Enoch Powell

[Marulus]

Enoch Powell

An enigma of awkward passions

Norman Shrapnel and Mike Phillips
Friday February 9, 98
The Guardian

The word most people settled for in trying to describe Enoch Powell , who has died aged 85, was - leaving out the ruder ones - enigmatic. Scholar, soldier, statesman, arch-rebel, philosopher, poet, all crowded so glitteringly into so few early years. Here surely was something to wonder at, this neo-Renaissance figure with a Black Country accent. At the end of the story, the enigma had still not been solved. For we also had a monument of self-contradiction - a man of the hard right who could be a sensitive social reformer, a deeply committed Tory who could urge his colleagues to conspire with the enemy, a master of words who could use them with what many saw as gross irresponsibility, a devout loyalist who could lecture his queen, an atheist and a High Anglican.

At one time and another he was all these. Powell had little time for anything in between, the reasonable man's halfway house where most tolerable life is carried on. Listening to a Powell speech could be a fascinating, benumbing experience he would use headlines to dazzle, plain words to bemuse. The language, perhaps the human mind itself, was never made to bear such logic. He carried lucidity to the point of obfuscation, even beyond it to somewhere near dementia. His written prose, including many sensible reviews were more normal but his verse, which shows some influence of A E Housman who taught him at Cambridge, clearly indicates the romantic urge driving him.


Powell and Michael Foot, for years the two best speakers in the Commons, were poles apart politically but alike in their power to exert a mesmeric effect over even a hard-boiled Commons audience. They had a mutual regard, and often joined forces in tactical skirmishing against what they both saw as the common enemy, the Common Market.

He was indeed a hard man to understand, and harder still to fit into current political categories. The contradiction clamoured: the imperialist who wanted to withdraw from the far east, the apparently cold man who once burst into passionate tears in the Commons, the confirmed anti-planner who took on the essentially planning job of minister of health in 1960. Nevertheless he regarded himself - and persuaded some admirers to regard him - as a model of logical consistency.

Rational and romantic were at war in him, and it was not always the romantic that won. Nor was there anything obviously romantic, though there might have been to the eye of a Balzac or an Arnold Bennett, about the appearance and manner of this tense, unsmiling man. He looked more like a member of some obscure town council than one of the most controversial politicians of his day. Provincialism was of his essence and English Midland provincialism at that, than which there is none more introverted. But a Welsh ancestry fired his complex nature. His parents were teachers, and he seemed born to exert diligence and acquire merit. He shone at King Edward's School in his native Birmingham and was a highly successful prize-winning student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in the mid-1930s.

By the time he was 25, he was Professor of Greek at Sydney University, and a second world war brigadier not so long after. Characteristically he had rushed home from Australia to enlist as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and promotion came quickly - as it did in all he put his hand and mind to, except his chosen career of politics.

He could have been distinguished in academic life his work on Herodotus suggests that he could have made his mark as a classical scholar but his excursions into English verse, collected, in 1990, from several slim volumes, hardly suggest that we lost a poet when we gained a politician. The echoes of Housman - another classicist, controversialist and poet - were too audible.

Powell worked for the Conservative Research Department, collaborating with Angus Maude on the pamphlet One Nation, and entered parliament on the big Tory wave of 1950. Powell's Birmingham voice and Wolverhampton constituency soon provided a new English centre of gravity there. A third dominant characteristic, probably linked with his provincialism and his romanticism, made itself felt. This was the urge to make a gesture, to stand conspicuously apart, to pit himself against established orthodoxies in his own party. He started in a small way, brushing with his local Conservative Association. It was as though he was rehearsing for major rebellions.

The first came in 1958, when as financial secretary to the Treasury, he resigned with Peter (later Lord) Thorneycroft, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Nigel Birch, the economic secretary, in protest against the government's refusal to hold back public expenditure to a level acceptable to them - the episode which Harold Macmillan christened 'a little local difficulty'. The second was when he stood out against the king-making convulsions in the Conservative party which led to Sir Alec Douglas Home's succession.

The third, and by far the most sensational, gesture compelled Heath to sack him from the shadow cabinet in April 1968, because of the 'rivers of blood' speech he made in Birmingham about immigration. It was made without consulting any of his colleagues, who criticised it more for the intemperance of its language than for its basic message. Those who had been patiently working for better race relations bitterly criticised that too.

