Throughout the last twenty years, locally at first, then nationally, one political subject has been different from all the rest in the persistence with which it has endured and the profound and absorbing preoccupation which it has increasingly held for the public. This is all the more remarkable because of the sedulous determination with which this subject has been kept, as far as possible, out of parliamentary debate, and the use which has been made of every device—from legal penalty to trade union proscription—to prevent the open discussion and ventilation of it. No social or political penalty, no threat of private ostracism or public violence, has been spared against those who have nevertheless continued to describe what hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens daily saw and experienced and to voice the fears for the future by which those fellow citizens were haunted. The efforts that were made during the 1930s to silence, ridicule, or denounce those who warned of the coming war with the fascist dictatorships and who called for the peril to be recognized and met before too late, provide but a pale and imperfect precedent.
In all this suppression more than one powerful motive can be seen at work. On the one hand there is the primitive but widespread superstition that if danger is not mentioned, it will go away, or even that it is created by being identified and can therefore be destroyed again by being left in silence. Akin to this is the natural resentment of ordinary people, but especially of politicians, at being forced to face an appalling prospect with no readily procurable happy ending. The custom of killing messengers who bring bad news is not confined to the kings and tyrants of antiquity or of fiction. On the other hand there are at work the dark motives of those who desire the catastrophic outcome which they foresee. All round the world in various forms the same formula for rending societies apart is being prepared and applied, by ignorance or design, and there are those who are determined to see to it that Britain shall no longer be able to escape. I marvel sometimes that people should be so innocently blind to this nihilism.
One of the ordinary weapons for the suppression of free speech and of frank expression of opinion is to allege that those who warn of a danger, be they right or wrong, actually desire that danger; that those who warn of war desire war; that those who warn of the materials of hatred and conflict being heaped up desire to see hatred and conflict come about. This is why Churchill was denounced as a warmonger. Because he did not fear to envisage and express the possibility and even probability of war, he could be accused of wanting it.
The fallacy is obvious; for the interest of those who desire calamity would obviously lie in keeping silent till it comes, instead of crying out for means and measures to avert it. But the fallacy is nonetheless dangerous for that.
Till now, however, there has been one essential bulwark against suppression of free speech and of open debate upon the nature and reality of the public danger to which I refer and upon the means to cope with it. That has been the necessity for those who aimed at suppression to prove evil intent on the part of their prospective victims. That condition was of vital importance; for it is inherently unlikely that any subject of public anxiety or apprehension can be discussed or debated without touching upon strong feelings, fears, antagonisms, emotions—indeed, that very probability is proportionate to the importance of the subject. If expression of opinion likely to have that effect is rendered criminal per se, irrespective of the intention of the speaker, then all free and open public discussion is rendered impossible, to the manifest endangering of the public interest; for the public interest depends upon the preservation of free speech.
It ought to be understood that, in the intention of the legal advisers of the Crown, this bulwark is now to be swept away. That was made clear by a recent exchange of published letters between the attorney general and myself regarding the effect of section 70 of the Race Relations Act, 1976. For a criminal offense under that section to be committed two conditions must be fulfilled. Speech or writing must be “threatening, abusive or insulting;” and it must also be speech or writing by which “having regard to all the circumstances, hatred is likely to be stirred up against any racial group in Great Britain.”
Now, I have never in a political speech used language which to my knowledge was in any natural sense of the words “threatening, abusive or insulting.” To the contrary, I have always regarded such language as self-defeating in public debate. However, the principal law officer of the Crown has asserted that in his view it was insulting to quote, as I did in a speech at Croydon last October, the expression “alien wedge,” which Viscount Radcliffe in a public address had applied to New Commonwealth immigrants, or to express the opinion that, in the foreseeable numbers and circumstances, the New Commonwealth immigrant and immigrant-descended population in our cities is not likely to be able to live and work in harmony with the rest of the population.
