ENLIGHTENED ENEMIES - THE HUME/ROUSSEAU FEUD RE-EXAMINED David Edmonds and John Eidinow

David Hume comes down to us as among the greatest of philosophers. He also exemplifies the man of pristine character, saluted in his own age for his uncommon virtue. Hume was immensely proud of his upright reputation; one might say he gloried in his goodness. In 1776, close to death from bowel cancer, he summarised his life in a short, unrevealing essay. He was, he wrote, "a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions".

His friend, the economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, agreed, eulogising Hume after his death as the exemplar of as "perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit". Historians and biographers have gone along with this image - ignoring Smith's caveat ... "as the nature of human frailty will permit" ...

That human frailty had faced its severest test 10 years earlier when Hume offered to succour the radical author Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The year was 1766 and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract, with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned. Even more threatening to the French Catholic church was Émile, in which Rousseau advocated denying the clergy a role in the education of the young. An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned.

In The Confessions, a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. "I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf ..."

Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland. But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil.

One night, a drunken mob attacked his house. Rousseau was inside with his mistress, the former scullery maid Thérèse le Vasseur (by whom he had five children that he notoriously abandoned to a foundling hospital), and his beloved dog, Sultan. A shower of stones was thrown at the window. A rock "as big as a head" nearly landed on Rousseau's bed. When a local official finally arrived, he declared, "My God, it's a quarry."

Rousseau had no choice but to uproot once more. So where next? His saviour would be the Scotsman David Hume.

In October 1763, Hume had gone to the French capital as under-secretary to the newly appointed British ambassador, Lord Hertford.

Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature, had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is. But his epic six-volume History of England, which had appeared between 1754 and 1762, had become a bestseller, and made him financially independent. Turning his back on the previous mode of history writing as a sequence of dates, names and glorifications, Hume brilliantly combined character studies and the detail of events with an analysis of the broad sweep of underlying forces. The tone was thoughtful, civil, temperate. The series would go through more than a hundred editions and still be in use at the end of the 19th century.

Hume still felt, justly, under-appreciated. The "banks of the Thames", he insisted, were "inhabited by barbarians". There was not one Englishman in 50 "who if he heard I had broke my neck tonight would be sorry". Englishmen disliked him, Hume believed, both for what he was not and for what he was: not a Whig, not a Christian, but definitely a Scot. In England, anti-Scottish prejudice was rife. But his homeland too seemed to reject him. The final humiliation came in June 1763, when the Scottish prime minister, the Earl of Bute, appointed another Scottish historian, William Robertson, to be Historiographer Royal for Scotland.

The invitation from Lord Hertford must have seemed irresistible. Hume's friends travelling in France had already told him about his incomparable standing in Parisian society. And the two years he spent in Paris were to be the happiest of his life. He was rapturously embraced there, loaded, in his words, "with civilities". Hume stressed the near-universal judgment on his personality and morals. "What gave me chief pleasure was to find that most of the elogiums bestowed on me, turned on my personal character; my naivety & simplicity of manners, the candour and mildness of my disposition &tc." Indeed, his French admirers gave him the sobriquet Le Bon David, the good David.

Soon in the French capital it became social death not to be acquainted with him. In his Journal, Horace Walpole (on a prolonged visit to Paris) records, "It is incredible the homage they pay him." To a fellow historian Hume wrote: "I can only say that I eat nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but flowers. Every man I meet, and still more every lady, would think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty, if they did not make to me a long and elaborate harangue in my praise."

The lavish attention paid by women must have come as a pleasant shock to this obese bachelor in his 50s. James Caulfeild (later Lord Charlemont), who'd once described Hume's face as "broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility", observed how in Paris, "no lady's toilette was complete without Hume's attendance".

Hume was glorified both in court circles and in the so-called "Republic of Letters", that unique French Enlightenment territory of salons governed by outstanding women. The salons became the transmission system of the French Enlightenment, creating, focusing and broadcasting radical opinion. The female hosts were the firm regulators of tact and etiquette: they wanted the guests to shine but they could set the tone of the discussions and insist on clarity of language. Their art was the creation and maintenance of civilised conversation.

In the salons, Hume was introduced to the critics, writers, scientists, artists and philosophers who powered the French Enlightenment, the philosophes. They included the "cultural correspondent for Europe", Friedrich Grimm, and the editors of that vast compendium, the Encyclopédie, the pioneering mathematician Jean d'Alembert and the multi-talented Denis Diderot. Diderot had recognised Hume as a fellow Enlightenment spirit - a cosmopolitan. "I flatter myself that I am, like you, citizen of the great city of the world," Diderot wrote to Hume. Hume also became close friends with the passionate atheist Baron d'Holbach, a major financial supporter of and a contributor to the Encyclopédie. All four men would be crucial in Hume's quarrel with Rousseau.

One salon hostess was a vital link in bringing Rousseau and Hume together: the beautiful, clever and moralistic Madame de Boufflers, in whose dazzling salon, with its four huge mirrors, the young Mozart once performed. The intimate tone of the letters between Hume and Mme de Boufflers indicates that he, at least, became infatuated. A spell apart had Hume writing to her: "Alas! Why am I not near you so that I could see you for half an hour a day." She flattered him that she "admired his genius" and that he made her "disgusted with the bulk of the people I have to live with", ending one note, "I love you with all my heart". Sadly, Hume might have misread the silken manners of her court.

When the ambassador, Lord Hertford, was replaced, Hume's sojourn in paradise ended too. Britain beckoned. Mme de Boufflers asked him to assist the persecuted Rousseau in securing asylum in England. How could Le Bon David possibly say no?

Saviour and exile finally met in Paris in December 1765. There had, until then, been only a short epistolatory relationship between them - marked by mutual effusions of love and admiration. Here is Rousseau on Hume: "Your great views, your astonishing impartiality, your genius, would lift you far above the rest of mankind, if you were less attached to them by the goodness of your heart." After their early encounters in the French capital, Hume penned an unreserved panegyric to a clerical friend in Scotland comparing Rousseau to Socrates and, like a starry-eyed lover, seeing beauty in his adored one's blemishes: "I find him mild, and gentle and modest and good humoured ... M. Rousseau is of small stature; and would rather be ugly, had he not the finest physiognomy in the world, I mean, the most expressive countenance. His modesty seems not to be good manners but ignorance of his own excellence."

