Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day015.03 Last-Modified: 2000/07/20 Q. The numbers of the pages are at the top right-hand corner. There are 12 pages in all. Can you turn to page 9 of 12, please? I am going to read the whole of this. This block in the first half of the page, leaving aside the interesting historical comment in bold type. You say: "Thus, we follow this tangled thread. At the end of the war in 1945, the British Empire was at its greatest ever extent in history. Our armies straddled the globe. We were beginning to get back the territories that we had lost in the Far East through Churchill's foolish military and naval strategy. And suddenly the Empire went. Groping around in the darkness, we look for", capital G, "Guilty", capital M, "Men. Partly I think that we must blame sins of omission. If we look back from where Britain is now, with just a handful of people of true English, Irish, Scots and Welsh stock - apprehensive, furtively meeting in dinners like this, exchanging our own shared sensations and sorrows - then we can see where some of the worst errors have been made. "In 1958, for example, we find Lord Hailsham saying at a Cabinet meeting, 'I do not think this Coloured Immigration is going to be much of a problem in Britain. We only have 100,000 of these immigrants so far, and I do not think the numbers are likely to grow much beyond that! So on chance I am against having any restrictions imposed". It might be "on balance", is it? . P-19 A. It should be "on balance", yes. Q. I think it should. Then you close the quote from Lord Hailsham and you say: "Traitor No. 1 to the British cause". What do you mean by that? A. Lord Hailsham, these were records that were in 1988 just released from the Public Record Office, Cabinet records, and they reveal Lord Hailsham, who later became a Lord Chancellor, I believe, having said at a Cabinet meeting in 1958 in a totally negligent manner that he did not think that immigration into Britain was going to be a problem and that so far only 100,000 had arrived, and he thought it would not go to more than that. Q. And why does that make him a traitor, No. 1 traitor? A. Because it is the duty of the custodians of government in this country to look ahead and to try to ward off any kind of misfortunes and tragedies that may otherwise befall the country which is put into their guardianship. Q. So what you are really saying is they have an overriding obligation to safeguard the racial purity of the mixed bag of mongrels of Anglo Saxons, French, Celts, Irish and goodness knows what all that you call "English", is that right? A. I am not sure that the British or English would be very flattered by the "mongrels" that you have called them. If I were to use language like that, I could be rightly and justifiably accused of vilification, of defamation and . P-20 possibly even of racism. Q. Some of us, Mr Irving ---- A. Are you calling the English half breeds then? Q. Exactly, one of your favourite terms, "half breeds". A. Well, you called them "mongrels". If I had used the word "mongrel" in my diary, then I would have been the subject of massive obloquy. Q. Some people, Mr Irving, leaving aside yourself and some of your friends from the Third Reich, do not mind having mixed ancestry. Does that baffle you? Do you find that shocking? A. Well, I have explained to you what my notion of patriotism is. Patriotism is pride in the country that has been handed down to you by your parents and by their parents before them. Q. I will carry on with the text, if I may? There is not much more. I should like to think there is somebody somewhere doing what Gilbert and Sullivan would have done had Mikado do which is making up a little list of named people", to be executed is the allusion, is it not? A. That is a childish remark, frankly. Q. Well, that is right, is it not? Who is childish, me or you? A. To suggest that a little list, there is a little list of people to be executed in some kind of Fourth Reich what is, no doubt, what you will have said next. . P-21 Q. I am not suggesting ---- A. That we have democratic processes in this country where lists of people get regularly fired by the electorate, but, unfortunately, we did not know in 1958 that Lord Hailsham had taken this wicked decision. Q. I am not suggesting you wanted Lord Hailsham executed, though may be you did ---- A. That is precisely the innuendo you placed on that phrase. Q. But the little list in your book, if you are the Mikado, is a list of traitors and the nature of their treachery is to allow large numbers of people who are not of pure mongrel English stock into this country, is it not? A. That is precisely what I did not say. What I did say, he is a traitor because he has not had Britain's interests, the interests of the British people at heart. He has failed to see ahead to the tragedy which massive immigration would inflict on this country. This country was existing in a relative state of peace. If you ask the family of Steven Laurence, you will see the kind of tragedy that has been inflicted on an individual scale by massive immigration into a foreign country. Q. So people like the Laurences, rather like your remarks about the Jews, have brought it on themselves, is that the theory? A. Oh, really! If this is the level of your advocacy --- - . P-22 Q. Well, what do you mean? A. --- this morning, then perhaps we ought to take a break. Q. What do you mean, Mr Irving? A. Shall I spell it out? Q. Yes, please. A. I will repeat what I just said. In the 1950s, Britain was a country at peace. We had defeated a major world power. We were licking our wounds and recovering and, for no perceptible reason, we then through the folly and negligence of the government that we had voted into power, as we now see, through their total negligence, through their ignorance, we inflicted on this country a body wound which only began at that time, the kind of wound which has led to 100,000 cases of the Stephen Laurence tragedy occurring on one level, and it could have been avoided. Q. Those tragedies ---- A. It was a tragedy inflicted on the immigrants whom we imported as slaves, as cheap labour into this country, and it was a tragedy on this country. Q. Yes, and the reason why people like Stephen Laurence or Stephen Laurence, if you like, was killed was because he was black, was it not? A. I think you are absolutely right. Of course, we do not know because there has been no formal finding in that matter. Q. And who is to blame for the fact that Stephen Laurence was . P-23 killed because he was black? A. Well, I do not want to sound legalistic, but until there is a proper legal enquiry into the matter and the guilt is apportioned and we find out exactly what happened, it would be wrong to kind of prejudge that issue, but we can talk in theoretical terms and say who is to blame if a black is killed by racist white thugs. Q. Yes, who is to blame? A. The racist white thugs are to blame. Q. Thank you very much. Now we go on, please: "Even if we all pull together jointly and severally for the next 10, 20, or 30 years and manage to put the clock back, say, half an hour of its time, the really", capital G, "Guilty", capital P, "People" will have passed on commemorated only by the bronze plaques and the statues and memorials scattered around our capital. We can go around and efface those monuments; but it is going to be a damned sight harder to put Britain back where it was. I don't think Mrs Thatcher or her like are going to be the people to do it. Even less do I think the Socialist Party are going to be the people to do it. Nothing makes me -- Mr David Irving -- shudder ---- A. Can I just explain the phrase Guilty People, why it is in capital letters? Q. We have had all that earlier on. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Say what you want to say about it and then we . P-24 will come back. A. It is a reference of course to a very famous book by Michael Foot in 1938 about the appeasers. MR RAMPTON: In this context it means the politicians who allowed all these black, brown and Jewish people into this country, does it not? A. I do not think we are talking about specific categories of people. We are talking about the appeasers, who have kowtowed to the Buddha of political correctness. Q. Whatever. A. And have ruined their own country in the process. Q. Mr Irving, please. Sometimes your interpretation of your own words is, to say the least, bewildering. In this context, it must be, must it not, that one of the principal guilty people, in fact possibly the most guilty because he is traitor number 1, was, for example, Lord Hailsham? A. And cabinet ministers like him, quite clearly. I have simply taken him as an example because that record has just come into the public domain at that time, but we presume that there are others like him, Harold Macmillan and others of that ilk. Q. Anybody who, at the very least, acquiesced in the admission to this country of large numbers of immigrants? A. Of whatever colour. It would have made no difference if they had acquiesced in the immigration into Britain of . P-25 huge numbers of, shall we say, Slovaks or Poles or people of whatever colour. If you import people, whatever colour, into a country on that massive scale, it introduces social unrest and economic unrest. There is no reference in this passage, what you have read, from which one can deduce that I am referring in that passage only to people of colour, let alone the Jews or anybody else that you are trying to shoehorn into it. Q. Do not worry about that. We have just seen a reference in the Hailsham passage to coloured immigration. A. That is what was happening at that time. Lord Hailsham referred specifically in cabinet to the coloured immigration. Q. Capital C, capital I, Coloured Immigration. Now we are going to see exactly what you talking about in the next sentence, if you will just let me read it: "Nothing makes me shudder more than two or three months, working on a new manuscript, and I arrive back at Heathrow Airport - where of course, my passport is checked by a Pakistani immigration officer (Laughter). Isn't that a humiliation for us English? (Applause)". A. Can we continue, please, and we will see what makes me shudder. MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. We will come to the rest of it in a moment. A. That is the parenthesis. He has read the parenthesis as . P-26 though that is what makes me shudder, and of course that is not what makes me shudder. Q. You are going to be asked a question about that particular sentence now. A. Can we read the whole sentence in context? Q. You can see what comes later in a moment. Just answer Mr Rampton's question first. A. He has paused at the wrong place. MR RAMPTON: No, Mr Irving. I want to know what is the matter with your passport stamp being put, or whatever it is, put on by a Pakistani. MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Checked by". MR RAMPTON: Checked by a Pakistani immigration official, officer, which caused great laughter amongst the audience apparently, or the laughter anyway, and why you should be applauded for saying that such an experience is an "humiliation for us English"? A. Well, presumably, if he is a Pakistani and he is working there, he has less right to check my passport than an Englishman who is working there. I would expect an Englishman to be better in control of immigration into England than somebody who has born outside the country, which is why that remark is made. MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is as maybe. Mr Rampton's question is why is it humiliating? A. That is bound up in my answer to the question, my Lord, . P-27 that I would have expected English people to be checking the immigration. If you go to Germany, you do not have, for example, Jamaicans, or you do not have Kosovans, or you do not have Russians checking the passports going into the country. You expect to have people of the country concerned who are checking the passports of the people going in and specifically at immigration control.
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