Whether Powell was truly a racialist is a matter of semantics. (Ironically, his bravest and most passionate speech at Westminster had demanded the exposure of British maltreatment of Mau Mau suspects in Kenya, a decade earlier.) Whether or not he calculated the result of the Birmingham speech in advance - there were few who believed he did not - they were easily calculable and the outcome was ugly. He raised fears and hatreds to a state of tension overnight. A pro-Powell campaign reached a pitch of near-hysteria and there were some unpleasant incidents.

On the best interpretation Powell, a man of strong imperialist sympathies, was ungenerous in treating the post-imperial human legacy with such cynical or at least selfish disregard. Many held that he was also cashing in on genuinely-felt social fears. Nor was logic on his side. In his temperamental war with emotion, reason lost. This episode also brought out his most alarming and sometimes absurd characteristic, the Cassandra complex coupled with a penchant for Delphic utterance. References to 'the Tiber foaming with much blood' needed a sense of classical distancing easily missed in Wolverhampton's back streets .

Powell was not the first or the last politician to be caught between the concept and the act, the purity of the idea and the twist and turns of real life, but in his case the gift for abstraction was so advanced that the gap yawned wider than for most. This created in him a sense of danger, a tension that communicated which was more than his argument always did. As a speaker in the Commons he often seemed to deploy a fiercely private logic, yet his carefully articulated, pedantic performances could make irrelevance sound prophetic. Few could always remember what he said, but they were always impressed by the intensity with which he said it.

One of his early posts on achieving junior office was at Housing (1955-57). Then came the Treasury post from which he resigned over government spending. Yet it was as head of a major spending department, Health, that he reached the cabinet.

The next phase of his career was marked by some searing attacks on political hypocrisy. Though ostensibly over his bitter opposition to the European Community and our part in it, the abandonment, in 1974, of his Wolverhampton seat and the Conservative party (over Europe) looked like self-punishment, almost a kind of self-mutilation for a man with his advanced sense of loyalty.

He was afraid that the credibility gap between parliament and people was growing all the time, as was the need 'to match the person to the institution.' His personal attempt to do this, as he explained with a flash of the charm he could deploy when he chose, was to change 'the ugly accent compounded of Birmingham, Staffordshire and Australia' for the 'beautiful lilting language of Ulster.' But it was a deeper change he really sought it was the best, indeed the only, chance in sight of taking another stand against the demon of ambiguity and double talk.

As Ulster Unionist member for South Down (1983-87) he lived in the world of absolutes, of jet blacks and shining whites. In that sense if in no other, he was at home. Asked in an unguarded moment during an interview how often he went to Ireland he replied coldly that he never went to Ireland but frequently went to Ulster. The continuing atrocities, in particular the Harrods bombing, he blamed on 'double talk and double-dealing on the part of Britain which has kept the IRA and their fellow murderers in business these last dozen years.' It was as MP for South Down that his private member's bill to ban research on human embryos failed to reach the statute books, but not before it had received considerable support.

In December 1985 he resigned his seat in protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and was re-elected at the ensuing by-election - but at the next general election, in 1987, he was out of parliament and it would have taken a brave prime minister to send him to the Lords as a parting present. It never happened.

His last book, The Evolution of the Gospel (1994), was typically challenging, raising questions about how Christ might have died. Powell never grew old gracefully.

He is survived by his wife, Pamela, whom he married in 1952, and two daughters.

Norman Shrapnel

The first time I met Enoch Powell left me feeling embarrassed, guilty and a little sorry for him. These weren't emotions I would have predicted, given who he was, and the impact he had had on my life, but, this was late in the 1970s, and by then his audience had dwindled and his charisma had begun to fade.

Even so, his name still had enough potency for the prospect of debating with him to carry a substantial emotional charge. The occasion was a BBC programme called The Editors. I am not sure what I was expecting but when we met, before the event, he was punctiliously courteous. He made small talk without being prompted, asking questions like how long it had taken me to get to Wood Lane, and whether the traffic had been bad.

