The Enduring Relevance of Enoch Powell II
'Voluntary Repatriation: A Practical Concept'
This speech was given to the Havering Borough Young Conservatives at Maylands School Hall, Hornchurch, London, on Saturday, 7th of November, 1981. It can be found at page 31 of this document.
Voluntary Repatriation: A Practical Concept
The multi-racial lobby, whose positive purpose is to alter the population and society of this country radically and not simply to secure fair and just treatment for such immigrants as might reside here, has closed its grip on the Home Office. The organs of the Conservative Party have joined with the multi-racial lobby in deriding any policy of assisted repatriation as both impracticable and undesirable, and in branding those who still advocated what the Party had ceased to advocate on the ground that it was inhuman and racialist. The received wisdom was now that any diminution of the prospective size of the ethnic population was not merely impossible but not to be thought of. It remained for time and events to start to break up that ignorant and arrogant consensus.
The multi-racial lobby has the habit, for the purpose of preventing sensible discussion of assisted repatriation, of pretending that what it is all about is “sending all the coloured people home”. This is of course outrageously absurd - no one doubts that a substantial New Commonwealth element will remain in the population of this country - but it is well to establish at the outset a broad and logical definition of a general objective. If rather more than half the present New Commonwealth population were to leave this country - say, between one and one and a quarter million - then, assuming that the one or one-and-a-quarter million were demographically balanced in terms of age and sex, the eventual New Commonwealth population would stabilise at approximately its present size. That, therefore, is the order of magnitude of repatriation which would permanently remove the most dangerous feature of the present situation, namely, the built-in certainty of a doubling or trebling of the New Commonwealth element over the next generation or so. The people of this country would for the first time be able to know for sure what was the magnitude with which they must expect to have to cope. To procure that certitude and that stability is both the object and the reward, for all concerned, of what, by any standards, would be a major effort.
The effort must be a national effort, espoused and organised by the Government. That is essential not only because of the magnitude of the effort but because it must be clear that the policy is one which has been adopted on a national basis in the interest of all concerned, and which can call upon the cooperation and goodwill of those other independent countries whose citizens are involved or which are desirous of attracting immigration from the UK. This is perhaps the point at which to make clear, so far as any legal impediment may be suggested, that the overwhelming majority of the New Commonwealth population here today, including those born in Britain, are citizens of the countries of origin of their parents and that they have in those countries an unconditional right to re-entry and residence. Conversely, in the UK, there would be no legislative difficulty about withdrawing existing rights of permanent abode here as the counterpart of assisted repatriation being accepted and completed.
Turning to the cost of removal and resettlement, I want to say first that, as far as possible, financial contribution ought in my opinion to be offered on a basis of rights, deemed to have been acquired by service done to this community during residence here. For example, it might be decided to capitalise and pay out the present value of future pension and other accrued social security rights, and to offer to those in receipt of unemployment and other social security payments a capitalised equivalent of their prospective liability owed to them by the state. Where houses and property needed to be disposed of, I would see no difficulty in establishing a mechanism to ensure that a fair current market value, taking no regard of the effect of the repatriation scheme, was guaranteed to the repatriates and then recouped over time by a public agency.
Until the outline of a scheme were agreed, it would be premature to attempt a total costing or to decide over how many years that costing would need to be spread. In 1969, however, in arguing against the assumption that cost would be prohibitive, I offered a notional figure, which at the time was not dismissed as absurdly low, of £2,000 [£27,770 in 2023] for a family of five for passage and resettlement, to which I added some 15% for administration. In 1981’s money [the year of the speech], that is £9,000. If applied - again very roughly - to the repatriation of 1,500,000 persons, that would represent a little over £300 million per annum for ten years, including administration [£1.1 billion per annum in 2023]. To put that figure into proportion, it may be recalled that, even if it were doubled, it would still be much less than our present government “aid” bill, running at £750 million a year [£2.8 billion in 2023]. It is no specious argument to suggest that the transfer and resettlement of population with the skills and capital acquired here would be of far more real and lasting value to the recipient countries than much of what counts as “aid” at present.