Several of his philosophe friends tried to shake Hume from his complacency. Grimm, D'Alembert and Diderot all spoke from personal experience, having had a spectacular falling-out with the belligerent Rousseau in the previous decade. In consequence, they had totally severed relations with him. Most chilling was the warning from Baron d'Holbach. It was 9pm on the night before Hume and Rousseau set out for England. Hume had gone for his final farewell. Apologising for puncturing his illusions, the baron counselled Hume that he would soon be sadly disabused. "You don't know your man. I will tell you plainly, you're warming a viper in your bosom."

At first all seemed well. Rousseau, not only a radical thinker but also one of Europe's most popular novelists, was a star in London. His arrival gave the press the opportunity to congratulate readers on this display of British hospitality, tolerance and fair mindedness. How different from the bigoted, autocratic French!

Of course it must have been galling for Hume, hailed in Paris, to be reduced, in the shrewd observation of an intimate Edinburgh friend, William Rouet, Professor of Ecclesiastical and Civil History, to being "the show-er of the lion". The lion stood out in his bizarre Armenian outfit, complete with gown and cap with tassels, and was almost everywhere accompanied by his dog, Sultan. Hume was astounded by the fuss, somewhat meanly putting it down to Rousseau's curiosity value.

He was still insistent on his love for Rousseau - at least when writing to his French friends. He told one, "I have never known a man more amiable and more virtuous than he appears to me; he is mild, gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested; and above all, endowed with a sensibility of heart in a supreme degree ... for my part, I think I could pass all my life in his company without any danger of our quarrelling ..." Indeed, a source of their concord, Hume thought, was that neither one of them was disputatious. When he repeated the sentiments to D'Holbach, the baron was glad that Hume had "not occasion to repent of the kindness you have shown ... I wish some friends, whom I value very much, had not more reasons to complain of his unfair proceedings, printed imputations, ungratefulness &c."

Hume worked to find somewhere for Rousseau to live and to engage his friends at Court to pursue a royal pension for the refugee. Initially the immigrant was set up in rooms just off the Strand while Hume stayed at his usual lodging house near Leicester Fields (today's Leicester Square), run by two respectable Scots ladies. But Rousseau was not a city lover. London was in the midst of a manic construction boom. Fuelled by the triumphant end to the seven years war, the capital was the richest, fastest growing city on earth. It had become the lodestone for the talented and ambitious, with foreign trade producing new wealth and shaking up the class order. For Rousseau, however, the city was full of "black vapours".

He moved to the bucolic village of Chiswick to lodge with "an honest grocer", James Pullein. Then, in March 1766, the offer of a country house came from an English gentleman, Richard Davenport, an elderly patron of substantial means. Davenport had an empty mansion, Wootton Hall, in a corner of Staffordshire that seemed to guarantee the solitude for which Rousseau yearned.

En route to Wootton, the exile stopped off at Hume's dwelling in London on Wednesday, March 19 1766. It was their last meeting.

Rousseau was already seized with the glimmerings of a plot; he warned his Swiss friends that his letters were being intercepted and his papers in danger. By June, the plot was starkly clear to him in all its ramifications - and at its centre was Hume. On June 23, he rounded on his saviour: "You have badly concealed yourself. I understand you, Sir, and you well know it." And he spelled out the essence of the plot: "You brought me to England, apparently to procure a refuge for me, and in reality to dishonour me. You applied yourself to this noble endeavour with a zeal worthy of your heart and with an art worthy of your talents." Hume was mortified, furious, scared. He appealed to Davenport for support against "the monstrous ingratitude, ferocity, and frenzy of the man".

Hume was right to be afraid. He knew Rousseau was working on The Confessions: he might even have sneaked a look at early pages on the journey across the Channel. Rousseau wielded the most powerful pen in Europe. His romantic novel Héloïse demonstrated that power, leaving readers weeping and sighing. It was a publishing phenomenon: demand was so great that Parisian booksellers rented it out by the hour. Hume saw his own memory put at risk for all time. "You know," he told another old Edinburgh friend, the professor of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, "how dangerous any controversy on a disputable point would be with a man of his talents."

Hume's eyes were on France, in particular, and his reputation as the good David. His first denunciations of Rousseau were made to his friends in Paris; his Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau would be published there in French, edited by Rousseau's enemies. He studiously avoided communicating with Mme de Boufflers, knowing she would, as she did, urge "generous pity". Hume's descriptions of Rousseau as ferocious, villainous and treacherous ensured joyful coverage in newspapers and discussions in fashionable drawing rooms, clubs and coffee houses. The actor-manager David Garrick wrote to a friend on July 18 that Rousseau had called Hume "noir, black, and a coquin, knave".

In his reply to Rousseau, Hume (unwisely) demanded that Rousseau identify his accuser and supply full details of the plot. To the first, Rousseau's answer was simple and powerful: "That accuser, Sir, is the only man in the world whose testimony I should admit against you: it is yourself." To the second, Rousseau supplied an indictment of 63 lengthy paragraphs containing the incidents on which he relied for evidence of the plot and how Hume had deviously pulled it off. This he mailed to his foe on July 10 1766. The whole document managed to be simultaneously quite mad but resonating with inspired mockery and tragic sentiment. It was also composed with a novelist's instinct for drama. For instance, among the accusations Hume found trickiest to deal with was Rousseau's claim that on the journey to England he heard Hume mutter in his sleep, "Je tiens JJ Rousseau" - I have JJ Rousseau. In the indictment, Rousseau played brilliantly with these "four terrifying words". "Not a night passes but I think I hear, I have you JJ Rousseau ring in my ears, as if he had just pronounced them. Yes, Mr Hume, you have me, I know, but only by those things that are external to me ... You have me by my reputation, and perhaps my security ... Yes, Mr. Hume, you have me by all the ties of this life, but you do not have me by my virtue or my courage."

