Enoch Powell is very much in the news again because Mr Nigel Hastilow, who was, until the weekend, a prospective Conservative candidate. He made, it seems, the grave mistake that Enoch Powell, back in 1968, got it right on mass immigration in his "rivers of blood" speech, made on April 20th that same year.
Regardless of one’s political leanings, we are witnessing the effects of mass immigration into the United Kingdom today. Enoch Powell’s speech is as pertinent now as it was then. Indeed, Mr Powell showed his foresight, vision and insights to be spot-on. Unfortunately, because of the doctrines of political correctness and multiculturalism, nobody engaged in politics is allowed to say these things, still less mention the name of Enoch Powell, probably one of the best and most intelligent politicians this country has ever seen.
Mentioning Enoch Powell and stating that he got it right way back then has cost Nigel Hastilow his candidacy!
Here follows Enoch Powell’s "Rivers of Blood" speech:
Powell claimed to have spoken to a constituent of his, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier who had said to him in conversation: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country...I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas". The man finished by saying to Powell: "In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man". Powell went on:Mark Alexander
"I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history".
"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen".
"This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to an inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another".
"For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions".
"She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist", they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder".
"For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal".
The title given to the speech arose from its allusion to Virgil's line from the Aeneid 6, 1.86, in which the Sibyl prophesies "wars, terrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with blood" (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno). Powell was a classical scholar. [Source: Wikipedia]
