• ...and statistics
Patrick Cosgrave
When Mr Charles Bellairs, studying the official Home Office figures on immigration into Britain, first noticed a remarkable, and inexplicable, contrast between the net (a technical term to be explained later) figures for 1973 and 1974 he, almost certainly, had no idea that he
Was about to set in train a revival of the Illlimigration controversy which bedevilled British politics in the late nineteen-sixties. Mr eellairs brought what he had noticed to the attention of the Shadow Home Secretary, Mr Ian. Gilmour (who is now in the Middle East, which is why he has not commented on the reyival of the immigration argument). Mr Gilmour then tabled a question to the Home Secretary. *Mr Jenkins subsequently confessed that his Department had, in 1973 when the Conservatives were in power, made the nustake of doubling the actual number of Commonwealth citizens leaving Britain, as a result of which it appeared, in official statistics, that the number of coloured people staying in this country was very much less than it really was and is. Mr Gilmour then made a major !Peech, attacking the incompetence of the llorne Office: his attack was richly justified, but he did not refer very specifically to the crass error of 1973. Then, on January 5, speaking to Egham Rotary Club, Mr Enoch Powell adduced this en-or as proof of the central jcontention of his speech at Birmingham on une 13, 1970 — that a small minority in posttions of influence were seeking to conceal. n'orn the people of Britain the facts about what was happening to the nation. Upon, in the nuddle of a general election campaign, seeing Mr Powell's speech (before delivery) Mr Edward Heath looked gloomy, threw it on the !able in front of him, and said, "This is Powellism, and it's evil," as though that settled the matter. Mr Bellairs is the Conservative Research uepartment officer concerned with Home Office affairs. The hesitation and care with which he and Mr Gilmour handled their scovery of the fact that a government u,ePartment notorious even in Whitehall for its P.Plness, incompetence and inability to get its ou_siness done (for evidence of the Home ?Mice's incapacity even to answer important letters see Lord Windlesham's book on the last en. nservative government Politics in Practice) ls evidence of their fear that facing the facts about the number of coloured people permanpently resident in Britain, and stating those facts ubi -IelY, would be damaging to race relations 1.11 this country. Mr Powell, on the other hand, tflas consistently proclaimed that only if the facts are faced can a serious approach be made 43 the Problem of people of different colour and culture living together in this island. And he has Proclaimed, further and often, that number is of tkhe essence: a major point, he said in Waivernaltpton on June 11, 1970, "which cannot be etoPhasized too often, is that of number". In the re!? ewed controversy over numbers it must be !aid that Mr Bellairs and Mr Gilmour, in at r, kicked towards goal: but Mr Powell, —g"arii, slammed the ball into the back of the "et. Certainly, nothing can justify or even exialain either, the initial Home Office error of
1973 or the concealment of that error for a year, until Mr Bellairs and Mr Gilmour winkled out the confession of it. Now, I imagine that Mr Gilmour and Mr Powell would both still believe there are major differences between them on the subject of immigration and race relations. But the brutal fact of the matter is that over the whole period of this controversy (which has lasted since 1968) Mr Powell has been vastly more right than the rest of us. I say "the rest of us" intending to include myself. When I was a Research Department officer, I prepared an appreciation of the immigration situation following Mr Powell's speech of June 9, 1069, in which he had singled out for attack the immigrant population projections offered by the Department to Mr Heath in the previous year: then Mr John McDonnell, the responsible officer, had argued that the number of immigrants in Britain by the end of the century would be at most 2.1m, but that it might be as low as 1.4m. To be sure, Mr McDonnell had produced those figures as part of an elaborate and rather academic numbers game he was playing with Mr Powell. I, in June 1969, came down somewhere between both men. I leant, in a word, towards the official figures, and ignored Mr Powell's continued insistence that he had, if anything, under-estimated numbers. He then said that the likely immigrant population by 1987 would be 3m., and by 2000 4m. To cut short a highly complicated statistical argument I asked, in the last couple of days, four informed people, politicians and civil servants, how many immigrants they believed were in Britain now. There was a staggering uniformity in the replies: everybody said one and three quarter million. Mr Powell's once scouted proposition that his vice was under-estimation was thus amply justified. One has to go further. Virtually every single critical response to Mr Powell's immigration speeches of 1968 and 1969 has been discredited; and almost everybody who has commented on these matters with any degree of responsibility (a category from which Home Office civil servants must be excluded) has to confess that fact. Let me take one example, and a crucial one. Mr Powell has always taken as his basis of calculation the net figures — that is to say, the crude difference between the number of people coming in and going out in any given year. The Home Office, though publishing these figures, has consistently, along with most politicians and most academics, argued that the so-called "figures for settlement" — that is the number of people coming into Britain who declare their intention of remaining here — is a more accurate and sophisticated guide to the actual and potential immigrant population. On the BBC's Radio Four programme Today on Monday last Mr Dipak Nandy, formerly Director of the Runnymede Trust, re-affirmed his faith in the settlement figures — which are much lower than the net balance — as true indicators of what is going on. But it was Mr Nandy who, six years ago, confessed that the net figures, if they showed a consistent tendency over a long period, would have to be accepted as our best guide. Not only have those figures shown a trend which favours Mr Powell's argument: the only major alteration in that trend was produced by the very error which the Home Office has sought so assiduously to conceal. Most people are familiar with the way in which the battle of numbers has been fought out in public. It is, I think, less well known that there was a Whitehall battle as well. When Mrs Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education her civil servants and inspectors — and many teachers as well — brought to her attention the huge difficulties being created in schools by the growing numbers of coloured children. Such figures as were available to the Department of Education and Science suggested that the immigrant population was very much larger than the Home Office (and, in particular, the then Home Secretary, Mr Maudling) would admit. Again and again the Home Office, and such ancillary bodies as the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission, refused a head count in schools. Mr Mark Bonham Carter was perhaps strongest of all in the insistence that it would be "undesirable" (a favourite word of his) for the facts about immigrant numbers in schools to be made publicly and officially known. Thus, in a measure as yet not apprehended, he and his Home Office allies frustrated the laudable anxiety of the DES to frame policies which would assist the integration into the host community of coloured schoolchildren, policies which of necessity depended on an accurate statistical appreciation of the problem. Thus, too, he assisted the concealment from the ordinary citizen of the truth about the way in which the face of Britain was changing. Mr Powell has often seemed to suggest that there has been a — in the strictly technical sense of the word — subversive conspiracy of silence. Even now I can hardly bring myself to believe that educated people in important and responsible positions have, over a period of years, deliberately sought to bring about the kind of fundamental change in the very nature of their Country which must follow a large, haphazard and utterly unco-ordinated settlement in Britain of citizens of the New Commonwealth. I prefer to believe that well-meaning folly and blindness have marked most of the opposition to Mr Powell's views on the subject. Like him, and in his words, "I hold no man inferior because he is of different origin." But I do know that the immigration of people of different
origin is producing in and that too of incalculably the years — and refuse now — to grasp either '
many in power and politics have refused over that fact or its consequences.
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