Content deleted Content added
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
Line 17:
=== Immigration ===
Powell's opposition to mass immigration derived from his belief that immigrants could not be decisively assimilated and from his nationalist outlook.<ref>T. E. Utley, ''Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking'' (London: William Kimber, 1968), pp. 27-8.</ref> Powell claimed that the children of Commonwealth immigrants to Britain did "not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Powell |first1=Enoch |title=Speech to London Rotary Club, Eastbourne |url=http://www.enochpowell.net/fr-83.html |website=www.enochpowell.net |access-date=3 July 2018 |language=en |date=16 November 1968}}</ref><ref>Rex Collings (ed.), ''Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell'' (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 393.</ref> Powell claimed that Commonwealth immigration to Britain post-1945 was "in point of numbers out of all comparison greater than anything these islands have ever experienced before in a thousand years of history".<ref>Collings, p. 401.</ref> Powell asserted that as the immigration was concentrated in urban areas, the result would be violence: "I do not believe it is in human nature that a country... should passively watch the transformation of whole areas which lie at the heart of it into alien territory".<ref>Collings, p. 390.</ref> Powell claimed that his warnings were political:
<blockquote>It is the belief that self-identification of each part with the whole is the one essential pre-condition of being a parliamentary nation, and that the massive shift in the composition of the population of the inner metropolis and of major towns and cities of England will produce, not fortuitously or avoidably, but by the sheer inevitabilities of human nature in society, ever increasing and more dangerous alienation.<ref>Heffer, p. 450.</ref></blockquote>
| |||