Odd Man Out: A Film Portrait of
Enoch Powell, BBC
(1995)
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- "Enoch
Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' Speech," The Telegraph
(2007)
This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of
Blood' speech, which was delivered 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.
[...]
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 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
“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.
[...]
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.
[...]
'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."
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