"I told you this would happen!": Enoch Powell

Earlier today, I wrote about the riots which are spreading across England like wildfire. (Pun intended, of course.) What we are seeing, I said, is class warfare. Karl Marx would not have been surprised, but he would have been astonished, I'm sure, by the degraded nature of the revolting underclass.

Marx foresaw warfare between the rich upper class and bourgeoisie and the lower class of workers and peasants. He didn't imagine that there would be a still-lower class of NEETs and chavs -- see previous post for definitions -- biting the hand of the nanny state that feeds them.

The other element Marx didn't factor in was race. He lived and worked in 19th century England, which had yet to admit millions of immigrants from its former colonies.

The tide of black and brown wannabe-Britons didn't reach flood proportions until the UK started winding up its empire in the 1950s. Marx was long gone by the time more dark faces than white were seen in the streets of London, Birmingham, and Leeds.

One man who saw it -- or them -- coming, and predicted disaster, was Enoch Powell, a Conservative member of the British parliament. On April 20, 1968, Mr. Powell made what he always called "the Birmingham speech", better known then and now as "the Rivers of Blood speech".

The speech caused a political firestorm, for Mr. Powell had the courage to say what had already become politically incorrect. He said that Britain would rue the day when it opened the doors to 1000s of third-world immigrants who would not or could not be assimilated into British society. The phrase "rivers of blood" does not appear in the speech. However, it includes the line, "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

Powell quoted a letter he received about the troubles of an elderly woman living in a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident. "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."

Powell argued that although "many thousands" of immigrants wanted to integrate, the majority did not. Some, he said, had vested interests in fostering racial and religious differences "with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population".

He went on to say that those who were urging the government to pass anti-discrimination laws -- this was in 1968, remember, at the height of the "civil rights" movement -- were blind to the rising peril which would ensure. Powell said that such legislation would be used to discriminate against the indigenous population and that it would be like "throwing a match onto gunpowder."

Mr. Powell described the position to which he thought the indigenous -- meaning white -- population would be reduced:

"For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision...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."

Enoch Powell said all of this and much more at Birmingham in 1968. His speech is worth reading in its entirety, for it paints a deadly accurate picture of the future of once-great Britain, after half a century of largely unrestricted immigration and reverse discrimination.

The rioting in progress today has its origins in the class war, sure enough. But it is also about race. As in Watts and other American riots of the `60s and `70s, it began (in Tottenham, a poor and blighted section of north London) when a white cop shot a person of colour. Minutes later, the gangstas and looters were burning, smashing and grabbing for all they were worth. "Police brutality" and "discrimination" makes it all right, you see.

The Brits are wringing their hands now, trying to figure out what to do, since it's obviously impossible to send them all back home. Powell advocated "voluntary repatriation", but that was over 40 years ago. Most of the boyz in the hoodz we see today were born in the UK. Which is where the class aspect of the problem manifests itself.

The mobsters intent on wrecking anything and everything are not only black or brown, but white too. What they have in common is being part of this huge underclass, the NEETs and chavs and scum which constitute a rapidly growing cancer in the body of our society.

How can this cancer be cured? Don't expect me to write "to be continued", for honestly, I have no printable ideas. We were warned. We didn't listen. We're still not listening, even though the disease is now endemic. In due course, I fear, our society will die. And, from wherever he is, Enoch Powell can rightly say, "I told you so."