Before Reagan and Thatcher failed on immigration, there was Churchill

(Note: See correction below.)

In 1954 Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a cabinet meeting briefly discussed limiting the immigration of colonial populations into Britain. Then he apparently dismissed the idea, because, he told his colleagues, while “[t]here is a case on merits for excluding riff-raff … politically it would be represented and discussed on basis of colour limitation.”

And that was that. Churchill, who with undaunted courage and brilliance had saved Britain and Western civilization from the Nazis, dropped the ball when it came to saving Britain and Western civilization from mass Third World immigration. And why? Because he was afraid to say out loud, or didn’t believe, or believed but lacked the arguments to back it up, that Britain ought to remain what it had always been, a white Anglo-Saxon country.

When Churchill had that conversation, in February 1954, there were 40,000 immigrants living in Britain. Today there are six million, a figure that does not include the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who have been entering Britain since 1945, such as the July 2005 London bombers, who were all “native Britons.”

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Spencer Warren writes:

I think the quote about colour limitation is from the Home Secretary, Maxwell-Fyfe, although it is not quite clear (fairly typical in British newspapers, in my experience).

It also is not clear that your interpretation of the “colour” part of the quotation means what you claim.

From this article my impression is that Churchill was troubled by the immigration but his “Government” ie the Cabinet, as a whole decided to back off. That was before Blair undermined the principle of Cabinet collective responsibility with his presidential conduct of affairs, sidetracking the Cabinet.

LA replies:

Thanks to Mr. Warren for catching this. On reading the passage again, I agree the “he” who made the statement about “colour” is more likely Maxwell-Fyfe than Churchill, though the story is written so poorly this is not definite. One thing is clear, however: the subject was raised and then dropped very quickly. No one discussed it seriously. Assuming it was Maxwell-Fyfe who said it, it appears Churchill assented to Maxwell-Fyfe’s implication that they could not raise the immigration issue because it would raise the color issue. So whether Fyfe said it or Churchill said it would make no practical difference.

LA writes:

However, a reader with a sharper memory than mine reminds me of this very different—but still too fragmentary to be definitive—angle on Churchill and immigration, which was posted last September at VFR:

In his book Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 233), discussing Churchill’s second government of 1951-55, Paul Addison writes:

He tried in vain to manoeuvre the Cabinet into restricting West Indian immigration. “Keep England White” was a good slogan, he told the Cabinet in January 1955.

This makes me think more highly of Churchill. I had not previously heard that he had done anything to oppose Britain’s postwar immigration disaster.

Let us analyze these two accounts in light of each other.

“He tried in vain to manoeuvre the Cabinet into restricting West Indian immigration.” Ok, but what did these efforts consist of? Perhaps they consisted of nothing more than what is suggested in the Daily Mail article: he raised the topic, perhaps even saying that England should stay white, then someone said, “We can’t do that, we’ll be attacked on the colour issue,” and the subject was dropped. But of course the issue was far, far too important to say that merely mentioning it once and being shot down adds up to anything truly significant.

Yes, if Churchill said to his cabinet, “Keep England white,” that adds to his reputation for political wisdom—or, if I may use the term for once in a non-leftist sense, his reputation for political correctness, meaning that he was correct on a political issue of transcendent importance. But if he dropped the subject as soon as he ran into opposition, then that does not speak well for him. Did he drop his call for re-armament in the 1930s when the entire British establishment despised and mocked him for it? No, he kept going, he was relentless, nothing stopped him, because he knew the survival of Britain was at stake. That is what a leader does. So far, there is no evidence that Churchill exercised anything approaching that level of leadership on the immigration issue.

Please understand, I’m not trying to dump on Winnie. I’m a big admirer of his. Reading his six volume History of the Second World War in the 1980s was a formative experience in my life. I know passages of his speeches by heart. I have notebooks where I’ve written down quotations of his. So I’m a Churchill guy. But I am not a worshipper of his, and I’m just trying to get at the truth of this issue.

LA continues:

Speaking of Churchill’s struggles to wake up Britain to the Nazi menace in the 1930s, I highly recommend the movie, “The Gathering Storm,” starring Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave, about that period in Churchill’s life. Finney is the ideal actor to play Churchill, bringing out his chthonic or titanic dimension, and how difficult he could be to deal with as a person.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 06, 2007 12:18 AM | Send