His voice was a surprise, too. I had expected to find it disturbing but, face to face, it was reedy, almost musical. He still sounded stiff, awkward with the cadences of informal chat, but I had no doubt about his sincerity, and resentful as I was, I began to think there was something immensely likeable about him.

On the other hand, he wasn't all charm. As we walked to the make-up cubicle he remarked that since none of the participants appeared to be editors, perhaps the programme should be renamed. I hastened to point out that I was editor of an ethnic paper, but it was too late. He'd taken the high ground.

At the time I was impressed. Over the years I had begun to think of him as a demagogue who'd struck it lucky, but in that moment, the silky fluency of his tone, combined with the sharpness of the glance he gave me was like a snake striking: and suddenly, like a new insight, it hit me that here was a dangerous old man.

Not that I had ever thought of him as anything else. Up until Powell began making his speeches about race the views he was expressing had widespread currency in private but in public they were disreputable, stuck out there in a margin to the right of the Conservatives. Immigrants were accustomed to hearing white people complain, but in general, we had a sense that the Notting Hill riots in 1958 had been a watershed, after which a liberal consensus had emerged among the politicians which would, somehow, protect us if the worst came to the worst.

Powell destroyed our complacency in one night. His speech about seeing the Tiber 'foaming with much blood' was like a key to Pandora's box. I'm not sure how strongly most other immigrants reacted, but we all felt the dramatic change. It was hard to say quite how it had happened, but Powell had become a rallying point for most of the hostility and rage we encountered, a shorthand for hatred and contempt. "I'm with Enoch," they said, or "they should let Enoch sort you lot out," and that was enough.

What was hardest to bear, and most alarming, was the pervasive sense that the politicians, the people who were meant to be in charge, seemed to be afraid of him and what he could do. In those days he cropped up in all sorts of places. Johnny Speight's bigoted Alf Garnett, on TV every week, offered him up in a domesticated package and gave him a renewed currency. He became a myth, a bogyman, in whose name blacks and Asians were to be harassed and assaulted for the next couple of decades.

In hindsight, I think it would be flattering Powell to say that he was entirely responsible for the effect of his speeches, but it's true that by marrying his version of nationalism to racist rage he gave British racism and racist violence in British streets its own peculiar shape for a time, and it bore his name, Powellism. He offered British politicians a model for racialist rhetoric which was to last for a long time - when, a decade later, Mrs Thatcher spoke of British civilisation being "swamped" the Powellite echoes were unmistakable, and successful.

His memory will probably have me looking over my shoulder in the streets of my own city, London, for the rest of my life, and although the thought would probably make him furious, I shall always think of him as part of my history and as part of my identity as a Briton.

Mike Phillips

John Enoch Powell, politician, born June 16 1912 died February 8 1998

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Enoch Powell's controversial ending - warden of St. Margaret's Church's controversial speech on race in 1968

National Review, March 23, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

It is not widely noticed in America, let alone resented, that a couple of conspicuous British divines protested mightily that the body of Enoch Powell would rest for one day in Westminster Abbey. The decision to place him there wasn't an Act of Parliament confirmed by the House of Lords confirmed by the Crown. It was as straightforward as that he had been a warden of St. Margaret's Church, which is an appendage of Westminster Abbey, and the conventional arrangements have always been just that simple: worship at St. Margaret's and earn a day at Westminster Abbey before you go underground.

But of course the death of Mr. Powell was an opportunity for bishops too busy to mourn the dead to engage in a little multiculturalism. "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge," said the Bishop of Croydon. His reference was to a speech by Enoch Powell in 1968, dubbed the "Rivers of Blood" speech. We should give that speech a little more perspective.

What Powell said that had political heft was that someone carrying a British passport ought no longer to assume that he had an inalienable right to immigrate to the British Isles. There was indeed some sense of it, when the talk was given, that Great Britain was going back on a trust: the assumption, for generations, had been that a resident of any country in the Empire was, in effect, British-born. "What that would mean," Mr. Powell explained on a Firing Line program, "is that several hundred million people would have a right of entry into the British Isles." Manifestly, the right of entry had to graduate from civil to ceremonial application; and indeed Parliament in due course made the necessary clarification.

