Non'sense, haven't yeh ever heard o' the black Irish boy-oh?
Posted on 04/20/2008 7:22:10 AM PDT by Murtyo
Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech destroyed his career, but was there a message in it for our time?
Forty years ago today, in a Birmingham hotel, a leading British politician made a speech which continues to echo down the years. It was Enoch Powell’s famous address on immigration, subsequently labelled the ‘rivers of blood’ speech. The relationship of British - or, indeed, wider European - politics with the question of immigration has never been the same.
At the time, Britain was one generation into principally Afro-Caribbean immigration. Powell used unacceptable language and expressions to attack the then unrestricted immigration policy.
In brief, he said that if immigration were not stopped or curtailed, Britain would, in the near future, be utterly changed. In particular, his depiction of the ‘‘black man one day left holding the whip hand over the white man’’ left little to the imagination.
The speech had huge consequences for Powell’s own political career. Across the political spectrum, he was accused of being a racist. Opposition Tory leader Ted Heath immediately sacked him from his shadow cabinet. With that went Powell’s own - not impossible - ambitions of becoming party leader.
More significantly, such was the opprobrium that descended on Powell’s head that, ever since, all political debate about immigration seems to have taken place in the shadow of his words.
Powell had tried to start a debate about the wider consequences of immigration, but the nature of his speech succeeded in stymying any argument on the subject. Powell limped away from mainstream politics, before finally resurfacing as an Ulster Unionist MP in the 1980s.
Now, 40 years after the speech, the question of immigration is once again creeping into mainstream British politics. The results last week of a series of opinion polls, tied into television documentaries about Powell, are threatening to recast his Birmingham speech in another light.
For example, the BBC poll last week found that almost two thirds of British residents fear race relations are so poor that tensions are likely to spill over into violence. Of 1,000 men and women polled, 59 per cent said Britain had too many immigrants and almost half - 49 per cent - wanted foreigners to be encouraged to leave.
A quarter of those questioned agreed that, because of immigration, ‘‘my area doesn’t feel like Britain’’, up from 12 per cent in a 2005 poll. Some 58 per cent also said parts of Britain now felt like a foreign country. During the past three years, between 800,000 and one million eastern Europeans have arrived in Britain to work, and the largest black grouping in Britain is of those who were born abroad.
Earlier this month, a YouGov survey found four fifths of the population - 83 per cent - considers there to be an ‘‘immigration crisis’’. That poll, which was carried out for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, found that 69 per cent of the population thinks special treatment of immigrants causes British people to ‘‘lose out’’. When Dispatches visited Leicester - soon to become Britain’s first black majority town - it found that the street crisis now being feared was no longer just black on white, but Asian on Afro-Caribbean.
The programme investigated areas of British cities where, apparently, whites cannot go, as well as reporting on how all ethnic communities continue to seek to live in ghetto-like communities.
When Powell was in Delhi with the British army’s intelligence corps during World War II, he had argued that India was not ready for independence, because of ‘‘communalism’’, meaning an overriding loyalty to a group that would prevent people voting rationally or accepting majority decisions. The bloody, intercommunal violence that accompanied Indian partition and independence confirmed his worst fears.
Powell feared that immigration would import communalism into Britain, eroding its homogeneous electorate and undermining its parliamentary system. Given what the Dispatches programme uncovered, perhaps Powell’s fears were not that wide of the mark.
Forty years on, immigration is now threatening to become a concern in Ireland. In just one decade, this country has experienced its greatest increase in population in recent history. Opinion polls in Britain consistently show that the real concerns are not xenophobic or based on racism, but are about the strain on the services and social network that mass immigration creates. This may yet prove to be the case here.
In Ireland, for example, the burgeoning crisis in the primary schools system is perhaps the first signal from communities that they are now beginning to understand the wider implications of immigration.
Add to this, the continuing crisis in our health service and the consequences of having to provide for more and more people, or treat rarer and rarer medical conditions, and perhaps the political consensus about immigration - the honeymoon - may be ending.
