A decade after Enoch Powell's speech on immigration, in anticipation of its
anniversary, the Sunday Times Magazine commissioned British photographer
Chris Steele-Perkins to
travel to Wolverhampton to capture the effects of Powell's words on ethnic
minorities (via).
"I sensed that people would rather not talk about it. It was a nasty
stain, but they wanted to move on. This [the series] happened ten years
after Powell, but this stuff doesn’t wash out that quickly." Chris Steele-Perkins
In the 1950s, Wolverhampton's economic growth was booming needing more
workforce. Newspapers published stories stating that Britain's boom could only
be maintained by attracting recruits from abroad, i.e. the "Continent",
Ireland, and the colonies. Commonwealth immigration was encouraged by the
governement, however, it was unprepared for the number of people seeking
employment in the factories which led to tensions between native residents and
immigrant newcomers. The immigrant population (mostly West-Indian and
South-Asian) was blamed for lowering wages and taking jobs. In the context of
this tension, Enoch Powell, then Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, gave a
controversial anti-immigration speech (via).
“It wasn’t a surprise. Powell was on the right of the Tory party, and he had
been banging on about immigration before. It was just that this was the most
extreme version of this kind of prejudice that he had come out with.” Chris Steele-Perkins
When Steele-Perkins visited Wolverhampton, he found a city different from the
rest of Britain, immigrants who were alienated and given second-hand
opportunities (via).
"I am essentially aware of it, as I am not part of the mainstream group. I
have a Burmese mother and an English father, and I wasn't born in this
country. I can't pretend it's something that happens to other people and is
not connected with me." Chris Steele-Perkins
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Enoch Powell's
"Rivers of Blood" speech, excerpts
(1968)
(...) 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. (...) Whole areas, towns
and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the
immigrant and immigrant-descended population. (...)
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a
prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" (...)
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. (...)
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.
(...) 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.
(...)
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photograph by Magnum photographer Chris-Steele Perkins
via
