The effect of any combination to fix the price of labour in a particular employment by restraining those who would be prepared to pay more or accept … - Enoch Powell

So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!' … The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment—it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability—I have not feared to give: it is—to use words I used two years and a half ago—that 'the people of England will not endure it'.

One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis argent; and older still, the crown itself and that sceptred awe, in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the English. Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's. The unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.

Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation should have saddled itself, without necessity and without countervailing benefit, with a wholly avoidable problem of immense dimensions is enough to make one weep. That the same nation should stubbornly persist in allowing the problem, great as it already is, to be magnified further, is enough to drive one to despair.