Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

54 Open Borders
the Tory shadow cabinet (although he was subsequently sacked by his
leader Edward Heath). His earlier speeches against immigration had not had
much attention. His third major speech, made on 20 April 1968, was, and
remains, notorious. Its scaremongering had probably the most powerful
effect of any Tory politician’s on the growth of racism and the far right. In
his speech he claimed:
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of
50,000 dependants who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the
immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in
heaping up its own funeral pyre ...
As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River
Tiber foaming with much blood!’ That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we
watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic ... is coming upon us here by our
own volition and our own neglect.
After this speech the National Front gained some respectability and recruits.
The Sheffield organiser of the National Front at the time was quoted in a
Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, The Case Against Immigration Controls, as
follows:
We held a march in Huddersfield in support of what Powell had said, and we signed
eight people up as members that afternoon. Powell’s speech gave our membership
and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks
and perverts. After his speeches we began to attract, in a secret sort of way, the rightwing
members of the Conservative organisations.
In a Southall factory, where members of the white workforce had, as in some
other British factories, campaigned to keep out black workers, fascist sympathisers
were emboldened by Powell’s speech to carry out violent attacks on
shop stewards sympathetic to Asian workers. In East London some dockers
organised a march in support of Powell, although others expressed shame
at their action.
The Conservatives were re-elected in 1970. In 1971 they introduced a
new Immigration Act. The act doubled the number of vouchers to be issued
annually to Kenyan Asians to 3,000. But, apart from this, it in effect brought
primary immigration from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and
Africa to an end by abolishing the distinction between ‘aliens’ and ‘British
subjects’, making them all subject to controls, and substituting the categories
‘patrial’ and ‘non-patrial’. Patrials were free from restrictions. They were
defined as British or Commonwealth citizens who were born in the United
Kingdom or had a parent (or grandparent in the case of British citizens) who
had been born or naturalised in the United Kingdom; or British and Commonwealth
citizens who had lived in the United Kingdom for five years and
had applied to register as a British citizen. Category A and B vouchers,
allowing residence and family reunion, were finally abolished and replaced
by temporary work permits which gave neither the right of permanent
residence nor the right for the workers’ families to enter, a system similar to