Enoch Powell – a prophet for our times?

Enoch Powell has become one of those figures in history that politicians avoid association with at any costs. Not because of anything he actually said or did of course. But because the dominant liberal narrative is that he was a bad man, even a racist, and quite likely a bigot. The very fact that his infamous speech to the Conservative Association in Birmingham in 1968, which led to his being summarily dismissed from the cabinet by Edward Heath, is almost always misquoted, illustrates that it is not Enoch Powell himself who is the object of criticism and opprobrium, but a caricature of the man.

In fact a study of this one speech illustrates that far from being an extremist whose words were likely to cause social upheaval, he was and is a prophetic voice describing accurately what would happen, and what has happened, and what may be about to happen, as a result of policies enthusiastically applied by those who have adopted the agenda and language of the left, whether with a blue or red tinge.

He began his speech by describing the supreme function of statesmanship as providing against preventable evils. It is therefore the defence of the nation. But as he points out, these evils are not always obvious and creep up on us. He says..

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.

We only have to look at the reporting of events in the various news media to see that he is correct. Those things that should be of greatest importance are unreported, while the things which are of temporary or relatively less importance fill the pages of newspapers and websites. The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of Woolwich becomes an isolated act of madness or criminality to be quickly forgotten, while the headline writers of the day wonder whether Boris Johnson suggesting that women attend university looking for a husband is a criminally sexist statement.

Powell describes the criticism he attracted when he spoke about the dangers of unlimited immigration when he continued..

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.”

Is this not the means by which discussion about the great issues of our times is always shut down? How often have we discovered that speaking about the threat of extremist Islamic violence on the streets of Britain is treated as if it were worse than than violence itself? How often is criticism of the benefit system or the NHS treated as if it were a personal and violent assault on every claimant and patient? Yet our political class will not address these important, these most important issues. Powell speaks of the justified contempt which the people will hold towards politicians who have failed to act. How much more should that contempt be due to those who have accelerated the conditions which were warned of so many decades ago. As Powell says..

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.

Surely our political class has deliberately avoided all discussion of the issues of the influence of Islam, mass immigration and an all consuming benefit culture, and they continue to avoid all such discussion. Indeed the outbreak of such conversations is seen as more of a problem, and more urgently requiring of action than the issues themselves.

Then Enoch Powell makes the first statement that leads him to be considered a racist and beyond the pale of polite political company. He quotes a constituent who says..

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.”

Of course Powell realises that this is a shocking thing for someone to say. But let’s not play the game of those who have wished to ignore all of the problems associated with immigration over the last 60 years. It is the role of the political class to address those concerns which move the people, not to treat them as if they always know best. If this is what a constituent in 1968 believed then politicians then and now should respond honestly. We remember the attitude of Gordon Brown just a few years ago when an ordinary British housewife in Rochdale raised similar concerns. As he drove off in his limousine, detached and isolated from the pressures she found herself facing, he turned to his aide and said..

She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour.

Has anything changed since 1968 when Enoch Powell was sacked from the cabinet for raising in public the issues which his constituents were most concerned about? Would a minister in the present cabinet also be sacked and condemned as a bigot if he spoke out about the harm caused by unlimited and mass immigration?

Enoch Powell responds to the concerns of his constituent. He doesn’t describe him as a bigot. He doesn’t have the right to do that. On the contrary, he takes the issue seriously.

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.

If only there were more MPs in our own Parliament who took this attitude to their constituents. If only there was a greater sense that the mood and fears and concerns of the people must be responded to seriously and honestly. On the contrary our MPs believe that they have every right to ignore the opinions of the electorate, and if there is a mismatch between the views of the political class and the people they represent then it is the electorate which must submit.

How many are concerned about immigration today? It is no longer only thousands and hundreds of thousands. Here is a statement from the Migration Observatory, a think tank dealing with research around immigration and its effects on British society. It says..

Opposition to the arrival of immigrants in the UK is far from new. Rising concern about “New Commonwealth” immigration prompted the British Election Study to begin questioning the public about immigration as far back as 1964—in those early years refraining from posing the question to “coloured” respondents. From the beginning, the overwhelming majority of people in Britain have agreed that there are too many immigrants in the UK.

The conclusion is clear. The overwhelming majority of British people have always agreed that there are too many immigrants. This is not a novel point of view, neither is the experience of mass immigration reducing the concerns of British people about the issue. On the contrary up to 75% of British people believe that immigration has gone too far. This is certainly not due to xenophobia or racism. On the contrary high levels believe that some categories of migrants do benefit the country and should be allowed. But the idea that all immigration, and at very high levels, is an unadulterated blessing has never been the view of the majority of ordinary British folk.