Transportation presents no insurmountable problem. When Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, asked his Quartermaster General to give him an estimate for the repatriation of the ex-slaves to Africa, that officer replied that the operation was impossible. We would not give that reply today in the age of mass travel by air, which indeed was the very technological factor that made possible the New Commonwealth influx into Britain on the scale on which it occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
[Repatriation] is a challenge. It is a challenge to which sooner or later - and better sooner than later - this country and surely, representatively, the Conservative Party, must respond. Voluntary assisted repatriation is more than “a practical concept”. It is the only means, on a rational and realistic assessment, to avert the prospect to which our own past errors of commission and omission will otherwise have condemned all elements in our great English cities.
Analysis
Voluntary repatriation. It’s a topic which is seldom discussed in this country - until now. It is a means by which those foreigners, and children of foreigners, who reside in Britain and no longer wish to do so, may be assisted in leaving. With current events being what they are, and following the spate of Islamic terrorism we have seen in recent years, the appetite for this “practical concept”, as Powell calls it, may begin to grow. We shall argue in this analysis that, despite the costs associated with such a proposal, the benefits will outweigh the costs, in the form of freeing up much-needed breathing room for the natives and the infrastructure of the nation.
Firstly, to outline the demographic effects of mass immigration, we shall begin with a few quotes from Sir John Hayes, Conservative MP for South Holland and The Deepings, speaking in a parliamentary debate on population growth and immigration on 27th June 2023, with some truly harrowing statistics.
“Under the previous Labour Government, total migration was 3.6 million, and nearly 1 million British citizens emigrated, so net migration topped 2.7 million. The rate of inflow between 1997 and 2010 equated to one migrant arriving every minute. Every year since 1997 bar one - when the world was locked down - net migration was in excess of 100,000, and often by a much bigger margin than that. Indeed, net migration has averaged about 250,000 a year over the last two decades.
There is a huge gulf between the expectations and the sentiments of the vast bulk of the British population on this subject and those of that awful marriage of greedy plutocrats and doubt-fuelled liberals, who seem to think that endless migration is acceptable. This has been done without consent - indeed, without as much as consultation, let alone consent.
Since 2001, the UK population has increased by 8 million, of which nearly 7 million was due to immigration. Just imagine that figure for a moment. To put it in context, that equates to the combined populations of Birmingham, Manchester, Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Peterborough, Ipswich, Norwich, Luton and Bradford. A much higher population increase can be expected in future years unless we do something radical to address this problem.
We need urgent action; otherwise, we will fragment our society, undermine our sense of shared belonging and alter our communities forever. More than that: we will not be able to sustain the good quality of life that British people rightly expect and want the Government to help them enjoy.”
As Sir John points out, Britain’s population has increased by 8 million since 2001, 7 million of that increase being due to immigration. The effects of 7 million foreigners flooding into our country in just two decades has put undue stress on our GP services, our schools, the health system - all public services, in fact - our roads, the housing market, and just about every facet of life.
Over a quarter (29.2%) of women who want to have children say they haven’t yet due to worry over having insufficient funds. The Bank of England admitted back in 2015 that mass immigration was driving down wages for native workers. Net immigration in that year was 336,000. Given the continuation and increase of the rate of migration since then it is easy to imagine that this effect has only gotten worse since. The newest immigration figures show that the net immigration number previously given for 2022 - 606,000 - was actually inaccurate. The revised figure shows that it was 745,000. That’s 2041 new immigrants entering Britain every single day. Even assuming that number can be divided into families of three - which is unlikely - that’s 680 flats or houses taken off the market by immigrants every day, which could otherwise be occupied by natives.
It isn’t unreasonable to assume that more native British young people would be more willing to have children if they felt that they were able to do so. The birth rate in 2021 was 1.55 per woman - well below the replacement rate of 2.1. It is important to note that we have no breakdown of the rates by ethnicity, 1.55 is simply the total rate. So it can be assumed, as immigrants typically have higher birth rates than British-born people, that the data is skewed by those above-average birth rates, and therefore does not tell the story of birth rates among native British women.
In the 2021 census data, the median age for the ‘English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British’ population was 45 years of age, higher than every single other ethnicity option other than Irish, at 54. This shows an ageing population which is not replenishing itself. The median age for Pakistanis was 28; for both Africans and Arabs, it was 30. It is predicted that white British children will be a minority in schools by 2060. In our two largest cities, London and Birmingham, Britons are already a minority.
