Nick Real Deal - 23/2/2016 19:32
The EU has become a monster and we have to escape it's clutches of we are to salvage anything left of our Country.
40 years ago Enoch Powell warned of the dangers, he was not a racsist, quite the opposite. He was a realist and highly intelligent.There is one story of him sitting a 3 hour exam for his degree. The task was to write a. Greek a poem. He finished in 1.5 hours and walked out after handing in his paper.
He had written in half the allowed time two versions in the style of two famous Greek poets. He attained the highest grade possible .
He joined the armed forces as a private and Rose to Brigadier, storming the officer training with ease. He formulated battle plans for Mountbatten who breezed in and took the credit.
Throughout his career he foresaw danger and patterns way before anyone else. In his prime he was recognised as our most gifted politician. Most of which he predicted has transpired in a variety of roles, Defence, Health, Housing etc.
He made many speeches but one even affected him,visably shaken as he sat down. The crux of it was when dealing with other Countries such as Africa we should treat them by our own standards, how we would want to be treated, not by the standards they are faced with. He found it disgusting that there were accepted levels of treatment according to which region. He could not accept that any human could be treated as a sub human.
The man was a genius, not a racsist and He transcended political parties, Tony Benn, Margaret Thatcher and the like praised him for his work. If he disagreed with Tory policy going into an election he advised the electorate to vote Labour. He was a loose cannon of course and in the end got frozen out by Heath and Thatcher.
In 1965 he predicted by 2000 1 in 10 of our population would be of immigrant background whether born here or not. It was more or less bang on.
So are we to at last listen to Enoch ?
No because he was indeed a rasicst playing to the lowest comondenominator. His so called intellect is irrelevant.
There’s an ongoing effort on the right to rehabilitate Powell. In a mealy-mouthed piece in the Telegraph on Saturday, Ed West did the “very clever man” routine (Powell picked Wagner, Beethoven and Haydn on Desert Island Discs, don’t you know?), threw in some flattering anecdotes and skipped daintily past the rivers of blood to focus on one area where Powell might feel vindicated: his Euroscepticism. Let’s remind ourselves of what West left out.
Firstly, the speech was no gaffe or unguarded remark but a calculated provocation. A few days earlier, Powell had told a friend, “I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up.” Secondly, he chose to quote the most explosive and alarmist comments from his constituents: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”; “When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.” If he were not interested in race-baiting, he need not have used that language. Thirdly, he wasn’t merely expressing reservations about multiculturalism — he was saying that immigrants had no right to be here in the first place. Fourthly, racial assaults, both verbal and physical, increased immediately after the speech, as if Powell had given racists the green light — in one instance white youths attacked Asians with metal bars outside a school in Southall. The likes of MP Paul Boateng and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar have talked about the mood in the playground and the street changing the very next day. In a piece for the Institute of Race Relations Jenny Bourne writes: “The point that is missed by almost every commentator to date is that Powell, though he might have echoed sentiments of his West Midlands voters, actually went on to create the Rivers of Blood he warned against. The blood shed was not that of the White English – clearly what Powell feared in the wake of US ‘race riots’ in the late 1960s – but of the Black newcomers, which is why it went largely unreported.”
It was hardly the most progressive era and yet the establishment rounded on Powell. Edward Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet while the Times editorial called it “an evil speech” which “appealed to racial hatred”. To Ed West, it seems, they were all a bunch of politically correct lefties. One section of his piece begs to be quoted in full:
Certainly it was inflammatory in tone, and when a West Indian christening party was attacked soon after by yobs heard to shout “Powell”, the media was quick to erect a cordon sanitaire around his views. Yet there was, if anything, more violence from the Left. Powell’s constituency home was attacked, there were bomb threats when he was due to address universities, an edition of Any Questions had to me moved, and a planned visit to his old school was abandoned for fear of disruption.
Yes, you read that correctly. Never mind the people who had their faces slashed at a christening — they had to move Any Questions!
He was wrong to compare the British situation to race riots in America and communitarian tensions in India. He was wrong to say that the only solution to racial tension was to stop non-white people entering the country. He was wrong to predict race war, although he kept at it, cropping up like a crazy old uncle in 1976 (saying race war would make the Troubles in Northern Ireland “enviable”) and 1981 (saying that the summer’s riots threatened “civil war”). Wrong every time, unless you’re Anders Behring Breivik.
Powell’s hysterical talk of “piccaninnies” and “the whip hand” and “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” that the subject became toxic in mainstream politics. Enoch Powell’s biggest enemy wasn’t Ted Heath or students picketing Any Questions: it was Enoch Powell. By mistaking his own extreme pessimism and racist paranoia for fearless clarity, he brought misery to the lives of many British citizens, ruined his political career and even damaged his own cause. For a man who could speak 14 languages, that doesn’t seem very clever after all.
Dorian Lynskey
I'd also caution Brexit obsessives to stay well clear of conflating race and immigration as Powell so stupidly did. If anything the kind fetishistic stuff that NickRealdeal is so enamored of is poison to sensible folk who may have genuine reservations about issues of sovereignty and economics. Decent British people (Many of them black-they prefer that term to Picanninies I understand-) share these concerns. The racsists with there ill judged tripe about Powell, may make them hold their nose and vote to stay in, rather than give succor to people still pretending Powell is relevant fifty years later. I may vote in just to spite them.