Enoch Powell looked ahead to a future where nothing had been done, and he reported the official Government projections available in 1968 which indicated that..

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.

That would have been looking to the 1980’s. It was a matter of guesswork to consider further into the future. But Powell made an educated guess..

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.

In the last year we have learned just how accurate Powell was. The white British population is now an absolute minority in London, and the immigrant and recent immigrant population is now in the majority. The same statistic is true of Luton, Leicester and Slough, and will soon be true of Birmingham. As Powell prophesied, there are many areas of our cities which are almost entirely populated by immigrants and their descendants. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets only 46.9% of the population is white British. In a ward such as East Ham North in the Borough of Newham the white British population is only 15%.

In 1968 the issue which Powell was addressing was that migration tended to create pockets of immigrant populations, and that as these populations grew in proportion to the wider community they would have a disproportionate influence. He made the reasonable statement that..

..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.

If, in 1968, it seemed that a population made up of only 10% immigrants in a particular place would lead to social stresses and strains, what would Powell think today of areas of the country in which 85% of the population were immigrants and their descendants? Nor again is this to introduce xenophobia or racism, but to describe the entirely predictable difficulties which a large immigrant population cannot help but produce. To be British, in such circumstances, comes to mean nothing more significant than ‘living in Britain’. Were I to emigrate to France I am not sure that I would ever be able to describe myself as French, even were I to live there till I died. I would always be an Englishman in France. This seems unavoidable if there is to be any substance to what it means to be French. Yet here in Britain we have been taught that to be British is indeed nothing more than a description of where we happen to find ourselves, and to demand anything more substantial is an expression of racism.

The immigrant population and its descendants is not however just 1% of the national population, nor even 10%, but it is already 15% of the population of England. This must have significant consequences for our society, and Powell foresaw them, and was condemned for daring to raise them in public.

What was Powell’s suggested solution? It was, at the time, the official policy of the Conservative Party, but was never implemented. It is certainly the same solution which is described on a great many blogs and forums and media comment pages today, but it remains entirely rejected by the political class who are wedded to a continuing programme of mass immigration. It is, in the words of Powell..

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.

There is still time if action is taken. But can anyone disagree with the description of the process that has been taking place for the last 50 years..

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Our politicians are certainly insane to continue this process of population replacement, and if they are not insane they are criminal. The 50,000 immigrants a year which so concerned Powell’s constituents is now 500,000 a year. And the immigration of those who would establish families of further and larger numbers of migrants has already taken place so that areas of the country and now almost entirely represented by immigrant communities not only from one nation but from one region or town in that nation. Everything Powell described has taken place, and to an even greater extent than he must have imagined.

We must say again, as if it needed repeating, Powell was no racist, and those who have the same legitimate concerns about immigration are not racists. Powell insisted that the temporary migration of students to study in our universities was a good thing. Now we have an industry of bogus colleges which exist only for the purposes of gaining access to the UK. He had nothing but positive commendation for those Commonwealth doctors who had allowed the National Health service to be quickly expanded. His concern was never about race, and it was never xenophobic. He loved India and the Indian people and culture. But he had a profound awareness that the British society and culture could not withstand the influx of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of those whose natural culture and traditions were entirely different to our own, and whose presence would create great strains on the social fabric of those areas where they tended to settle.

What did Powell propose? As we have seen, he wanted a halt to almost all immigration, and the provision of generous assistance to allow immigrants to return to their native lands, or to other countries which were in need of labour and did not have a growing unemployment problem. But he was also greatly concerned about the issue of discrimination. Not the discrimination against immigrants. Indeed immigrants were causing controversy and discontent because it seemed that they were being preferred. The decision by the political class of 1968 and continuing to the present to treat all people present in the UK as if they were of the same character and qualified entirely for the same benefits was highly discriminatory and remains so.

In 1968 Powell said..

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…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.

And this is the situation in which we find ourselves still, and an even worse situation since our membership of the EU allows every European to migrate to the UK without any hindrance whatsoever. The family which has lived in Britain for countless generations, paying taxes of every kind, submitting to the costly duties of defending the nation on more than one occasion, suddenly discovers that a recent immigrant has all the same rights and privileges without any of the responsibility. If this was felt keenly in 1968 when the immigrant population was still relatively small across the country, how much more is it felt now, and yet the political class are silent, and silence any discussion of the issue.

Powell describes the experience of many people in 1968, gathering together the concerns of the hundreds who wrote to him, and these experiences are still our own as the NHS creaks under the weight of a rapidly increasing population, as the school places run out, and as the white British taxpayer is marginalised (yes, there is still such a thing as a white Briton, we have not yet been entirely replaced). He says..

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.