Hume was aghast: he could not hope to match prose that he described to a French sympathiser as having "many strokes of genius and eloquence". What he did, instead, was laboriously to go through the indictment, incident by incident, desperately scrawling "lye", "lye", "lye", in the margins as he went along. His annotations became the basis of his Concise Account

Among Rousseau's numerous charges were Hume's misreading of a key letter from Rousseau about a royal pension. That error embroiled King George III. The king was just one of the many prominent figures to be sucked into the quarrel: others included Diderot, D'Holbach, Smith, James Boswell, D'Alembert and Grimm. Walpole became a key player. Voltaire piled in too, unable to resist the chance to strike at Rousseau.

Grimm said that a declaration of war between France and Britain would not have made more noise.

In press coverage of what the Monthly Review called the "quarrel between these two celebrated geniuses" support for Hume was far from universal. While Rousseau was denounced for lack of gratitude, the Monthly Review was not alone in advocating "compassion towards an unfortunate man, whose peculiar temper and constitution of mind must, we fear, render him unhappy in every situation". Letter writers, under cover of pseudonyms such as "A Bystander", also took up the cudgels for Rousseau: one recurring theme was the lack of hospitality and respect accorded the exile, which shamed the British nation. There was poetical support in the St James's Chronicle:

Rousseau, be firm! Though malice, like Voltaire,
And superstitious pride, like D'Alembert
Though mad presumption Walpole's form assume,
And base-born treachery appear like Hume,
Yet droop not thou ...

This even-handed treatment was not what Hume had expected, and not the version he gave Mme de Boufflers, writing that there had been "a great deal of raillery on the incident, thrown out in the public papers, but all against that unhappy man". A cartoon depicting Rousseau as a Savage Man, a Yahoo, caught in the woods was more to Hume's taste. He described it to her with relish. "I am represented as a farmer, who caresses him and offers him some oats to eat, which he refuses in a rage; Voltaire and D'Alembert are whipping him up behind; and Horace Walpole making him horns of papier maché. The idea is not altogether absurd."

So, in less than a year, the relationship between Hume and Rousseau had gone from love to mockery by way of fear and loathing.

In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."

While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopédie; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.

But neither Hume nor Rousseau fitted easily into that narrative and its intellectual consensus. Rousseau, in particular, inveighed against so-called "civilisation", taking aim at the Enlightenment's proud boast of progress (that there had been progress in the human condition, and that with the systematic application of rationality and information, improvements could be speeded up). "Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything," he wrote. In his emphasis, not just on reason but on feeling, on sensibilité, he would gain a posthumous reputation as the father of the Romantics.

But Hume, too, is a problematic Enlightenment figure. He used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason and he injected his empiricism with a destructive revolutionary force. Taking empiricism to its logical conclusion, he showed how, if we rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no confidence in the laws of nature that we take for granted, such as gravity, and we must drastically rethink our notions of induction, necessity and personal identity. Nor could ethics have a rational foundation. Logic was an inappropriate tool for dissecting morality, like taking a carving knife to water. Reason was a slave to the passions.

True, both Rousseau and Hume assailed the Church: it might seem that in this at least they were emblematic spirits of the Enlightenment. But in fact neither did so in a way that would satisfy the wits and cynics in the salons. Rousseau believed in God's existence, professed his love for God, and his faith in God's goodness ("everything is good, coming from God"), as well as his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal, which "all the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment".

As for Hume, though he had been damned in Scotland for having too little religion, in Paris, where he squirmed at the disdain directed at believers, his burden was that he had too much. True, he had demolished the arguments purporting to prove the existence of God, including the argument from design - the claim that only a supreme and benevolent being could explain the wonder and order in the world. This argument, Hume insisted, was untenable. How could it account for the suffering in the world? How can we infer that there is just one architect of the world, and not a co-operative of two or more?

Hume also wrote that "I would not offend the Godly". Once, dining with Baron d'Holbach, he claimed he had never seen an atheist and questioned whether they really existed. D'Holbach replied that Hume was dining with 17 of them.

For biographers, the Rousseau affair has been a sideshow in the greater scheme of Hume's astounding achievements. But Hume's behaviour is revelatory. His relationship with Rousseau and the falling-out put him under pressure, and that pressure opens up the man. Through a detailed reading of the constant correspondence, we can see that Hume had not wanted to accompany Rousseau to England in the first place - hoping to delegate that task. And, while Hume was telling his French friends of his love for Rousseau, his cousin John Home, the "Scottish Shakespeare", had noticed only 10 days or so after Hume brought his charge to London, his frustration "with the philosopher who allowed himself to be ruled equally by his dog and his mistress".

A letter of Hume's to Hugh Blair exposes what lay masked by the outpourings of love: "[Living in his Staffordshire solitude, Rousseau] will be unhappy in that situation, as he has indeed been always in all situations. He will be entirely without occupation, without company, and almost without amusement of any kind. He has read very little during the course of his life, and has now totally renounced all reading: He has seen very little, and has no manner of curiosity to see or remark; He has reflected, properly speaking, and studied very little; and has not indeed much knowledge: he has only felt, during the whole course of his life; and in this respect, his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of: but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man ... stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin."

In fact, sensibility apart, all this was false. Rousseau was widely read and never without fulfilling occupations, including music and botany. In the English countryside, he was introduced to the collector and botanist, the Duchess of Portland, and they went on blissful expeditions in the Peak District together. And, of course, Rousseau was working on The Confessions. It was Hume's creative life that was over.

Behind Rousseau's back, Hume conducted an obsessive investigation into Rousseau's finances. He asked various French contacts to make inquiries on his behalf - though concealing from each friend that he had also asked the others. Mme de Boufflers was put out to learn that Hume had set both her and D'Holbach on the same errand. "To what purpose?" were these investigations, she demanded of Hume: "You will not become his denunciator, after having been his protector ..." Yes he would. There's no question of Hume's wanting the information to help Rousseau. He himself makes plain that Rousseau's character was at stake: was he a fraud professing to poverty?

He denigrated Rousseau in a letter to D'Alembert in such foul terms that D'Alembert destroyed the letters and replied, with others, urgently counselling the man of moderation to remain moderate. Rousseau, according to Hume, was exposed as "surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world".

