Speech given by Enoch Powell in April 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 that

is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation a

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 , me

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

obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see,

and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.