But the issue was complicated by inflammatory predictions. Powell's speech projected that "in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." The current Economist comments that the projection proved to be "a nonsense. Today, non-whites, lumped together in official statistics as 'ethnic minorities,' amount to only 6 per cent of the population." The editors neatly finessed an opportunity to pass judgment on whether, if Powell's prediction had proved correct, England would have suffered.

The Bishop of Croydon (there were others, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury) feels the constraint similarly felt so widely in the United States, where any talk about immigration reform, so clearly needed, runs into multiculturalists who espy anti-black or anti-Hispanic prejudice in proposals for restriction, or libertarians who espy a statist assault on freedom of movement. Enoch Powell was prepared to evaluate the cultural level of ten thousand Indians in 1968 and ten thousand Brits in the same year and insist that disparities in education and culture and tradition made them less than entirely, or immediately, fungible. He was right, but to make that point was so risky as probably to have cost him the political ascendancy he had reason to expect.

Because he was one of the truly brilliant political figures in modern British history. A classicist profoundly learned, a man of withering intelligence who at age seventy, for the sake of research he was engaged in, mastered Hebrew. He resigned from the Tory Party because of his dissatisfaction with Tory leader Edward Heath (who declined to mourn his death last week), and took a seat with the Unionist Party in Ireland. Through it all he opposed Europeanism and preached the value of the free-market economy, supporting the reforms of Mrs. Thatcher, who, notwithstanding, denied Powell the hereditary seat in the House of Lords he was said to covet. This deprivation had a domestic impact on his wife. "Pamela was especially keen for her husband to find employment," an observer reported in the London Times. "'She was fed up with him mooching around the house,' says a friend. 'Pam married him in sickness and in health, but not for lunch."'

Amusing, but not really apt for someone never idle, busy with research on the Bible, which at a large dinner party in London a few years ago he described privately to his host as fulfilling a lifelong ambition. He had been to Russia, and when he addressed the assembly from the lectern he said that everywhere he went in Russia he heard three words, "Ivan bil pravi." He spoke about his long fight for a free market and for the need for a country to control its own borders and against Europeanization. What was the translation of those words he heard spoken everywhere? He gave his tight smile, "Why," he said, "that's Russian for 'Enoch Was Right."' Evidently the Russians know things a lot of British bishops don't know.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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[Errigal]

It is worth mentioning that the Guardian is the newspaper of Enoch Powell's political enemies. It is also worth mentioning that Bill Buckley is an American political eunuch who has played the role of totally useless Grand Old Man for almost fifty years.

Here is the text of his famous speech from 1968:

"Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood"
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.

[Marulus]

Immigration: It Is Worse than Enoch Powell Predicted

From the desk of John Laughland on Wed, 2008-04-16

Of all the great misquotations in political history, none can surely be more persistent that the use of the phrase “rivers of blood” in reference to the speech given by the controversial British politician, Enoch Powell, forty years ago on Sunday (on 20 April 1968).

What Powell in fact said was, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” He did not talk about “rivers of blood” as such. A classical scholar, Powell perhaps thought that people would understand his reference to Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which the Sibyl recounts a prophecy of terrible wars to come. No doubt the vision was supposed to be of the Tiber actually foaming with blood, but Powell was some way from predicting actual bloodshed in Britain. Instead, he was using the quotation to communicate his sense of terrible foreboding.

Like many prophets of doom, Powell was furiously denounced for what many people regarded as a highly inflammatory attack on mass immigration. It is true that he had used some rather unfortunate language in his speech. But Powell’s basic sin was to have expressed openly – and dramatically – what many people were saying in private, namely that they no longer felt at home in their own country as a result of mass immigration.

Forty years on, it is obvious that Powell was both right and wrong. He was right that mass immigration would fundamentally change the nature of British society. That, indeed, is the point of it: supporters of mass immigration are more interested in multiculturalism as a political ideology than in any supposed economic benefits of it.

But he was wrong to permit one decisive, cataclysmic event. Although there have, of course, been outbursts of racial tension in Britain, and although immigration has contributed massively to the rise in violent crime on the streets of Britain’s major cities – one in five prisoners in Britain today is a Muslim, even though the number of Muslims living in Britain is probably around one sixtieth of the total population – what has in fact happened is perhaps worse: a slow erosion of the principles and values of British life which has occurred without people really noticing. Anyone who looks at a film from fifty or even forty years ago can see that the country has changed out of all recognition.

