Enactments Continued in Force

Part of Orders of the Day — Expiring Laws Continuance Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 25 November 1970.

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Photo of Mr David Steel Mr David Steel , Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire and Peeblesshire 12:00, 25 November 1970

I shall make only two comments on the speech of the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell). First, with the exception of his last few sentences, in response to interventions, we listened at least to a cool appraisal of what the right hon. Gentleman understood to be the situation. There were no rivers of blood running through the Chamber. That sort of language is apparently kept for the halls outside. It was a welcome change. This is a subject which we should be prepared to discuss at least on the level at which the right hon. Gentleman conducted the greater part of his speech.

But the right hon. Gentleman's technique of building up the figures as he went through was most interesting. An assumption which was made very early on and was explained to us after the intervention of the hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) very quickly, a few sentences later, became an established fact. The phrase "grotesque under-estimate" was used constantly as though that had now been established by the mere assertion of the definition which the right hon. Gentleman himself used.

If the right hon. Gentleman is to base so many of his conclusions and facts and researches on the figure of net increase in immigration, he must explain to us why he differed so strongly from both the previous and present Administrations on the figures of immigration that they gave. The right hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he has a duty to the House to explain and not just to make that assumption. Is he really saying that the number of students and the like who come in will settle in this country in large numbers and that the Home Office and the police forces are in grave dereliction of their duty because those are people who should not be staying here but are? Is the right hon. Gentleman really suggesting that as a significant factor in the immigration figure, or is he merely picking out from the statistics the fact that we have a large and possibly growing number of people coming here from the New Commonwealth for higher education?

If that is the fact that he is asserting, then of course no one will contradict him. It is self-evident that with the development of independent nationhood in the New Commonwealth throughout the 1960s, and particularly with the increased demand for higher education facilities, it may well be the case that the number of people wanting to come here from the New Commonwealth for higher education of all kinds will be on the increase. But it is wholly wrong to include that figure in the figure of immigration for settlement and then build up a series of hypotheses on that.