But there was no plot by Hume, though Rousseau was not entirely wrong when he accused Hume of being a traitor. A satirical letter purporting to be from the King of Prussia, acidly mocking the beleaguered Swiss, was a central plank in Rousseau's construction of a conspiracy. The letter promised Rousseau sanctuary, holding out a lacerating incentive: "If you want new misfortunes, I am a king and can make you as miserable as you can wish."

In fact, Walpole in Paris was the author, composing the hoax (in French) just before Rousseau arrived to meet Hume. Walpole took it round very appreciative salons. The "King of Prussia" letter even made its way into the London press and to Rousseau's refuge in Staffordshire. The exile was very upset. Hume maintained he was totally ignorant of the spoof. But a little literary detective work reveals that he was present at a dinner where the joke started, and that he probably contributed its most wounding thrust - in one letter Mme de Boufflers, who was appalled by the satire, claimed this was common knowledge in Paris. Hume was at two dinners where Walpole read the letter aloud

Hume's handling of the affair was full of malevolence. His letters were flush with half-truths and lies: such as that Rousseau had called him the blackest of men, that he had proof that Rousseau had plotted for two months to dishonour him, that King George III was "very much prejudiced" against Rousseau - all plainly untrue. And after Rousseau returned to France to live under the protection of Mme de Boufflers, Hume informed Smith that Rousseau was being shunned. He suggested to Mme de Boufflers and others that for his own sake Rousseau would best be locked away as a madman. Le Bon David's reason had become a slave to his passions.

In Paris as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch on the Grand Tour of Europe in 1766, Adam Smith was among those who advised restraint. When he delivered his posthumous tribute to his friend "as approaching nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit", Smith had seen at first hand how susceptible to human frailty Hume was after all.

UTOPIAN IDEALISTS AGAINST OUR NATION AND PEOPLE by David Hamilton

We are led to believe that mass immigration is a blessing to us and that only Enoch Powell and a few narrow-minded and prejudiced people have ever seen danger in it. All decent folk of good will, we are told, have embraced this break in our national continuity as a sign of enlightenment with people progressing to a higher state of civilisation - that of a one-world utopia made up of coffee-coloured persons. It also has been presented as an Ideological battle between left and right but actually is between people of common sense and utopian idealists.

Most ordinary people relate to the world by common sense so the impracticable dream of a multi-racial utopia had to be socially engineered which requires totalitarian methods. The Utopians see immigrants as essentially good and if we are nice to them they will be nice to us.
This utopianism does not counter human nature and we find people being brought in as cheap labour with idealism as a smokescreen. If the high-minded ones are so benevolent and moral, why have their plans been underhand and why public infamy for those who foresaw danger in just letting it happen?

Multi-Racialism follows on from the French Enlightenment in trying to create a society on rationalist principles and ignoring human nature as was the Soviet Union too. Those who wished to preserve our traditional way of life knew how human nature works from their experience of how people treat each other and what they are capable of doing to each other. They learnt from history how different ethnic groups have vied with each other for power and territory and looking at the world around them see that in practice immigration is not assimilation, but the colonisation of our territory. Conversely, Multi-Racialists never describe reality but appeal to a vague future utopia, not facing that if we have been cruel to them in the past then these newcomers could be cruel to us in the future. Further, people from all walks of life have now given warning of the practical consequences which shows the British people as essentially conservative. Some have made crude remarks but most bring common sense to an irresponsible series of idealists who just let things happen with no control. All have suffered and some have been openly persecuted.

Two days after the Empire Windrush docked on the 22 July 1948 with 790 west Indians, J.D.Murray and ten other Labour MP’s wrote to Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee, asking for legislation to prevent an influx. Atlee replied, that he thought they would “make a genuine contribution to our labour difficulties at the present.” There had been racial battles in 1948 between 31 July and 2 August in Liverpool, in Deptford on the 18th July; and Birmingham between the 6th and 8th of August 1949 but the idealists ignored them as they had in 1919 when after the racial battles in Liverpool and Cardiff Lord Milner wrote a Memorandum of June 23rd “On the Repatriation of Coloured Men.” ”I have every reason to fear, that when we get these men back to their own colonies they might be tempted to revenge themselves on the white minorities there…” ( Panikos Paranyi (ed) “Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth Century.” (Leicester University.1996).

The first actual debate on immigration was in the House of Commons on the 5th of November 1954 in a thirty-minute adjournment debate called by John Hynd Labour M.P. for Sheffield (Attercliffe). “One day recently 700 embarked from Jamaica without any prospect of work,
housing or anything else.” He also said the colour bar in Sheffield dance halls because of knife fights was justified. Both Hynd and another Labour M.P. James Johnson called for a committee of enquiry to be set up and speakers repeatedly asked the Government to take action but Henry Hopkinson(c), Minister of State at the Colonial Office fobbed them off by telling them “the matter is receiving urgent attention.” He did admit that he had received many letters from worried M.P.’s on both sides. In March 1955 Frank Burden(L) in the debate on National Service asked the Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour why immigrants did not have to serve in the armed forces as native-born youngsters did.

Winston Churchill battled in cabinet against appeasers of Commonwealth leaders but was old and ailing. He wanted the Conservative party to adopt the slogan “Keep England White” in 1955. If Sir Winston had been well we would not know be suffering gun killings, knifings and muggings or Muslims bombing our people. Harold Macmillan entered in his diary for January 20th 1955, "More discussion about the West Indian immigrants. A Bill is being drafted - but it's not an easy problem. P.M. thinks 'Keep England White' a good slogan! The bill was not ready till June 1955, two months after Churchill had stood down.

(Peter Hennessy, 'Having It So Good - Britain in the Fifties' (Allen Lane, 2006) p 224
Hennessy's reference is: Peter Catterall (ed.), 'The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950-1957' Macmillan. 2003 p 382. People have tried to keep this aspect of Churchill’s beliefs quiet.)