Mass immigration directly accounted for around 60% of population growth between 2001 and 2020, and the offspring of immigrants will surely make up a large amount of the rest. It is mass migration which has brought about a situation in which hardly any of our younger generations hold out any real hope of ever making it onto the housing ladder. The Left will trot out the line that we simply need build more houses, but with 700,000 or more people coming into this country each year, it requires a truly demented level of idealism to imagine we could build at a sufficient rate to house them. Even if we could build even homes to house the 700,000+ new arrivals, why would we want to? Why should the entire industry of housebuilding be aimed at creating enough housing stock to faciliate the continuation of the already blatantly negative effects of unfettered immigration? We need more housing supply for the natives, and we could do without the extra demand caused by new arrivals. The primary function of government is to meet and defend the interests of its people, not the peoples of other countries.
Powell says, “The received wisdom was now that any diminution of the prospective size of the ethnic population was not merely impossible but not to be thought of. It remained for time and events to start to break up that ignorant and arrogant consensus.” That consensus has begun to be broken in earnest now. Britons are fed up. Fed up of being preached at, and expected to believe that ‘diversity is our strength’, when that is manifestly not the case. As Orwell put it, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The comfortable masses are beginning to finally cast their eyes upon the enormity of the demographic problem in this country. They are, at length, growing ill-tempered at being told to look the other way as their children are raped by Pakistani grooming gangs, or murdered at pop concerts by Islamists.
Now, for the economics. The Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office has allocated £6.9 billion in aid for 2022/2023, rising to £8.3 billion in 2024/2025. We adjusted the numbers given by Powell in his speech for inflation. Assuming the figure of £1.1 billion per annum for ten years to repatriate one-and-a-half million foreigners to be accurate, it would be feasible to simply reallocate that money from the Foreign Aid budget to the repatriation budget. The numbers would, naturally, have to be crunched again to better represent the costs of such an operation today, but, assuming they end up being something similar to the inflation-adjusted numbers related to the figures which Powell gave, the prospect of a voluntary repatriation scheme funded from the foreign aid budget may well be affordable.
In today’s political paradigm, in which we value the economy über alles, there may not be much of an appetite for the costs associated with a plan for voluntary repatriation, but we are predicted to spend an estimated £11 billion a year on ‘asylum support’ by 2026, so we might as well spend that money in a way which actually benefits Britain. We are, as you read this, spending £8 million a day on hotels for illegal immigrants - nearly £3 billion a year. If the figure of £1.1 billion per year on a voluntary repatriation scheme still sounds like a lot, note that the UK’s gross domestic product for 2022 was £2.5 trillion, or £2,506 billion. It is clear that, while Powell was talking about the prospect of repatriating 1.5 million foreigners over the course of ten years, any such effort undertaken today would have to be larger than that - forecasts predict net migration figures to top one million in 2023 alone.
But, even if the inflation-adjusted figures are not appropriate for today, even if we have to repatriate three million people or more - assuming the figure comes out to even as high as £5 billion per year, we would be purchasing our freedom, removing the ‘enemy within’, and other immigrants who simply do not wish to reside here any longer. We would be buying our children’s futures back.
It would not be economically unfeasible. It is, for now, in all likelihood, politically unfeasible to implement such a plan. But, it is impossible to say how much longer it will take for the disrest of the public to reach such a pitch that a proposal like this could be taken seriously. At this rate, it may be sooner than we think. Needless to say, for such an operation to begin, a prerequisite would have to be a reduction of immigration down to negligible numbers - if not absolute zero - in order for it to actually have any effect. So the first order of business must be to raise our voices and make it clear that we demand a vast, vast reduction in immigration numbers. Anecdotally, the direction of public feeling on the topic of immigration and ‘diversity’ does point to a growing appetite for the idea of deportation and repatriation - especially since the October 7th Hamas invasion of Israel and the disrespectful protests we have been subject to since.
It is no longer enough to simply advocate for reduced immigration; we must also begin to drag the Overton window rightward. We must bring the topic of voluntary repatriation into politics, as well as continuing our agitation for the deportation for undesirables; terrorist sympathisers, foreign criminals, illegal immigrants, et cetera. Appetite for this cause is steadily growing. The fate of our nation depends on action.