|
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 fiancés 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 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.
There 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 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 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.
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 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.'
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 immigrant
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.
|
