Warnings from the Lion
According to a review in the Spectator somebody recently published a book that fits the great Sir Winston Churchill into a fashionable stereotype, claiming he was weak, weepy and dependent on his wife. In fact Sir Winston Churchill is the only major British politician who had the courage to try to stop open-door immigration into our country. It was because of his health failing that he did not succeed.
Mr. Churchill was different from the unworldly academics that theorise unworkable plans for a multi-racial Utopia. He was a brave and practical man who did not go to university but to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and gained a commission in the Fourth Hussars. He was a war correspondent during the Boer War, got captured, held prisoner and escaped. He was in the relief of Ladysmith. As Home secretary in 1911 he personally attended the Siege of Sidney Street, took control and gave the order to let the building burn, not rescue the anarchists inside. He used a detachment of Scots Guards not the police. As First Lord at the Admiralty In 1915 he was blamed for the Dardanelles campaign and demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. In one of the most heroic acts of any British politician he resigned office after six months, rejoined the army and commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers as a Colonel on the Western Front until May 1916. As a young man he had served under the iconic Lord Kitchener in the Sudan campaign in 1898, when the British avenged the murder of General Gordon.
Because of his practical nature he was not taken in by the Liberal orthodoxy that peace is the natural state until it breaks down into conflict. He knew that different races compete with each other for power and territory and he knew the truth of sub-Saharan slavery. In “The River War” (Eyre&Spottiswood.1933) he wrote, "The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and Negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than primitive savages. The stronger race soon began to prey upon the simple aboriginals... But all, without exception were hunters of men. To the great slave-market at Jeddah a continual stream of Negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic by placing the ignorant negros at a further disadvantage. Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.”
In the first edition he expressed thoughts that would now get him prosecuted by our totalitarian Government for inciting racial hatred. "Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and, were it not that Christianity sheltered it, the civilization of modern Europe might fall as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." (.Longmans.1899. Vol.11. pp. 248-50)
In his St. George’s Day address of 1933 he warned of the types who were taking over our political and intellectual life, “The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country who, if they add something to the culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large portion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible utopias?"
He became the embodiment of the allied struggle against Nazism. He even looked like the British Bulldog! British people wanted to avoid war so ignored Hitler's expansionist policies. But Churchill was not decadent. He accurately perceived Hitler in October 1930 and stated that, if Hitler were to come to power in Germany, England's eventual response must be – “If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite.” He had a massive struggle to alert our effete rulers to the threat. In 1938 Hitler had Austria and was ready to take the Sudentenland, if not all of Czechoslovakia. The British economy was struggling to recover from the Depression and the public did not want war. His response to Munich showed his realistic outlook, “How could honourable men with wide experience and fine records in the Great War condone a policy so cowardly? It was sordid, squalid, sub-human, and suicidal ...The sequel to the sacrifice of honour.”
Mr. Churchill knew where he belonged and did not fantasise that he was a citizen of the world. His tribute to the Royal Marines in 1936, “Those who do not think of the future are unworthy of their ancestors.” He told the Royal Albert Hall in 1931, “We gave India a civilization, far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves, or could possibly maintain.” He admired Jewish people and described them as “the most formidable and the most remarkable race in the world.” This is part of his racial outlook (Robert Harris. Spectator 16/4/1994).
He was a renowned wit. During the war a black official of the Colonial Office had been stopped dining at a London club when American officers used it. It was brought to Mr. Churchill’s attention. He quipped, “That’s alright. Tell him to take a banjo, they will think he is one of the band” (The Diaries of Alexander Cadogan. 1938-45, for 13/10/1942).
Mr. Churchill was realistic - alliances, military force and the 'balance of power', not ideologies, were the way to run international politics. As we saw in the first quote from The River War he knew that natural harmony, that became the fantasy of racial harmony after the War, was not the state of man until it breaks down into conflict because of prejudiced people, but that throughout history different races have competed with each other for power and territory.
