Enoch Powell on Being Called A Racist | The Dick Cavett Show

new litter green the patented cat box filler with natural chlorophyll controls odor and absorbs like a sponge i'm allowing a decent interval to pass so we can now talk wait i guess the the immigration issue was the thing is you know that uh changed your life and and made your name probably better known throughout the world than it had been before that and when you made a speech as a result of what you were called a racist by um many of your own papers and many in the states who reported it and it's easy to see reading the speech why you could be called that do do you understand why people call you a racist uh it is one of the modern terms of abuse and the term of abuse is the more effective the less defined it is then you can throw it at anybody and anything but i find this word race very irrelevant in the british context indeed it's rather a word which we've borrowed from america because in the states the term race simply means negro or non-negra now that of course is the form in which this sort of conflict or potential conflict primarily presents itself in the united states but that's a very different background a very different origin uh from the problem which we have here i wonder if you'd allow me a minute or two to sketch in the background here in britain because it is unique in the world and one gets it wrong if one imports ideas from anywhere else you've got to go back to the fact that alone of all the countries in the world we never had the definition of ourselves there was never such a thing as a united kingdom citizen unlike the united states which has its own citizenship france germany we never had that uh we were british subjects we were subjects of the king or the queen as the case might be consequently as the british dominions expanded automatically everybody was born in or belonged to any part of the british dominions hundreds of millions of human beings were all british subjects and in the law of this country there was never any distinction between one british subject and another there was no way of labeling the british subject who if i may use the word belong to this country now this was had many advantages when britain was the center of an empire and if the numbers from the rest of the empire who availed themselves of this identification remain small then no problem arose but the rest of the empire had its own citizenships an englishman wasn't allowed to go and settle in india or jamaica on the contrary they had their own very strict demarcations and definitions and now after the second world war there was a big technical revolution that took place and that was air travel which made the movement of masses of people from one continent to another possible on the scale which had never been contemplated before as a result of that there moved into the united kingdom growing numbers of british subjects uh from the rest of the well it was by now the commonwealth it ceased to be the empire who had no other connection than that with this country with the united kingdom now it wasn't that this was asked for it wasn't that these people were brought in as labor like the movement of labor on the continent it happened because without a major change in our law it couldn't be prevented indeed it couldn't be seen you see we actually don't know how many came in because if we're all british subjects you only counted well you didn't count british subjects and uh a hong kong chinese or a bataan from the north west frontier or myself coming back from a weekend in paris we were all the same going through the port of entry or heathrow airport well eventually reality breaks through and in 1962 at last the law was changed so as to make a difference between the british subjects who belong to this country and those who don't but by the time that that had happened i'm simplifying so large a number had already settled here plus the inflow in the years after 1962 for reasons which i won't enter into they are complicated that we now know that unless some drastic change happens large parts of many of our cities will by the beginning of the next century be occupied by a population which has nothing in common with the people of this country now i've defined the problem yes that all sounds reasonable i think the uh it is reasonable you know well it also sounds reasonable uh the thing is that i think in reading the speech it's obvious that um many of the examples that you chose to illustrate the problem uh were much more pungent you feel pardon the expression and then you talked about a lady in a small town and had excrement shoved through her letter box by now we must people here have the context to that speech yeah that speech was made two three days before the conservative opposition had decided to oppose a race relations bill and the reason that we were going to oppose it was that it would do more harm than good and it would do more harm than good because the danger to race relations basically was the fear of the indigenous population of the growing numbers and growing influx of immigrants and it was that fear which was the reason why that bill we believed and all believed would do more harm than good that as the member representing one of the places primarily affected i set out to illustrate and to explain to parts of the country that had no knowledge of it in that speech so that's the context of that speech i was making that speech against a bill which the conservative party as a whole opposed and i was saying you know it isn't really the danger lie lies not so much in discrimination against the immigrant it lies in the fear which increasing numbers inspire in the minds and not surprisingly and not unnaturally of the population here that's was the message but do you still have any question in your mind as to what in the speech caused such manifestations afterwards as uh if you want a for a neighbor both was never used in connection with my speech that phrase dates back to the 1964 election if not earlier but of course there was a terrific explosion of relief that at last somebody had drawn attention not we now know to the full dimensions for i underestimated the numbers in that speech but to generate to what were then thought to be the full dimensions of the problem and people who had watched year after year particularly in the areas concerned something happening which was altering their lives but nobody apparently caring nobody referring to it nobody worrying about it but at last at least somebody's spoken about it now we can face it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

Views: 852,451

Rating: 4.8134799 out of 5

Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, Talk Show, Musician, Celebrities, Dick Cavett, United States, Chat Show, Interview, Enoch Powell, #enochpowell, Roger Moore, Jonathan Miller, #jonathanmiller, British politician, classical scholar, #politics, Minister of health, conservative member, India independence, Post-imperialist Britain and India, post-imperialism, John Enoch Powell MBE, Rivers of Blood Speech, Britain commonwealth, immigration, UK immigration, #thedickcavettshow, debate

Id: L7Zfvcb3mWI

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DavidBrocksganglia]

This would never happen on modern TV. So much time on an interview?? Dick Cavett was great. This has to be like 3 to 4 decades ago? Enoch Powell breaks it down well enough but that's probably not the case now.