Documents at the Public Records Office show the fifth Marquess of Salisbury trying, “I should not be satisfied with the legislation which you suggest. I feel that it would only be tinkering with what is really becoming a fundamental problem for us all, though it is only beginning to push its ugly head above the surface of politics. The figures which we have been given make it clear that we are faced with a problem which, though at present it may be only a cloud the size of a man’s hand, may easily come to fill the whole political horizon …With each year that passes, and with the general improvement with methods of transportation, the flow increases. Indeed, if something is not done to check it now, I should not be at all surprised if the problem became quite unmanageable in twenty or thirty years time. We might well be faced with very much the same type of appalling issue that is now causing such great difficulties for the United States. The main causes of this sudden inflow of blacks is of course the Welfare State. So long as the antiquated rule obtains that any British subject can come into this country without any limitation at all, these people will p[our in to take advantage of our social services and other amenities and we shall have no protection at all.” Letter to Viscount Swinton March 1954.

These records also show Oliver Lyttleton (later Lord Chandos) trying to bring common sense to bear on the matter. In a letter to Swinton 31/3/1954 wanting deposits of £500 to be put down by immigrants, “ if there is to be means of controlling the increasing flow of coloured people who come here largely to enjoy the benefits of the Welfare State.”

He had a list of all restrictions imposed on Britons by other Commonwealth countries who refused to accept “persons who are likely to become a public charge,” illiterates”, those deemed “undesirable” had “unsuitable standards or habits of life” many had quota systems and even dictation tests. Jamaica prohibited those likely “to become a charge on public funds by reason of infirmity of body or mind or ill-health or who is not in possession of sufficient means to support himself or such of his dependants as he shall bring with him to the island”.
Thirty–nine territories had entry permit systems or required prospective residents to first obtain permission.

We look back to the time of Salisbury’s illustrious ancestor Lord Burleigh advisor to “Good Queen Bess” and see coming alive our tradition of practical wisdom and how idealists
are trying to destroy it. It was Elizabeth1 who in 1601 had the “Blackamoors” expelled from her realm. As we move forward we find David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, write in “Of National Characters”, “There are moral causes that tend to transform whites from a barbarous nation to a civilised one, whereas nature does not allow this to happen to blacks.” His near contemporary Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the Collapse of Rome, warned of a time hence when minarets would sprout amongst the spires of Oxford. Farther on, we come to G.K.Chesterton who predicted a war with Muslims in England in his novel The Flying Inn (1912). Nearer still Enoch Powell refined his views in a speech to the Southall Chamber of Commerce on 4th November 1971, “Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him possession of his native land.”

On 20th January 1955 when immigration from Jamaica was 11,000 a year, Conservative Cyril Osborne(later knighted) had written to the London Times,” But the present West Indian and West African invasion is a mere trickle of what we must expect, because as the law now stands everyone born in the Commonwealth is entitled to come to this country. What shall we do when the millions living in the bigger areas decide to emigrate?” The open entry to anyone was not brought under any control until the Commonwealth Immigration bill (1961).

At the second reading Osborne warned “that the world’s poor would swarm to Britain’s welfare honey pot. We have neither the room nor the resources to take all who would like to come.” Both sides of the House laughed at him and called him Fascist.” We are seeing this now with boats leaving Africa for Europe.

Churchill was replaced as P.M. by Internationalist Anthony Eden who answered Osborne in the House of Commons, “There is no question of any action being taken to control immigration and in any case most were from Eire.” In May 1958, 3 months before the racial battles of Notting Hill and Nottingham, Osborne had written to Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell who contemptuously handed it to his secretary to reply, “The Labour Party is opposed to restriction of immigration as every Commonwealth citizen has the right as a British subject to enter this country.”

He instigated a Commons debate on the 5th of December 1958 3 months after the racial battles when Labour spokesman Arthur Bottomley replied, “We are categorically against it (restrictions).” Seconding the motion Martin Lindsay said, “We must ask ourselves to what extent do we want Britain to become a multi-racial community. If that is our desire and we decide to make it a matter of deliberate policy, well and good, but let us at least consider where we are going and make up our minds that is what we want, and not simply drift.” Simon Heffer relates in his biography of Enoch Powell “Like the Roman” that in 1958 Osborne pleaded with the Conservatives 1922 backbench committee to consider the future consequences of mass immigration. When they refused to listen this genuine and sincere man broke down and wept. In March 1965 he told the House,”Our children and grandchildren will curse us for our moral cowardice.”

Supporting Osborne in December 1958 Labour’s Frank Tomney, remarked on elected representatives ignoring their constituents. “We have been sent here by the electorate to give expression to issues which concern them.” Fellow Notting Hill MP George Rogers (L) told the Daily Sketch of 2/9/58,” Overcrowding has fostered vice, drugs, prostitution and the use of knives.” James Harrison (L) from Nottingham also supported controls. Mr Tomney was a practical man of humble origins and understood his people, "I have come directly from the benches of a factory to the benches of the Commons". In the Guardian of 20/3/01 Andrew Roth slotted him into a standard stereotype, “the crusty old far-right Labour MP.” In the late 70’s Militant, the ideological group in the labour party, tried to de-select him.

Norman Pannell Liverpool (Kirkdale), who had served in the Nigerian legislature and lived in Africa for over 10 years proposed a motion at the 1958 Tory conference for reciprocal rights of entry with other Commonwealth countries, for the U.K. had an open door policy and let anyone in. “When I visited Nigeria two years ago as a Member of Parliament without ultimate responsibility for the affairs of that country, I was given an entry permit valid for 14 days and renewable subject to good behaviour.” He also addressed the 1961 conference on the perils of admitting criminals and the sick. The debate was stage-managed to stop Cyril Osborne speaking who stood outside in the rain handing out off-prints of a letter of his from the morning’s Daily Telegraph. Mr. Pannell stated that though Home Secretary Butler had disagreed with limiting numbers he had agreed with his suggestion of deporting immigrants who commit crimes but nothing had been done.

In a letter to the Times of 13th December 1960, Harold Gurden wrote, “On the health question we find the middle ring of the city (Birmingham), where immigrants are mainly concentrated, heavily peppered with dots of tuberculosis incidence. It is the opinion of medical officers that at least some immigrants are suffering with this disease before entering the country. We have a duty to our constituents.” In the winter of 1961-62, a young Pakistani girl entered the country with smallpox and caused an epidemic. In January 1962 two Pakistanis were in hospital in Birmingham with smallpox Mr.Gurden wrote to the Minister of Health urging medical checks on immigrants. In 2005 we were told that we now have a record number of TB cases and there are more in London than the usual breeding grounds of the disease abroad.

