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Rivers of Blood

Enoch Powell - 20th of April, 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable
evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted
in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not
demonstrable until they have occurred; at each stage in their onset there is
room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the
same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current
troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing; whence the besetting
temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at
the expense of the future.

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 have been through grammar school and two of them are 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 may
not be wholly preventable. Can it be limited, bearing this 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 in-flow, and by promoting the
maximum out-flow. 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 in-flow of some 50,000
dependents, 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 dependents 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 dependents 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 in-flow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible
proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures
be taken without delay.

I stress the words "for settlement". This has nothing to do with the entry
of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for
the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like ( for
instance ) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own
countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than
would otherwise have been possible. These are not, and never have been,
immigrants.

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 newspapers which year after year in the 1930's 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 onto
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