Enoch Powell Quotes

As I watch and listen to the voices that are raised to persuade electors to surrender their own birthright because they fear their fellow subjects, I think I discern ahead the shape of a Conservative Party that is the party of a class, and not of a nation – and thus doomed to extinction.

All belief in democracy, above all in parliamentary democracy, is an act of faith, as the maintenance of all free institutions is an act of faith. It depends on the faith that the political will of the people is capable of self-expression and of impressing itself upon those free institutions and ultimately moulding them to its will. If that be not so, then democracy and Parliament and all their theory are empty husks. So it is a question of faith whether the people will defend, are determined to defend, have the desire and purpose to defend, or, if it is lost, to restore and regain, the supremacy of Parliament and the political independence of this country.

The British Labour Party has always been nationalist, if not insular, and...not just democratic but parliamentarian. But it is confrontation with the EEC that has presented the Labour Party with an uninhibited appeal to patriotism. Internationalist it may be in phrases; when it comes to policy, it is nationalist.

Being a nation is, in the last resort, subjective; those who feel they are a nation and behave accordingly are one.

Like all human institutions, it [the state] too is mortal. An observer watching the behaviour and listening to the language of British politicians since 1972...would have been reasonably entitled to conclude that the British had become disenchanted with the unique form of government which continues to distinguish them from their continental contemporaries and had resolved to abandon parliamentary self-government under an unwritten constitution in order to be embraced by a single state – and that a unitary, not a federal state – comprising western Europe, the Iberian peninsula and Greece and live forever under treaties interpreted by the European Court. I am not the person best qualified to advise you whether that judgement would be premature, because my own obstinate refusal to countenance the abandonment of parliamentary self-government by the United Kingdom has resulted in my living the life of an Ishmael in British politics since 1972. I will therefore do no more than leave you with some cautionary words of a general character. Nations do tend to behave remarkably like themselves and to revert to past habits even after appearing to have departed from them for sometimes lengthy periods. The most reliable indication of a nation's future behaviour is its history. It would be an exaggeration no doubt, but a venial exaggeration, to say that the history of Britain is the history of British parliamentary self-government.

There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances.

This is the positive aspect of British opposition to entry into the Community – the breadth and depth of the people's conviction that in no foreseeable future could they in this sense form one electorate with the inhabitants of the continent... It is that in their thousand-year history the British Isles has made a nation which recognizes itself more in its separation and difference from the continent than its similarity and kinship.

[I]t is not speculation, leads and lags, and the rest which cause the trouble. It is their impact against fixed exchange rates. With a floating exchange rate, speculation is not only harmless; it actually does its work, of moving the rate to correspond accurately with the net total of all anticipations. Speculation only becomes harmful, it can only do baleful work, when it is confronted with a blatantly false assertion made and attempted to be sustained by Governments in terms of a fixed parity... [I]n a world of economic change and in a world where the major monetary powers are likely for a long time to come to be pursuing their own different policies, the nearest approach to stability we can have is by allowing those changes to be reflected in rates which are free to move. We ought now, at last, to abandon the illusion that we can call change to a halt and live in a world of our own pretence, and instead to provide, by a sensitive and continuous recognition of changing reality, at least that stability which is available.

Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.

It is no kindness on the part of politicians to minimize the size which those problems will assume, even if from now onwards every possible legislative and administrative action is taken to limit it. To draw attention to those problems and face them in the light of day is wiser than to apply the method of the ostrich which rarely yields a satisfactory result – even to ostriches. We have just been seeing in Wolverhampton the cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the shape of communalism. Communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognize it when it rears its head here. Large numbers of Sikhs, who had been serving the Wolverhampton Corporation voluntarily and contentedly, have found themselves against their will made the material for communal agitation. They have the same right as anyone else to decide which if any of the rules of their sect they will keep, and they had found no difficulty in entering the Corporation's employment and complying with the same rules as their fellow employees. For those who took a different and a stricter view there were plenty of other opportunities of employment. It will be the opposite to the equal treatment of all persons within the realm if employers are placed in the position of adjudicating upon the requirements of their employees' religion. The issue in this instance, is not racial or religious discrimination: it is communalism.

Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger. Because there can be no such thing as compulsory compassion or vicarious compassion, therefore it is a humbugging abuse of language, intended to deceive, to talk about a 'compassionate Government' or a 'compassionate party'—or even a 'compassionate society', unless one simply means by that a society which happens to contain a lot of compassionate individuals. Nor let anyone protest: 'Oh, but when I vote for a party which will "make provision on an unprecedented scale for those in need of help", it means I too shall have to pay my whack and so I am being compassionate after all'. Nonsense! The purpose of your vote is not to make yourself subscribe—that you can freely do at any time—but to compel others.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

For over ten years, from about 1954 to 1966, Commonwealth immigration was the principal, and at times the only, political issue in my constituency in Wolverhampton. Between those dates entire areas were transformed by the substitution of a wholly or predominantly coloured population for the previous native inhabitants, as completely as other areas were transformed by the bulldozer. My uppermost feeling on looking back upon those years is of astonishment that this event, which altered the appearance and life of a town and had shattering effects on the lives of many families and persons, could take place with virtually no physical manifestations of antipathy. This speaks volumes for the steadiness and tolerance of the natives. Acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky, they could understand; but now, for reasons quite inexplicable, they might be driven from their homes and their property deprived of value by an invasion which the Government apparently approved and their fellow-citizens – elsewhere – viewed with complacency. Those were the years when a ‘For Sale’ notice going up in a street struck terror into all its inhabitants. I know; for I live within the proverbial stone’s throw of streets which ‘went black’.

The few Roman Catholics who serve in the [Ulster Defence] regiment today are very brave men indeed. They do so at the risk of their lives in a way that their colleagues do not. I am proud to have some of those men in my constituency and to know them personally.

Wages, profits, prices are determined, always have been determined, and always will be determined until we go Communist, by the market—by supply and demand working through the market. While we tie ourselves into knots trying to invent non-market criteria for our commissions to use, the market is there, noiselessly, efficiently, irresistibly doing the job for us all the time. Irresistibly—yes, and there's the rub. For there is one thing outside the market in a modern economy, and that is money itself. Governments can and do satisfy the demand for money, raise and lower the supply of money. In short, governments have the power to control money, which is so largely their own creation. If governments allow monetary demand to increase faster than productivity, the market will not stop the process, because it cannot stop it. The market will simply go on determining wages, profits and prices in ever higher monetary terms—until something busts.