Peter Griffiths Smethwick called for health checks on immigrants when he responded to a question in the local paper the “Smethwick Telephone”, “Immigration should be limited to those of sound health who have jobs and living accommodation arranged before they enter.”

This was prescient as there was an outbreak of Typhoid in Smethwick in April 1965.
In 1964 there had been uproar over the general election at Smethwick which Griffiths won against the trend on anti-immigration (as did Wyndham Davies (C) in Birmingham,Great Barr). The loser was shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon-Walker who lived at leafy Hampstead Garden Suburb. Mr Griffiths lost this seat in 1966 to Andrew Faulds who lived in Stratford upon Avon! Several well publicised events made this West Midlands industrial town world famous. A slogan used during his election campaign was “If you want a N***** for a neighbour vote Labour.” The town council wanted to buy the remaining houses in Marshall street to stop it becoming “a coloured ghetto”. Prime Minister Harold Wilson described Griffiths as a “Parliamentary Leper” on television. A bomb was planted outside Griffith’s home on 26th October 1965 because of the way he had been de-humanised by press and politicians.

A series in the Times in January 1965 “The Dark Million” showed what the official attitude was. The author wrote: “Back in June (1964) a senior civil servant talked to me about a particular aspect of the problem that has since taken some people by surprise. I had asked why figures were not available to give a nation-wide picture of the problem. I was told:
“We haven’t tried to find out. It may be as things get more critical, and they are getting more critical, it will be decided that should do so. It will be a political decision. One of the things
about statistics is that people asked what they are, then again in three months time what they are, and then you have a problem on your hands. People start to keep the score, and you have a crisis. If, as, a result, they know that such-and-such is happening in Wolverhampton, they say what is the Government doing about Wolverhampton. It is a matter of judgement as to when you start taking that line and say something should be done. It is a matter for central Government.”

In the House of Lords debate on the renewal of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1/12/1964, Lord Elton took the long view,” I take the view that we are laying up for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, problems - economic, political, social and moral -and that there is no evidence that we can solve them. The brake should therefore be put on more firmly”

On the 5th of March 1965 Patrick Wall (later knighted) spoke against the multi-racial ideal,”We must for the moment reject the multi-racial state not because we are superior to our Commonwealth partners, but because we want to maintain the kind of Britain we know and love.”

In the debate on the 1968 Race Relations Bill Ronald Bell (later knighted) argued that the bill was “very deep and damaging encroachments into the proper sphere of persons decisions.” (Hansard, 23/3/1968). In a speech “This Sceptred Isle” to W.I.S.E. at the National Liberal Club in 1981 was concerned at the nascent totalitarianism in the multi-racialists attitude, “The very word discrimination itself has been grossly abused. It used to be a good word: a discriminating person was someone to be admired. People have been brainwashed into thinking that it is a bad word except when native inhabitants are being handicapped. That is now called positive discrimination, and is deemed a good thing. We are well on the road back to “presentment of Englishry”, when in the days after the Norman Conquest that it was a defence to show that the injured person was only an Englishman.” Sir Ronald had constant difficulties with his constituency party chairman who wanted him de-selected.

Harold Soref had to flee a mob of unworldly students that tried to break into the Oxford Union and attack him while he addressed the University Monday Club on immigration on 10th May 1974. He should of accused them of anti-semitism!

John Stokes MP wrote to The Times on 27th May 1976, “The question is not one of simply maintaining good race relations here, but of preserving our national identity. What sort of people are we to become? Surely not a hotch-potch of all kinds of peoples whose first loyalty is found to be to their own homelands and who we know will never truly integrate with us. What an end to a thousand years of glorious history for our nation! The intellectuals, the intelligentsia and some sections of the media (middle class to a man) expect our English working class to absorb these alien peoples in ever increasing numbers.” He was mocked by the Mirror as “the member for the 17th Century.”

Warren Hawksley (C) Wrekin, told Oswestry Conservatives in 1981,”You may have read in the National Newspapers of the 12 or so back-bench Conservative M.P.’s who had a meeting, during the summer, with the prime minister to put our fears that Mr. Whitelaw (Home Secretary) was letting us down by not implementing our election pledges with speed and enthusiasm.”

In the same year Tony Marlowe MP in Northampton told the Oxford University Conservative Association, “Hordes of exotic invaders have flooded the continent (Europe) wishing to help themselves to the luxuries of Western living. Nowhere has the pressure been greater than in the United Kingdom. No country has been less prepared to stem the flow than our own. In this land which proclaims free speech free discussion has been stifled by humbug and by the censorship of an establishment unwilling to contemplate the radical cures which alone can reverse the tide.” “What would be unacceptable and should not under any circumstances be tolerated is a policy of suppression and inaction for no policy can be more calculated to bring about the racial holocaust which we should all so earnestly strive to avoid.”

K. Harvey Proctor addressed the 1983 Conservative party conference ,but no senior party member sat on the platform apart from a glum looking John Biffen who only clapped sparely. Mrs Thatcher was not present. Just two years previously Proctor had announced a plan by the Monday club Immigration and Repatriation Committee to repatriate 50,000 immigrants a year. The forward to the document was by Sir Ronald Bell. Mrs Thatcher rushed to assure Asian leaders that they have a right to be here. Just two years previously she had won power by stating on TV that the British people feared “being swamped.” At a Monday Club dinner in early 1984 guest of honour Enoch Powell revealed that the Conservative party had threatened to not speak to Proctor for his belief in repatriation which would have been the first time in their history they had sent one of their MP’s to Coventry!

