"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.