http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3178
Immigration: It Is Worse than Enoch Powell Predicted
From the desk of John Laughland on Wed, 2008-04-16 06:15
>>"Of all the great misquotations in political history, none can surely be
more persistent that the use of the phrase “rivers of blood” in
reference to the speech given by the controversial British politician,
Enoch Powell, forty years ago on Sunday (on 20 April 1968).
What Powell in fact said was, “As I look ahead, I am filled with
foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with
much blood’.” He did not talk about “rivers of blood” as such. A
classical scholar, Powell perhaps thought that people would understand his
reference to Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which the Sibyl recounts a prophecy
of terrible wars to come. No doubt the vision was supposed to be of the
Tiber actually foaming with blood, but Powell was some way from predicting
actual bloodshed in Britain. Instead, he was using the quotation to
communicate his sense of terrible foreboding.
Like many prophets of doom, Powell was furiously denounced for what many
people regarded as a highly inflammatory attack on mass immigration. It is
true that he had used some rather unfortunate language in his speech. But
Powell’s basic sin was to have expressed openly – and dramatically –
what many people were saying in private, namely that they no longer felt
at
home in their own country as a result of mass immigration.
Forty years on, it is obvious that Powell was both right and wrong. He was
right that mass immigration would fundamentally change the nature of
British society. That, indeed, is the point of it: sup****ters of mass
immigration are more interested in multiculturalism as a political
ideology than in any supposed economic benefits of it.
But he was wrong to permit one decisive, cataclysmic event. Although there
have, of course, been outbursts of racial tension in Britain, and although
immigration has contributed massively to the rise in violent crime on the
streets of Britain’s major cities – one in five prisoners in Britain
today is a Muslim, even though the number of Muslims living in Britain is
probably around one sixtieth of the total population – what has in fact
happened is perhaps worse: a slow erosion of the principles and values of
British life which has occurred without people really noticing. Anyone who
looks at a film from fifty or even forty years ago can see that the
country
has changed out of all recognition.
Immigration has greatly increased under the present Labour government. The
huge influx of Poles is the most visible part of it, but the continued
immigration from the third world has been massive as well. Immigration is
openly discussed (and hotly contested) in several mass circulation
newspapers, especially the Daily Mail and the Daily Express which conduct
vigorous anti-immigration campaigns. They point out, among other things,
that it is false to claim that immigration has no effect on employment
among the indigenous population.
On the contrary, the government has been forced to admit, after many years
of claiming the opposite, that the number of indigenous British people has
fallen as the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe has risen in recent
years. The number of immigrants, both from Eastern Europe and the third
world, is now so great that it is almost impossible to find a single
English person working in a shop of restaurant in London. I am not
exaggerating. There are, of course, many inner city areas (including in
the East End of London) where you hardly ever see a white face. As a
result, there is now a very considerable phenomenon of “white flight”
in Britain, white people leaving the inner cities and even the country in
order to live in parts of the country, or other parts of the world, where
they are not surrounded by immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of British
people every year emigrate or move to the provinces for this reason. Those
who stay practise segregation for their children: in London, all state
school children are black while all private school children are white.
Powell was a bizarre figure. He was sacked from the Cabinet and left the
Conservative Party after his famous speech; but it was not just on
immigration that he disagreed with the Tories. He also fell out with Prime
Minister Ted Heath’s over Europe, a subject on which he was as prophetic
as on mass immigration and for which he is still revered by many
Eurosceptic Tories today. But unlike them, Powell also disagreed with the
pro-American stance of the entire British political class. He regarded
British and American interests as different and often incompatible. He
became convinced during the war (rightly) that the United States was
determined to destroy the British empire. By contrast, the vast majority
of Conservatives even today hold it as an article of faith that Britain
must servilely copy everything the Americans do. This has now become the
distingui****ng feature of British foreign policy under New Labour.
For all these reasons, I agreed with Enoch Powell on almost everything and
of course admired him greatly. Yet I never warmed to the man. On “Desert
Island Discs”, a popular and well-established radio programme in which
interviewees pick eight records they would take to them on a desert
island, and on which Powell appeared in the late 1980s, Powell chose
exclusively excerpts from Wagner’s Ring. I adore the Ring, and Wagner
generally, but the choice of one single work of music, however superb,
seemed to me to betray a basic strangeness, almost inhumanity. My
impression of a certain inhumanity – a cussed determination to shock and
to estrange – was confirmed when he was asked at the end of the
interview
if there was anything in his life he regretted. Powell replied, “I would
like to have been killed in the war.”<<
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