Is this not in every way a mirror to our own experience? And yet this prophet of a politician was castigated and condemned. These concerns and observations are nothing to do with race, but they are to do with what it means to be a nation of people, rather than an aggregate of people who happen to live in a certain place. If a politician does not have any sense of what it means to be British rather than simply to live in Britain then he has no place in our ancient Parliament.

Let me refer to one more passage from this wonderful speech by Enoch Powell, a speech which every British person should know and value, and which if it had been spoken by a Frenchman in France would certainly be commemorated and praised. He describes that fear which many of his correspondents were starting to feel for the first time as British citizens in speaking against the will of Parliament. he says..

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.

Unfortunately a great many of us now have experience of looking over our shoulders and watching what we say, because we know that the state is determined to enforce its new definition of what it means to be British, and ordinary white British people are rather more of an obstacle to achieving that end than a means to its epiphany. If every email and telephone conversation is being monitored then how much more fearful do many of us feel when discussing the issue of immigration. The state insists, even as it had started to do in 1968, that to discuss immigration is already to be a racist and a bigot. And Gordon Brown’s response to Mrs Duffy is only an illustration, a humiliating illustration of what most politicians think of ordinary British people most of the time.

At this point in his speech Powell turns to the example of one of his constituents who found that their street was slowly populated by immigrants and she became the odd one out, subject to abuse and fearful of her safety. She even wrote of fearing that she would be sent to prison because she had unreconstructed views about the type of neighbourhood she preferred to live in. But Powell was not a racist, much less a bigot. He did see great problems would be caused by large scale immigration, and we see these and experience these ourselves. But he was well aware that a small proportion of immigrants wished to integrate into the wider British society. He says..

There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

Isn’t this entirely true? Indeed is it not the case that there is a significant minority among the immigrant community who positively hate our society and wish to destroy it, while others have introduced harmful and repugnant cultural practices and attitudes which are incompatible with our British culture and traditions. For every immigrant who has become entirely at home in Britain and considers himself and wishes to consider himself British, how many others are not intending to become British at all, but wish to recreate the experience of their own native land here in London, or Leicester or Luton. It is not for nothing that a part of London is called Little Lagos, it represents the largest community of Nigerians outside of Nigeria, and the streets and shops reproduce a Nigerian experience not a British one.

As a prophet Powell spoke of the development of special interest groups among the immigrant communities who would first gain local dominance and power, and then seek to gain wider social and political influence and then authority. How prescient this was..

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.

It is almost impossible to do anything without some special interest group or agency taking affront. Politicians now prostrate themselves at the steps of the altar of Political Correctness, and the priesthood of the equalities industry receive from them the sacrifice of British liberties which are consumed in the flames. The cloud almost fills the skies above our head now, and where Powell spoke of something that was still to be completely revealed in the future, and could be dismissed as a madman, now the very thunder heard in the distance leads those who should speak out to keep silence for fear of the approaching storm. But as Powell insisted, to warn of the danger is not to be responsible for the danger at all.

There was one other who was willing to speak out a little. Powell refers to comments made by John Stonehouse, a Labour Minister in the 1968 administration. He had said..

‘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.

Not only is this view one which has much to commend it today, but it illustrates entirely that development which Powell considered so dangerous. It was not immigration itself which was a threat to our British way of life, nor even large scale immigration much greater than he could have imagined, but it is the establishment of ethnic communities, of communalism, each ethnic community with a competing agenda and each attempting to gain power for one ethnic group, which was so likely to create great fissures in the social fabric over the following decades.

Here, at the end of his speech, and in context it is not of great controversy at all, he considers how the political leaders of these various ethnic immigrant communities will use the equalities legislation being passed to gain power over others and to dominate social and political discourse where they are in a majority. It is in this context that he quotes from Virgil..

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

It cannot be said that Powell is speaking of any sort of violent conflict in the streets. He does not even indicate if the troubles he foresees will be between immigrant communities, or between British citizens and immigrants. All that he intends to refer to is that prophetic notion in the Aeneid that the future was not one to be filled with peace, unless the circumstances he had been describing were properly addressed. It is not a ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. No-one could possibly imagine that it was unless they had already determined to ignore Powell, or misrepresent him as a racist demagogue.

It is, however, a prophetic statement of what will come to pass if nothing is done, and seeing that nothing has been done, it remains, while there is still some time for remedy, a reasoned and balanced call to action. Those who have worked hard to bring the memory of Enoch Powell into disrepute have acted with deliberate malice. They also are aware that his prophetic voice has a power and a resonance which must not be heard. But while there is yet time, and before the storm has finally broken upon us, let us hear him and be inspired to act. His final words should move every faithful British soul..

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.