Sir Ronald Bell QC MP, speaking at the Caxton Hall, London, on Thursday 19th June 1980 at 6.30 pm.
“Race chief warns of riot-torn cities” ran last night’s headline. Mr. David Lane, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but…” and then followed warnings of an urgent problem and a difficult summer, with the risk of Bristol-style riots, and two or three difficult years ahead.
I don’t want to be alarmist either but “two or three difficult years” could be the understatement of the year. It also occurs to me that, if I had said what Mr. Lane had said, I should have been accused by the race relations industry of spreading a feeling of insecurity among the coloured population and even, perhaps, of provoking disorder. I seem to remember that Mr. Enoch Powell has in the past been accused of just those things.
The really interesting element in Mr. Lane’s statement is that he is expecting – or fearing – disturbances similar to those in Bristol; that is riots by the coloured population, not by the native white population, and that he thinks the risk will remain acute until we remedy the underlying problems, of which the biggest (he believes) is unemployment.
The Government’s judgement, with which I agree, is that severe inflation leads to unemployment and that the cure is monetary discipline which, in its first phase, must increase unemployment. Is Mr. Lane and the Commission for Racial Equality suggesting that the main economic policy of the nation should be put in reverse because the coloured element in the community will riot if the Government perseveres in it? I ask That question because Mr. Lane and his colleagues cannot seriously believe that “switching off resources” to the coloured areas could have any real significance, economic or political, unless it were done on so massive a scale that it provoked riots by the British.
I have never been one who relied heavily on the argument of the resentful outburst by the native white people. Such an outburst would be entirely understandable, because they have been scandalously betrayed by their politicians. But I have always regarded it as improbable. The danger that I have seen is a lowering of national morale, a loss of clear identity, a feeling of bitter helplessness, of despair, then apathy.
The British have hated what was happening to them; they never acquiesced in it, but they were deceived, misled and let down time after time and forced to endure a rate of change in their towns that is destructive of any continuity of national spirit and identity. Those powerful people, the “communicators” were their enemies: and the result of it all is around us.
Insult was added to injury by the race relations legislation. Now we learn that alien injected element has not been sufficiently pampered and protected by politicians and media: that unless there is a further big dose of “positive discrimination”, which apparently, unlike ordinary discrimination, is lawful and a good thing, there is the risk of major outbursts of disorder. “Who knows where the trouble will begin?” says Mr. Lane.
Is it not reasonable to ask why someone of tropical origin, who does not like our arrangements here, should not return to his own country, rather than cause riots in ours? Someone, somewhere, I am sure, will object: “But what if he was born here? What is his own country?” And that brings us straight to the expected new British Nationality Act, and the definitely promised Nationality White Paper.
There are some, indeed many, who have been demanding a new Nationality Act for years, believing that in it at last they will find the longed-for cure for Commonwealth immigration. I bring them no message of comfort. The White Paper proposals when they come, the Bill’s proposals, if they come, will cause no reduction in immigration and lead to no increase in repatriation. They will remove a right to come here from nobody, except possibly some people in the old Dominions: they will enlarge or confirm a wide area of entitlement to settle in Britain. Ultimately, in a distant future they might just reduce immigration, but in the short and medium term they are likely to increase it.
Of course, it need not be so. It would be quite easy to devise a bill which would stop all new settlement, from the tropical areas, in Britain, and lead to a significant outward movement. But all the familiar pressure groups will combine to see that the Nationality Bill is just one more step along their road. It is quite certain that it won’t even deal with the special citizen privileges of the non-citizen Irish. Mr. Whitelaw has said so already.
And, in particular, it will be founded firmly on what lawyers call the “ius soli”. The most important consideration will be where you were born. So the child born to a foreign couple during a brief stay in England will have British citizenship, and be free to come and go, whilst most Australians and New Zealanders will not. But very many, who are presently citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, not born here and with no personal connection with Britain, will also have the right to settle here. Indeed, if the Liberal Party has its way, all the millions of present citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies who live outside Britain will be free to come. For there are degrees of suicidal lunacy in this matter and, amid keen competition, the Liberal Party has always held the top place.
Is it not time to introduce a bit of sense? Of course heredity counts. It counts more than anything else. What sort of person you are is determined by your parents, not by the spot in which your mother happened to be when you were born. In the modern world of swift, easy communication and constant mobility the place where you happened to be born is of minimal importance. Our objective must be to restore clear meaning to being British. One third of all the births in Greater London are to foreign mothers. Does that make sense? Who can be proud of being British if that is all being British means? And, if it doesn’t make sense to be proud of being British, what focus of pride and loyalty to you put in its place? We are being destroyed as a nation by fools rather than by knaves: but fools are more dangerous than knaves and they have had a long run. We must not underestimate the extent to which national demoralisation has already progressed from mainly demographic causes. We face, not the two or three difficult years envisaged by Mr. Lane, but a generation of agonising problems swiftly and easily created but only most painfully and slowly to be solved.
Many
thanks to David Hamilton for sending this for our website.