Immigration has greatly increased under the present Labour government. The huge influx of Poles is the most visible part of it, but the continued immigration from the third world has been massive as well. Immigration is openly discussed (and hotly contested) in several mass circulation newspapers, especially the Daily Mail and the Daily Express which conduct vigorous anti-immigration campaigns. They point out, among other things, that it is false to claim that immigration has no effect on employment among the indigenous population.

On the contrary, the government has been forced to admit, after many years of claiming the opposite, that the number of indigenous British people has fallen as the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe has risen in recent years. The number of immigrants, both from Eastern Europe and the third world, is now so great that it is almost impossible to find a single English person working in a shop of restaurant in London. I am not exaggerating. There are, of course, many inner city areas (including in the East End of London) where you hardly ever see a white face. As a result, there is now a very considerable phenomenon of “white flight” in Britain, white people leaving the inner cities and even the country in order to live in parts of the country, or other parts of the world, where they are not surrounded by immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of British people every year emigrate or move to the provinces for this reason. Those who stay practise segregation for their children: in London, all state school children are black while all private school children are white.

Powell was a bizarre figure. He was sacked from the Cabinet and left the Conservative Party after his famous speech; but it was not just on immigration that he disagreed with the Tories. He also fell out with Prime Minister Ted Heath’s over Europe, a subject on which he was as prophetic as on mass immigration and for which he is still revered by many Eurosceptic Tories today. But unlike them, Powell also disagreed with the pro-American stance of the entire British political class. He regarded British and American interests as different and often incompatible. He became convinced during the war (rightly) that the United States was determined to destroy the British empire. By contrast, the vast majority of Conservatives even today hold it as an article of faith that Britain must servilely copy everything the Americans do. This has now become the distinguishing feature of British foreign policy under New Labour.

For all these reasons, I agreed with Enoch Powell on almost everything and of course admired him greatly. Yet I never warmed to the man. On “Desert Island Discs”, a popular and well-established radio programme in which interviewees pick eight records they would take to them on a desert island, and on which Powell appeared in the late 1980s, Powell chose exclusively excerpts from Wagner’s Ring. I adore the Ring, and Wagner generally, but the choice of one single work of music, however superb, seemed to me to betray a basic strangeness, almost inhumanity. My impression of a certain inhumanity – a cussed determination to shock and to estrange – was confirmed when he was asked at the end of the interview if there was anything in his life he regretted. Powell replied, “I would like to have been killed in the war.”

[source]

[Kernunnos]

a sign of a reversing tide? ( a note of the residing kernunnos ..)


From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Sat, 2008-04-19 14:01
A quote from the BBC, 17 April 2008
Almost two-thirds of people in Britain fear race relations are so poor tensions are likely to spill over into violence, a BBC poll has suggested. Of the 1,000 people asked, 60% said the UK had too many immigrants and half wanted foreigners encouraged to leave. […] Equality and Human Rights Commission head Trevor Phillips said the findings were “alarming”. […]
The survey was commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, in which he described the indigenous population’s “sense of alarm and resentment” over immigration. […] BBC home editor Mark Easton says Powell’s words, spoken to a small gathering in Birmingham’s Midland hotel, still echo down the decades. […]
Asked if they thought immigration meant their local area didn't feel like Britain any more, a quarter of the sample agreed – double the amount who felt this three years ago. Six out of 10 said immigration had made parts of Britain feel like a foreign country. […]
[O]ur correspondent says immigration is now back on the political agenda. He says: “One reason politicians can debate it again, perhaps, is that the latest wave of immigration is different. The million Eastern Europeans who’ve come to the UK in the last three or four years are not looking to settle for good. Their motives are economic. And perhaps most importantly they are white. Forty years after Enoch Powell, the issues of race and immigration have been separated once more.”

More on this topic:
Rivers of Blood and the Mentality of 68, 16 April 2008
It Is Worse than Enoch Powell Predicted, 16 April 2008

Rivers of Blood Forty Years On, 17 April 2008