In 1993 the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, also called Winston, warned that in the north of England half the population was now Muslim and If our prime minister(Major) believes that 50 years hence “spinsters will still be cycling to Communion on Sunday morning” he had best think again. Rather, "the muezzin will be calling Allah's faithful to the High Street mosque" for Friday prayers. The Times (London) attacked him for a 'tasteless outburst,'" a leading Labour Party politician described his remarks as 'putrid and racist.' Michael Howard, the Conservative Home Secretary, denounced “any intervention which could have the effect of damaging race relations”; Downing Street stated Conservative Prime Minister John Major agreed with Mr. Howard,." Mr. Churchill was viscously shouted down on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme by presenter John Humphrey’s in what was a despicable attack on an elected politician. Another M.P. to be bullied by his party leader(William Hague) was John Townend(C) who wrote in 1991, that Government “ministers wanted to turn the British into a "mongrel" race and the Commission for Racial Equality should be abolished.” In 1989, he suggested deportation of Muslims who opposed Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, "England must be reconquered for the English".

Another of Sir Winston’s grandsons, Nicholas Soames commented in the Commons. On July 17th 2007 he said, “foreign immigration is now 25 times higher than it has ever been in the past, even at the two peaks. Talk of Britain as a nation of immigrants is absurd. It would be much more accurate to describe us as a nation of emigrants. Indeed, the number of emigrants exceeded the number of immigrants until the 1980s. Net immigration is a new phenomenon and initially was quite small. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, it hardly exceeded 50,000 a year. Since 1997, however, it has quadrupled to some 200,000 a year. Even that number makes little allowance for immigration from eastern Europe. In 2005, it was assessed as a net inflow of 64,000—a figure that today looks remarkably low. None of those numbers include any allowance for illegal immigrants, who are believed to comprise at least half a million people. The sharp increase in immigration is no accident. To suggest, as Ministers do, that it is all a result of the fall of communism or of globalisation is, frankly, bizarre. The numbers point clearly to a massive increase since the present Government came to power in 1997. Part of the increase is due to their failure during their first five years in office to get a grip on asylum claims, of which more than 60 per cent. were eventually judged to be unfounded. Another part is due to their decision to allow a massive increase in work permits, which have trebled since 1997. At the same time, their decision in June 1997 to abolish the primary purpose rule has led to the number of spouses admitted to Britain doubling from 20,000 to 40,000 a year.” He was accused hysterically of getting his information from the BNP!
In 2005 Lord Tebbit former chairman of the Conservative party told e-politix website , “Islam is so unreformed there have been no real advances in art, literature, science or technology in the Muslim world in 500 years, and multiculturalism was in danger of undermining UK society. In the 1980s he disputed the loyalty of immigrants who backed cricket teams from their countries of origin. He claimed if he had been heeded it might have stopped the London bombings. A leading Muslim group said he was "misguided". After the Muslim bomb attacks in London he declared that Enoch’s prophecies of racial civil war were right.
Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, produced Salisbury Paper 9 in 1981,”The Old People of Lambeth”. It was an empirical research into the real living conditions of “whites” rather than another abstract academic study. One elderly man told him, “…its our Queen and our country, why should we be afraid to go out?” Another former Sunday Telegraph editor Sir Peregrine Worsthorne has written “even Hitler would not have treated ordinary people with such cruelty.” In 1991 the Conservative party tried to impose a black candidate on its party in Cheltenham. A local party member Bill Galbraith expressed his indignation in crude language and was pilloried by the media and hounded by the Race Police and this persecution led to his death.

Eminent legal minds were concerned. Viscount Radcliffe, former Lord of Appeal in Ordinary was concerned about the preferential treatment being accorded to immigrants above
that given to the natives, “ I cannot for myself, imagine how juridical notions can be founded
on such vague conceptions. The conduct of human life consists of choices, and it is a very
large undertaking indeed to outlaw some particular grounds of choice, unless you can confine
yourself to such blatant combinations of circumstances as are unlikely to have any typical
embodiment in this country. I try to distinguish in my mind between an act of discrimination
and an act of preference, and each time the attempt breaks down.”(Immigration and Settlement: some general considerations”, Race, vol.11, no.1, pp 35-51.)

In a case against squatters, Judge Harold Brown commented,” It seems curious that if a landlord closes the door on a coloured applicant merely because of his colour he might well get into serious trouble. But if he closes his door on white people with children merely because they have children, he is under no penalty at all.” (Guardian, 2 August 1969.)

In 1995 retired judge, James Pickles, told a literary luncheon in Leeds, "Black and Asian people are like a spreading cancer... There are no-go areas in Halifax, where I have lived all my life, where white people daren't go even with their cars... All immigration must stop... The country is full up. We don't want people like that here. They have a different attitude to life. They are not wanting to adopt our ways of life" (India Mail 02.03.95). Bradford M.P., Max
Madden, described Judge Pickles as a "repulsive old buffer" who had "plumbed the depths by his remarks which will cause widespread offence to people of all races and nationalities"/ Liaqat Hussain of the Bradford Council for Mosques called for Judge Pickles to be prosecuted under the Race Relations Act.

In 1982 Lord Denning, widely regarded as the twentieth century’s greatest judge, published — What Next In The Law and the publishers withdrew 10,000 copies because of some inaccuracies, wrote: "The English are no longer a homogenous race. They are white and black, coloured and brown. They no longer share the same standards of conduct. Some of them come from countries where bribery and graft are accepted as an integral part of life: and where stealing is a virtue so long as you are not found out." Lord Denning had been a benefactor to young people from the Commonwealth and was expressing common sense.

In 1976 Rock guitarist Eric Clapton advised his audience that Enoch was right and that Britain was overcrowded. This raised a profoundly important point about culture and Multi-Racialism. Those of us who were brought up on Black music as I was, have a great respect and admiration for those blues and soul singers who developed a deep, expressive music. Clapton had black musicians in his band but understood a human truth - that enjoying different cultures and having friends from other ethnic groups is good: but that does not mean that we should try to force them together and destroy both.

There have also been scholars. Dr. John Casey who read a paper to the Conservative Philosophy Group which was also printed in the first issue of The Salisbury Review in Autumn 1982. “There is no way of understanding British and English history that does not take seriously the sentiments of patriotism that go with a continuity of institutions, shared experience, language, customs, kinship. There is no way of understanding English patriotism that averts its eyes from the fact that it has at its centre a feeling for persons of ones own kind.” Dr.Casey was persecuted for this and recanted. Marxist professor Terry Eagleton held rival English lectures, the usual campus rent-a-mobs demonstrated as well as refusing to go to his lectures and the Sunday Times of 1st December 1991 printed a photograph that made Dr.Casey look like a wizened crow!