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Differentiation by color, where it exists, is an enormously important factor in this context, effective in a number of ways which all operate in the same direction. It is, first, a permanent and involuntary uniform, which performs all and more of the functions of a uniform in warfare, distinguishing one side from the other, friend from foe, and making it possible to see at a glance what is happening, where to render assistance, and where to attack. This is why those who have sought to organize the domination of a majority by a minority have commonly, where possible, used insignia and means of mutual recognition to increase the potency of small numbers.Moreover, the uniform of color, because it is involuntary and irremovable, becomes an irresistible force for dominating and disciplining those who wear it. They are literally marked people, expected to rally to whatever is designated as their cause and treated as manifest traitors if they fail to do so. When one has witnessed how the invisible uniform of religion enables the IRA to exert over the mass of peaceful and law-abiding Roman Catholic citizens in Northern Ireland a terror and compulsion far severer than that under which their Protestant fellow citizens live, one can form some idea of the consolidating potential of the visible uniform of color. Finally, color polarizes, and reinforces differentiation and segregation, because the individual, however much, as an individual, he may become, and wish to become, assimilated to the host population, is firmly identified, and thus eventually obliged to identify himself, with the minority to which he belongs. Color is a recruiting sergeant, and a recruiting sergeant for officer material.
I have been describing the forces which, with a kind of mechanical inevitability, invest the New Commonwealth immigrant and immigrant-descended population in England with the sort of power which cannot in the nature of things remain unexerted; but one crucial factor has not yet been mentioned. The consequences of New Commonwealth immigration are not static, they are dynamic. The resultant population is not a fixed element of the total, bearing a proportion to the whole not destined to increase, and representing therefore a phenomenon which, despite all the attendant difficulties of highly differentiated and segregated enclaves, might eventually, by a kind of collective force of habit, become a stable feature of the England of the future. This is probably the mistaken picture still in the minds of many people, including a correspondent who in a letter to me after my last speech on this subject wrote, “After all, what’s so terrible about a few race riots?”
What we do know is that upon any conceivable assumptions, short of wholly new policy initiatives, the New Commonwealth immigrant and immigrant-descended population will continue to grow not only absolutely but proportionately until far into the next century. This is implicit in the age-structure of that population, apart from any other causes whatsoever. Thus of the two differentiated populations, one will be advancing and the other retracting, both numerically and territorially. The significance of this fact is again enhanced by the pattern of distribution The picture is not that of a province or corner of the country occupied by a distinct and growing population, though that would be perilous enough. It is of the occupation, more and more intense, of key areas—and, it may be added, of key functions—in the heartlands of the Kingdom. The process is one of which both populations will continuously and increasingly be conscious. It is this fact which, added to all the rest, points to the prospect of eventual conflict upon a scale which cannot adequately be described by any lesser term than civil war.
Thus by our own past actions of commission and omission we have set in motion the processes which will lead to a result equally catastrophic for both the host and the immigrant-descended populations and equally unwilled by both, who will be the prisoners and the victims of their situation. I defy anyone to suggest that to trace those processes and to envisage this prospect is to “insult” either population, unless it be an insult to assume that they will act and react as human societies observably do and always have. But still the question may be asked: “So be; but why do you not, foreseeing this, keep silence? What is gained by speech?” To this I answer that even if I thought the outcome could by no contrivance be avoided, it would still be one’s instinct and one’s duty to speak: we cry out to warn our fellow beings of impending catastrophe, whether or not we calculate that they can still escape. The instinct is a healthy instinct, and the duty is a rational duty; for who knows what efforts men are capable of when necessity stares them in the face? Nor have I ever doubted that, once the nature and scale of the consequences were recognized, the common interest of all in averting them could make possible measures hitherto dismissed as impracticable or unthinkable. They would indeed be heroic measures, measures which radically altered the prospective pattern of our future population; but they would be measures based on and operating with human nature as it is, not measures which purport to manipulate and alter human nature by laws, bureaucracy, and propaganda. Such as they are, they will never come, or they will come too late, if a prohibition is placed upon rational and temperate free speech and a premium upon self-deception and willful blindness.
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