A letter to Enoch Powell

Roy Kerridge Dear Enoch Powell: Anyone who is an admirer not only of George Borrow, but also of Surtees, must be a man of sound views. However, I am afraid that I consider Your pleas for the repatriation of coloured immigrants to be a little out of character. Unlike many of your followers, you call for voluntary repatriation only, and you point to the riots of last summer as the vindica- tion of your ideas.

Riots and muggings, in my opinion, are the work of young people who reject their Parents' West Indian ways and yet cannot feel themselves a part of England. Some de- mand repatriation to Ethiopia, but if they could be sent there, they would probably soon ask to be sent home again. Jamaica and the other islands have enough troubles of their own without importing alien Cockneys from Brixton.

It is the dream of many older West In- dians to go home to get away from their own young people. They remember the islands as they were in the 1950s, and think they can escape from reggae, Rastas, drug Peddlers and other English phenomena by flying back to a land of law and order. Most are in for a rude shock. Last week I spoke to an elderly man who had returned to Jamaica with his family after spending 20 Years in London. He had bought a small farm in the hills.

'All my friends had died or emigrated,' he told me. 'As for the young people, they were a new sort, who roamed around in evil gangs. They came to my house as friends, but really they were looking to see how rich I was. People who have been to England are regarded as mad, as we are used to going to work, and so we walk about quickly. One night my wife heard a noise, awoke me and I looked out of the window and saw 12 men wheeling the car out of our garage. I ran down to stop them and they pulled out guns. That was during election year. Myself, my wife' and my children had to lie down in a row on the floor at gunpoint, while the men took everything we had and loaded it into the car.

'If you move, we'll blow your brains out,' they said. 'If you get up after we gone, we'll take petrol from the tank and burn your house down with you inside it.'

'We lay there for a long time, and when we got up I found they had chopped down our cedar trees and spoiled our farm. At least we have our lives. My wife told me to take a holiday in England. I blame England for what has happened to Jamaica — why did they have to give us independence?'

'You're right!' a friend chimed in. 'That's when our troubles began. We may have had to work hard in those days, but our homes and property were always safe.'

Repatriation schemes would send many gentle old people back to an uncertain fate, and leave the youngsters here with no guidance whatsoever. Bad characters, who rant against 'Babylon' and white people, usually like England very much. This is a good country for ranters. They would get no sympathy for being 'blacks' in the Caribbean, and would miss their grants or dole money and exciting night life, not to mention their endless fund-raising Action Committees. Here the Rastas are fawned on by white admirers, while on St Lucia and other islands the police shoot them on sight, or so I have heard.

West Indians in England are not paupers, and go home for holidays fairly often. If they pined for home, they would go there, without any state assistance. If you bluntly tell the 'born here'. children of West Indians that they can never be accepted in their own country, England, why not add that they are outcasts who owe no allegiance to English laws? That is how your speeches may be interpreted.

You know a great deal about India, so why do you make so little of the difference between the Indians and the West Indians over here? Should a riot in Notting Hill mean that an Indian in Wembley cannot live here with his wife and family? Some West Indians find it hard to control their children, but Indians have no such dif- ficulties. Your alarm at the figures of In- diaa immigration would suggest that these newcomers are Vikings and terrorists, not hardworking shopkeepers and textile workers. Perhaps what you feel is some- thing deeper than anything that logic and statistics could explain.

Sometimes, as I travel by bus about our cities, particularly in places I knew as a child, I feel a certain sadness to see volatile foreigners in the place of men and women who were English, of England, and knew where they belonged. I too feel a pang when I think of the intense lives of Edwardian Methodists and Baptists whose beloved chapels are now mosques or Sikh temples. To see England transformed has been the lot of every generation since men first trod these shores. In places where there are no coloured immigrants at all, you may sigh to .see teenage cultists with blaring transistors where once the cobbles rang to the sound of clogs. Great houses where chandeliers twinkled and music played are now the haunts of owl and bat, of managerial trainees or of power-crazed Californian gurus. The working-class district of our 'childhood may now be the abode of 'tren- dies', and the genteel neighbourhood a council estate for problem families. Such changes call for gentle melancholy, but not for the Stalin-like removal of whole popula- tions. A boy born in, say, Nottingham, of Indian, African, West Indian or Chinese parents, may feel the same patriotism and loyalty to the town and land of his birth as you do. Such boys, I have noticed, often feel impatient and thwarted when their parents speak of another land as 'home'. Must they be 'immigrants' for ever?

When among your friends in County Down, you do not support the Fenian view that Protestants of Scottish or English des- cent have no place in Ireland, no matter how long their families have been settled there. While rejoicing in the works of Bor- row, you do not wish that the gypsies he describes, who were his main inspiration, had been deported to India long ago. You may say, with justice, that a gypsy is proof that Easterners cannot be assimilated. The love of petty commerce, the claims to occult

powers and the view of marriage and children as life's ultimate happiness are part of both Eternal India and the world of the Romany scallywag with his neckerchief, cheese sandwich and poacher's pocket. A few German gypsies, I am told, escaped from the death camps and found their way to Scotland, where they became particularly aggressive fortune-tellers. Would you have them sent back again, as some would have sent the 'Asians' back to Idi Amin?

The black spokesman industry, with its hunger for grants and its shrill hatreds, throws a smokescreen of charlatans bet- ween the Briton and the immigrant, just as the unions do between management and the factory floor. As for those children of West Indians who have taken to crime, I feel that they are less of a lost cause than are the in- finitely more numerous football hooligans. Some football Crowds could only be tamed by St Lucian methods, but the relatively open faces of young coloured waifs and strays suggest lost souls who belong nowhere and cannot find their way.

Street children, a Victorian problem, calls for a Victorian solution such as Boys' Clubs, Boys' Brigades and muscular Chris- tianity. You of all Britons know best how to inspire, evoke and appeal to patriotism. Here is your opportunity. Let us see of what metal you are made.

Yours truly, Roy Kerridge