He is the only major British politician with the courage to oppose mass immigration, even though he was 78 and tired after the war. Documents at the Public Records Office show, his first Cabinet discussion was on 25th November, 1952, when he asked if “the Post office was employing large numbers of coloured workers. If so, there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created”. He then went into a deeper view of the situation, and “raised the whole issue…of whether coloured subjects of the Commonwealth and Empire should be admitted to the country from now on.” The Postmaster-General Lord De la Warr explained, that the Post Office trades unions” raised no objection to the employment of coloured people in basic grades.” (CC100 (52)8 Cabinet Conclusions)
Then tragedy arrived. On the 27th of June 1953 Sir Winston suffered a stroke that left him paralysed down the left side. He was in decline and not up to decisive action. His Private Secretary, Sir John Colville, noted in his diaries, "He is getting tired and visibly ageing. He finds it hard to compose a speech and ideas no longer flow. (The Fringes of power” p654)
In January 1954 Home Secretary Maxwell Fyfe reported on the findings of the Home Office “Working party on the Social and Economic Problems Arising from the Growing Influx into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers”, which had deliberated for 13 months. He stated “the unskilled workers who form the majority are difficult to place because on the whole they are physically unsuited to heavy manual work…”
In March 1954 Maxwell Fyfe told Cabinet, “that large numbers of coloured people are living on National Assistance” and that “coloured landlords by their conduct are making life difficult for white people living in the same building or area…the result is that white people leave and the accommodation is then converted to furnished lettings for coloured people, with serious overcrowding and exploitation”. In a Cabinet memorandum of 8 March Maxwell Fyfe noted “serious difficulties involved in contemplating action which would undoubtedly land the Government in some political controversy.”
In cabinet in October 1954 Mr. Churchill warned Maxwell Fyfe, “that the problems arising from the immigration of coloured people required urgent and serious consideration.” Maxwell-Fyfe emphasised that there is no power to prevent these people entering no matter how much the number may increase.
Britain was the only Commonwealth country that allowed all Commonwealth citizens automatic entry. Maxwell Fyfe “did not believe that the problem had yet assumed sufficient proportions to justify legislation, which would involve a rehearsal of traditional practice, and would antagonize liberal opinion.” But Mr. Churchill foresaw, “The rapid improvement in communications was likely to lead to the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country, and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people.” However, he did not think, “the problem had assumed sufficient proportions to enable the Government to take adequate counter-measures.” Mr. Churchill asked his staff to find out about difficulties in Lambeth, Brixton and Cardiff. Once again he was surrounded by effete appeasers, only now they were frightened of Commonwealth leaders.
The Commonwealth Relations Office were was told that restrictions “ there might well be a chance of the governments of India and Pakistan introducing retaliatory restrictions against the entry or residence of members of the British business community.” (PRO CAB127/77, 2 September 1955) Commonwealth Secretary Earl Home, warned that they should not give the impression that Commonwealth citizens from India, Pakistan and Ceylon would be less favourably than those from the Dominions otherwise there could be retaliation. (Colonial immigrants, memorandum by the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations) 2/9/1955, CAB127/77
In “Eminent Churchillians” Andrew Roberts quotes from private interviews which give an insight into those around, “A Minister closely involved in the decision-making process, ‘In fact…we were just stalling and hoping for the best’… One of Mr. Churchill’s private secretaries ‘at that time it seemed a very good idea to get bus conductors and stuff’ … a junior minister ‘it was becoming hard to find somebody to carry your bags at the station’.’’
He remarked on immigration to Sir Hugh Foot, Governor of Jamaica (1951-1957), “It would be a Magpie society: that would never do.” (Layton-Henry, The politics of immigration. 1992.p31). Ian Gilmour then owner and editor of the Spectator relates that just before he stood down because of his health, Mr. Churchill told him “It (immigration) is the most important subject facing this country, but I can not get any of my ministers to take any notice.” (Inside Right. Quartet.1977). There were but two who did agree: Oliver Lyttleton and the fifth Marquess of Salisbury. Those apart, Mr. Churchill’s colleagues were timid and pretended the world is full of benign peoples and that all you need to do is be nice to them and they will be nice to us.
On the 16th of March 1955, just three weeks before he stood down because of his health, the cabinet discussed immigration again. They agreed that a discussion at the Central Council of Conservative Associations as “a useful opportunity to ventilate the conflicting views which are held on this subject.” Then the Internationalist Eden took over.
Had Mr. Churchill been healthy in the 1950’s we should not now be being dispossessed by foreigners. But how comical would have been the Utopians - Marxists and Globalisors, to shout at him in the House of Commons “Fascist” or “Nazi”!
(1980)
David Hamilton