Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue

 

Subject: Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue. 

The anniversary of Enoch Powell "Rivers of blood" speech has awakened the condemnation, freely expressed in the media and the middle classes of the damage to "race relations" the speech made.
Britain had embarked on a mass immigration campaign, not only from the West Indies and the 'Windrush' but also from India and Pakistan where many thousands of people were being encouraged to come over to fill the jobs which it was said were made vacant by the toll on the indigenous male workforce due to the carnage of the War. An alternative view was that the Establishment were using the manpower shortage as an opportunity to import cheap and easily manipulated labour to enable and procure higher profits for the owners of industry.  There was also the growing competition from Asia, especially Taiwan in the production of cotton and the alternative, artificial fibres, not only because they had the cheap labour but had invested in new factories to produce the yarn at half the price the labour intensive mills in the North of England were able to produce. Investment has always been the Achilles heel of British thinking. The factories were traditionally running on manufacturing practices invented fifty years and more before. The market for wool and cotton in the world was thought largely to be sown up and that the 'quality' of the cloth, unsurpassed anywhere, would continue to provide a market for all we could produce. The advent of synthetic fibres and the durable cloths they produced turned the mill owning world upside down and they were of a mind set unable to respond and move forward with more mechanisation.
The solution was to cut costs and try to bring the finished product in line with the foreign competition  by introducing cheap labour and attract labour from the Commonwealth. We tarted it up with the rhetoric that we were doing it to thank these nations for standing by us in the war but it was capitalistic forces within the nations decision makers which held the actual sway.
The decision was met by a great deal of natural hostility from the working class who's jobs and pay packets were to be undermined but when, if ever, have the working class been listened to.
Powell speech represented what was on the majorities mind the people who lived in the areas most effected by immigration. What upset the Establishment the most was that one of their own was voicing the fears of an aggrieved populous.
His words are still an anathema to the liberal conscience of this country who abhor any sense of racism. As a country we have apparently grown, or been coerced into acknowledge the importance of multiculturalism and the indifference we must show to different cultures as they line up in competition to our own. Our persuasion that "all will come out in the wash" and that our own culture has much to make us feel apologetic about has grown traction by what could be termed, propaganda.
Today we are coming to terms with the problems of fake news especially if propagated by a foreign power but think how so much more insidious when the false news and the propaganda comes from within, from the very people you were brought up to respect and trust your very governance to.
When I walk the streets of East London today I am very much in the minority. It's the same in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bradford and Bolton. The white skinned so called indigenous population are now in a substantial minority and the cultures and dress code could excuse you for thinking you were living aboard. None of this would matter if the cultures which accompany the immigrant weren't so oppressive and at odds with our own. It's at odds with the star struck, multiethnic paradise envisaged by the modern view of society, a society of individuals, each with rights for which it is our, the indigenous populations responsibility to up-hold, irrespective of the fear that there would be little reciprocation  if the proverbial boot was on the other foot.
So was he right, or will our propensity to muddle through prevail. Our kids have rightly become colour blind. For them there is no issue since multiculturalism has seen their own culture modified to such an extent that they would be hard pressed to articulate what their intrinsic culture is. Not so the immigrant who more and more demand recognition of their cultural space and tradition. Theirs  is a forward looking policy to reinvent their culture on foreign soil and never, never to dilute their own ethnicity.
I sight the Jewish uproar at the moment in Parliament for protection against as they see it racialistic slurs and the increasing hold of Muslim rights in our inner cities with their demand for the recognition of Sharia law and the observance of their faith above all else.
It's seems "we" the Englishman who dates his family in terms of not more that two generations have no rights, other than to apologise for our past.
The under-laying charges made by Powell  are contested by opponents of Powell in well rehearse appearances on mainstream TV by people who come from and represent the immigrant population. As I write a man has just been proclaiming on Sky News that the immigrant numbers which Powell said would swamp the indigenous population have not taken route anywhere in the country and yet when we walk around the streets of these inner city wards our eyes tell another story. It's the old old story, if you keep on repeating a falsehood and importantly given the media time to do so then the lie will stick. His opposition the 'Far Right' are banned from virtually all media outlets and so his comments go unopposed since it's more than the media presenters job to get into an argument about minority claims.   His smug remark, that the current sitting MP is a black woman, as if that were the end of the claim of racial preponderance or that the destabilising effect of large numbers of people who are naturally attracted to move into areas where their brothers and sisters live, skews the electoral make up of what once was a predominantly white area and has been an important element in her election. The very fact that a black person has been chosen to represent them in Wolverhampton or a Muslim man represent predominantly Muslim areas is proof that racism is alive and well but of course it's not called racism rather the normal will of the representative process of people electing their own ethnicity in the hope that they will have a fuller, better understanding of their particular needs.
It's this wholesale 'slight of hand' when discussing the effects of immigration which gets my goat. White people are always portrayed as being either apologists, on the back foot or as members of a far right neo-Nazi group. The immigrant or first generation black or Asian is seen as down trodden, deserving of our hospitality irrespective of our abhorrence of the black gang knifing culture rapidly expanding across the country or the abhorrence we have of the way Muslim women are treated in a patriarchal society. These institutionalised norms are waved away as being outside the cohort of white people to comment and a voice like Powell would today be in danger of imprisonment for racial instigation.