Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, said Mr Enoch Powell, Opposition spokesman on defence, on Saturday. He added: ╥We must be mad,
literally mad, as a nation to permit the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants.╙
It was like watching a nation ╥busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre,╙ he said at the annual meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. He called for an immediate reduction to ╥negligible proportions╙ of the present immigrant inflow, and an ╥urgent╙ encouragement of re-emigration.
In a reference to the Race Relations Bill, Mr Powell said that to enact legislation of this kind was ╥to risk throwing a match on gunpowder.╙ He continued:
╥In 15 or 20 years, on present terms, 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 millions, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns will be occupied by different section of the immigrant and immigration-descended population.
╥The natural and rational first question is: How can its dimensions be reduced? Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence? The answers 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.
Danger unexpected
╥If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of 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 of 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 grants and 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 for the future.╙
The Race Relations Bill was a means of showing that the immigrant communities could agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill informed had provided. ╥As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ╘the River Tiber foaming with too much blood.╒╙
