Enoch Powell: the Great Lie survives
By Simon Heffer
>>"Sunday is the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most significant speech
made in British politics since the Second World War: Enoch Powell's
"Rivers of Blood" speech.
It is also, therefore, near to the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest
lies in British politics since the Second World War: that this remarkably
accurate prediction of the dangers of enforced multiculturalism has
"prevented" a rational debate on immigration, since anyone who seeks to
engage in it will be branded as a "racist".
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It would be a comfort if this position were merely ignorant. It isn't.
Powell is used by the Left - and that includes many people in the
Conservative Party - as a cynical excuse to conceal their own failures in
imposing proper immigration controls and maintaining social cohesion.
They start by saying Powell was a racist, which is also a deliberate lie.
They then say that anyone who mentions immigration will now be tarred with
that brush, which must therefore be a lie as well. This is convenient for
those who have betrayed the people of this country by imposing an
immigrant community so large upon it that it struggles to integrate - and,
indeed, who have betrayed many of those immigrants too. Yet it won't wash.
Long before Powell made his speech - which ought to be issued to every
home in the land, since I rarely hear it quoted anything other than
completely inaccurately - there was a code of silence about immigration.
Long before we knew the term "political correctness", it was viewed as
simply impolite to raise the subject.
Powell reported in his speech what he found to be the alarmingly strong
views some of his constituents in Wolverhampton had about mass
immigration, the way it was affecting their lives and the strain it was
putting on local public services. He said he knew there would be "a chorus
of execration" that he could say such things. But he asked a more
important
question as an MP whose electors bring him a deeply unsettling problem: by
what right, instead, would he have remained silent?
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Powell had served in India in the 1940s. He fell in love with the country,
its cultures and its peoples so profoundly that he wished to spend the
rest
of his life there. He learned to speak two Indian languages fluently. This
does not stop point-scoring spud-thick politicians accusing him of racism,
bigotry and other vices. A few months ago it did not stop the poseur who
leads the Tory party sacking one of his parliamentary candidates for
saying that Powell was right. Soon, Dave will be booting out people who
say the Pope is Catholic.
Many of our immigrants have assimilated over the past 40 years. Equally,
many have chosen not to. Four of them murdered 52 innocent people on
London's public transport network nearly three years ago. Others,
according to the police and the security services, are busily engaged in
trying to repeat the incident. So far they have been thwarted: but for how
long?
This is all the legacy of those who refused to take Powell seriously; of
militant Leftists who mischievously cry "racism" to avoid any sensible
debate on immigration; of well-heeled politicians who saw no harm in
driving millions of poor immigrants into ghettos, with a perfect disregard
for their welfare and for that of the people already living in those
places; and of ministers in this very Government who for years saw no
reason to enforce immigration controls at all, in the interests of
deliberately destroying our national identity.
Powell was the greatest Conservative thinker in political life in living
memory. He foresaw what were then unimaginable tensions caused by forcibly
altering the character of a country. We should remember him tomorrow with
enhanced respect. For he was right."<<
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/19/do1902.xml
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