So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their should… - Enoch Powell
" "So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders.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'.
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About Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).
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J. Enoch Powell
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John Enoch Powell
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Additional quotes by Enoch Powell
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.
It would be different if there were some great widespread public indignation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.
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Now there are a lot of people about whom it behoves to be very cautious in accusing their political opponents of past or prospective U-turns. In acrobatics Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister [Heckler: "Judas!"] Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!
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