Immigration
In September 1972, the club held a "Halt Immigration Now!" public meeting in Westminster Central Hall, opposite Parliament, at which the speakers Ronald Bell, QC, MP, John Biggs-Davison, MP, Harold Soref, MP, and John Heydon Stokes, MP, (all club members) called on the government to halt all immigration, repeal the Race Relations Act, not the separate Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, and start a full repatriation scheme. A resolution was drafted, approved by the meeting, and delivered to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who replied that "the government had no intention of repealing the Race Relations Act". When Reginald Maudling resigned from the Cabinet, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, commented that "Mr. Heath has been left to wrestle with the Monday Club single-handed."
In October 1982, the Monday Club published its latest, slightly revised, policy on immigration. It called for:
- Scrapping of the Commission for Racial Equality and Community Relations Councils.
- Repeal of the race relations laws.
- An end to the use of race or colour as criteria for the distribution of state benefits & loans.
- An end to positive discrimination and all special treatment based upon race or colour.
- An end to all further large-scale permanent immigration from the New Commonwealth.
- An improved repatriation scheme with generous resettlement grants for all those from New Commonwealth countries who wish to take advantage of them.
- The redesignation of the Ministry of Overseas Aid as a Ministry for Overseas Resettlement.
The Club's position on immigration was reiterated in a letter in The Times from Lauder-Frost on the Club's behalf in October 1991 where he stated that the annual levels of immigration "were unacceptable" and called for "the strictest possible entry to Britain for those of other cultures."
Read more about this topic: Conservative Monday Club
Famous quotes containing the word immigration:
“The admission of Oriental immigrants who cannot be amalgamated with our people has been made the subject either of prohibitory clauses in our treaties and statutes or of strict administrative regulations secured by diplomatic negotiations. I sincerely hope that we may continue to minimize the evils likely to arise from such immigration without unnecessary friction and by mutual concessions between self-respecting governments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)