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton was quoted in “The Opinion Journal” of December 10th 2002, “It is a tautology to say a Conservative wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavour is the effort to conserve a historically given community.”
For years we have been told how evil we are and how morally superior the multi-racialists are but now we see that a main motive for importing immigrants is for them to have cheap labour. Eminent economist Professor Ezra Mishan exposed immigration as being about cheap labour in the Salibury Review in 1988, “Frequent claims that the new immigrants have in fact reduced the labour shortage in particular sectors of the economy – in particular, the apparent shortages of labour in transport, in nursing, and in what are popularly to be the more menial and less attractive occupations- are naïve. Managers of public services in Britain who, along with some private firms, sent agents to the West Indies in the 1950’s in order to recruit labour were only acting as good capitalists would in such circumstances – attracting lower-paid labour from outside their area in order to prevent wages from rising within it. If it was not for that wages would have risen.”

Professor Bob Rowbotham in the London Sunday Telegraph of 2 July 2006, referred to the motives of the elites, who were creating what Marx called “A reserve army of labour.” In November 2006 it emerged that the Government were advertising for immigrants to come here.

A Foreign Office pamphlet declares: 'Multicultural Britain - A Land of Immigrants'. It encourages immigrants to move here because of the preferential treatment they get under the Human Rights Act and well-paid jobs. The Foreign Office put it in embassies across the world.
In a book review for the Salisbury Review of Spring 2003 Sir Alfred Sherman, former senior advisor to Mrs Thatcher and leader writer on the Jewish Chronicle, recalled a friend in race relations had asked him to take a look at the reception areas of Deptford and Southall in the mid 60’s, “ I was horrified. My natural vague sympathies for the immigrants, strangers in a foreign land, was replaced by strong but hopeless sympathy for the British victims of mass immigration, whose home areas were being occupied. I was made aware of a disquieting evolution in “Establishment” attitudes towards what they called immigration or race relations and I dubbed “colonialisation.” The well-being and rights of immigrants and ethnic minorities had become paramount. The British working classes, hitherto the object of demonstrative solicitude by particularly the New Establishment on the left, but the working classes had acquired new status as the enemy, damned by the all-purpose pejorative “racists.” The transformation of Southall was brought about by Wolf’s rubber factory encouraging workers from India.

Since New Labour took office in 1997 there has been such a massive increase in immigration that even middle-class Liberals are now worried. The veteran Liberal broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy wrote in a book review for “The Oldie”, in January 2004, that there ”are too many black faces on TV, political correctness has got completely out of hand.” The preferential treatment given to immigrants over that to our own elderly caused Sir Patrick Moore, the world renowned astronomer to remark “The more asylum seekers get the less there is for us.”
Early in 2005, Welsh film star John Rhys-Davies who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings told “World magazine ”the Muslim birthrate is a demographic catastrophe, I think that Tolkein says that some generations will be challenged. And if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilisation.” The same month in the Radio Times film star John Hurt praised Enoch, “I think he was just saying: We can’t afford to have any more.”
The Socialist intellectual David Goodhart in Prospects (march 1998), quoted Conservative M.P. David Willetts on the Welfare State: "The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn't do? This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."

Prof. Goodhart reflected, “Thinking about the conflict between solidarity and diversity is another way of asking a question as old as human society itself: who is my brother? With whom do I share mutual obligations? The traditional conservative Burkean view is that our affinities ripple out from our families and localities, to the nation and not very far beyond. That view is pitted against a liberal universalist one which sees us in some sense equally obligated to all human beings from Bolton to Burundi - an idea associated with the universalist aspects of Christianity and Islam, with Kantian universalism and with left-wing internationalism.”

In an echo of Enoch’s warnings on “racial civil war” The Sunday Times(London) June 11, 2006 reported that Rear Admiral Chris Parry, one of Britain’s most senior military strategists has warned that western civilisation faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman empire. He said future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals while north African “Barbary” pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years. Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries—a “reverse colonisation” as Parry described it. These groups would stay connected to their homelands by the internet and cheap flight. The warnings by Parry of what could threaten Britain over the next 30 years were delivered to senior officers and industry experts at a conference. The result for Britain and Europe, could be “like the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals”.

“Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned … the process acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet.” Lord Boyce, the former chief of the defence staff, welcomed Parry’s analysis. “Bringing it together in this way shows we have some very serious challenges ahead,” he said. “The real problem is getting them taken seriously at the top of the government.”

Frank Field(L) has also spoken out on cheap labour. In August 2006 was questioned by the panel on the Moral Maze and asked why he has only raised the issue now and was it because the mass of current immigrants are white (from Eastern Europe). His answer was “The sheer numbers and the attempt to close down the issue. He took the side of the poor natives and talked about this influx pushing down wages and people having to compete for homes. He commented that the panel are well-heeled and the ones who are getting cheap labour.

Former Conservative MP George Walden ) told of how we are being replaced in Time to Emigrate(Gibson square Books). Writing in the Times of 5th November 2006 wrote on how he had been attacked by historian Tristram Hunt. The previous day the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had announced some startling new figures: Britain was taking in 1,500 immigrants a day, while 1,000 Brits left. Which rather confirmed the central premise of my book: that more people were moving out as well as in, and that a growing number of emigrants — by no means necessarily racists — were quitting because of the numbers coming in.

Earlier in the week Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, had complained to a committee of MPs that it was hard to manage the economy when nobody knew how many people were in the country. Unmoved by any of this, Hunt denied there was a problem, real or potential. In one sense he was right: for the well-born, expensively educated liberal elite he represents, there isn’t. I doubt that the Hunt dynasty (he is the son of Lord Hunt of Chesterton) will be inconvenienced too much by immigration and its social, economic and educational consequences. Less privileged folk of his generation, for whose fears about the future he clearly has a patrician contempt, will pay a heavy price if our unprecedented experiment of mass immigration goes wrong.”