The police got a bloody good hiding!” As I write these words, the headlines are full of reports of the latest race riots in Bradford, Burnley, Leeds and Oldham.
In the case of Oldham, 30 the riots were followed by impressive general election results for a small party called the British National Party (BNP) in the two Oldham seats. 31 The prospect of such diabolical figures possibly gaining a couple of council seats in next May’s council elections has thrown the Left into a blind panic. A high-powered delegation of local worthies, including the three local Labour MPs, was sent to London to address the “root causes” – only for it to be criticised for being all-white (another nice example of how revolutions devour their own). Incidentally, it is also darkly amusing to record that the Bradford Labour Club was set alight during the disturbances there, and the local Labourites had to be rescued by firemen, after their political playmates had blocked the door with a burning car.
The excuses for race riots are becoming ever less plausible and the proposed “solutions” more ludicrous and expensive. So far, scapegoats for the latest spate of riots have included the Tories, “far-right extremists” (although the BNP only stood candidates in Oldham because riots had already taken place there), the local newspaper, the police, bad examples from the white underclass and “Western society,” a liberal local councillor who publicised inconvenient facts about disparities in local authority funding, local teachers and, inevitably, “social deprivation” – everything but the flawed policy of large scale immigration combined with aggressive multiculturalism. Proposed “remedies” include organising sports tournaments and adventure courses. 32
The presence of large numbers of women police officers, the lowering of the old physical fitness standards for males (done both to boost recruitment, and to attract more Asian applicants, who tend to be shorter) and the necessity to avoid being seen as ‘heavy-handed’ means that it will become increasingly difficult for the police to control future riots, of which no doubt there will be many more.
Enoch Powell once said that all political careers end in failure. But although he certainly failed to provide leadership at a crucial moment, at least he spoke out when no-one else would, and also gave the restrictionist cause some intellectual credibility. Our racial problems have worsened despite his intervention. Perhaps not even he would have been able to foresee the myriad stresses and strains and the sheer angst caused by the presence and moral super-equality of such large numbers of unassimilated, perhaps even unassimilable, immigrants. There will be many more Stephen Lawrences and many more Rupert Everetts (the 15 year old London boy killed by Asian youths in London) thanks to the stupidity and short-sightedness of a few politicians, journalists and TV script writers, who seem to believe that all human beings are interchangeable, infinitely malleable consumers. Yet perhaps it would have been even worse had he not spoken at all.
Just as the shoddy buildings of the 1960s are crumbling, so are the liberal platitudes, which underlie Leftwing social policy (or lack of policy). But the generation now in power is unlikely to realise the error of its ways. There are widening cracks in the multicultural edifice, but there are still vast numbers of influential people who will do anything to avoid discussing this topic sensibly. For now the unvarnished truth – that there is a growing racial problem in England which shows all the signs of becoming as intractable as the problems of Northern Ireland – is just too dreadful for our present rulers and intellectuals to contemplate. style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Yet murder will out and, as one Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate put it in May: “I have but one consolation: the silence will not last forever.” 331 By replacing the concept of common allegiance to the crown with separate citizenships for Commonwealth countries and the status of “Commonwealth citizen” with rights equivalent to British subjects, the British Nationality Act effectively gave 800 million Commonwealth citizens the right to reside in Britain.
2 Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1994.
3 This was almost certainly an underestimate; recent immigrants are much less likely to fill in census forms and of course there is no way of counting illegal immigrants.
4 Oxford University demographer David Coleman, Spectator, January 6, 2001.
5 John Derbyshire, National Review, May 31, 2001.
6 Roberts, op cit.
7 Referred to in The Bow Group, James Barr, Politico’s, London, 2001.
8 Peter Brimelow has memorably said that current US immigration policy is “Hitler’s revenge” on America (Alien Nation, Random House, New York, 1995).
9 Denis Kavanagh, Independent, February 9, 1998.
10 The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was set up under the 1976 Race Relations Act. Although nominally independent, it receives its funding from the Home Office. It administers over 100 Racial Equality Councils or similar bodies around the country. It has statutory powers to advise or assist persons complaining about discrimination or harassment, to investigate companies and organisations alleged to be guilty of racism (and can then compel organisations found guilty to change their practices) and to take action against legally discriminatory advertisements or companies. Its powers have just been strengthened by the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which came into effect in April 2001. Now all major public bodies are obliged to provide “equality of opportunity” and “good race relations.” The CRE’s former chairman, Lord Ouseley, recently ennobled by Labour, has authored a report into the Bradford riots.
11 Approximately 20% of the UK’s prison population is non-white (non-whites comprise between 8 and 10% of the population).
12 Sunday Telegraph, May 6, 2001.
13 Spectator
14 It might be mischievously noted that Maude has not been taken entirely seriously by many Tories ever since he, a professed Eurosceptic, signed the Maastricht Treaty on Britain’s ‘behalf.’
15 Yorkshire Post, May 2, 2001.
16 Roberts, op cit.
17 The five defendants – young, white, petty criminals – were easy targets and had no defenders, but despite both a public and a private prosecution and completely hostile media there was just not enough evidence to convict them New Home Secretary David Blunkett is presently discussing the possibility of scrapping the old English legal safeguard of ‘double jeopardy’, which holds that no-one can be tried twice for the same crime - so that the five may be tried again. It may be of passing interest to note that one of the five ‘racists’ charged with Lawrence’s murder was later implicated in an illegal immigration racket.
18 Guardian July 6, 2001.
19 Times, 10, 2001.
20 As so many asylum seekers are fraudulent, William Hague took to using a simple catchphrase during his general election campaign – “bogus asylum-seekers.” This anodyne phrase was itself condemned by Labour politicians and the Commission for Racial Equality as racist. Government spin doctors even circulated a story to the newspapers that the secret service were taking an interest in Conservative politicians’ speeches, implying that they were criminal and subversive.
21 Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2001.
22 By way of contrast, in 1996 43,500 people were granted citizenship.
23 Daily Telegraph , July 12, 2001.
24 Times , May 22, 2001.
25 Independent, July 5, 2001.
26 Guardian , April 30, 2001.
27 Daily Telegraph , June 13, 2001.
28 Daily Telegraph, ibid.
29 Daily Telegraph , July 12, 2001.
30 Pakistanis and Bengalis make up 11% of the city’s population, projected to be 17% in ten years.
31 The British National Party obtained 16.4% in the constituency of Oldham West & Royton and 11.21% in Oldham East & Saddleworth. They also retained their deposits in several other seats around the country.
32 Daily Telegraph , July 11, 2001. But there is at least one faint glimmer of light within Labour ranks – Keighley’s Labour MP Ann Cryer has admitted that present immigration policies amount to little more than “importing poverty,” and called for English proficiency tests for immigrants (Yorkshire Post, 12th July 2001).
33 Simon Pearce, letter, Daily Telegraph, 2 May 2001. He was writing in response to the witch-hunt against John Townend.