Finally, a debate is breaking out on immigration. To date it has been dominated by the propagandists for multi-culturalism - an approach which has already proved a disaster in Britain.
To date, all conversations about immigration have taken place under the watchful monitoring of the political correctors. Even to attempt to discuss immigration has been to be accused of racism.
Remarkably, given the numbers who have come and given the changes those numbers have brought about, there has been little debate on the subject in the Dáil. Is there any difference of opinion in any of our political parties in relation to the question? If there isn’t, why isn’t there?
The answer of course is that public representatives are terrified of being branded racists. Censorious attitudes have succeeded only in preventing public debate and burying what could well be a growing sense of public concern, if not foreboding.
The economic success of recent years has helped to lessen the impact of the numbers we have taken in, but what about the future, now that very different economic times lie ahead?
Should a weakened economy influence our attitude to the numbers we can absorb in the future?
One suspects that immigration may well move up the political spectrum. We might start the debate afresh by looking at the failures elsewhere and by trying to avoid repeating them.
Crude and cathartic as Enoch Powell’s comments were some 40 years ago, given today’s context, his speech at least deserves some re-reading, if not re-evaluating.
I was over in Dublin a couple of weeks ago.
Get to Ireland before the Irish are all gone!
They can keep a lid on it for the moment, but that will just mean the inevitable explosion will just be bigger
There will come a point where people stop caring about being called racist, where PC loses its power to censure. When that point comes, the fight will be on
Ireland ping!
This reminds me of the attacks on Daniel Patrick Moynihan over his “crisis of the black family” paper in the 1960s, when the out-of-wedlock rate was 22%. He was shouted down as a racist, and the blacks never “forgave” him. Meanwhile the black out-of-wedlock rate is now 70%. He was right, like Enoch Powell was right. More proof that suppression of truth through political correctness can fatally wound a nation.
I’ve never understood just why western nations in general, and “Anglosphere” nations in particular, have accepted wave after wave, for going on four decades, of third world immigration, of such a scale as to be guaranteed to cause social dislocation and unrest due to lack of assimilation, as well as mounting economic difficulties. It’s not advantageous at all, and is actually irrational, to undermine those nations that are capable of providing aid to areas of the world in need. Introducing third world dysfunction, en masse, into societies that do function is a recipe for collapse.
The conservative parties in these nations are naive and stupid. They've bought into a concept that is completely liberal in origin and is incorrect, namely that nations aren't composed of people bonded by blood, but are instead “ideas” that anyone can ascribe to with equal fervor. This is why Bush, McCain, and the Tories in England have the same attitude toward open borders as the far left. They think it won't make any difference if the historic population is replaced because the new ethnic majority will still be “Americans” or “Englishmen” or whatever.
Combine this with the fact that the average person is bombarded daily with tributes to “diversity”, threats of dire consequences for opposing it, and media images and an educational system pushing “diversity” 24/7 and most people fear saying anything. They just accept it as a done deal, and maybe move every few years to a quieter, more traditional area further and further out into the ever-sprawling suburbs.
Its nearly four years since I left Ireland to live in the US, just about the time the Polish started coming in. From what I’ve heard, most people are very happy with the Polish immigrants over there, except for some who complain about construction wages being lowered given their comparable skills and willingness to work for less than their Irish counterparts. I’m not sure about how other groups are settling in, but the Ireland I visited last summer didn’t seem to have changed much, except that there were foreigners working as shop assistants and waitresses and fast food and labouring, areas that seemed to be perpetually short-staffed in the years before I left (and presumably some of the jobs that Mary Harney had been sending out SOS messages for immigrants to come and fill). You always hear the various anecdotes about the Nigerian scam artist or the Romanian beggar, but I doubt if these are in any way typical of what the average immigrant brings to the country. The health system has been in crisis in Ireland for as long as I can remember, so I think blaming immigrants for those problems is just a little disingenuous, except to the extent that they are putting a little extra stain on an already crumbling edifice.
All that said though, people should be free to have an honest public discussion about where the country wants to go in the future regarding this issue. I would suggest that inflammatory Powell-style speeches don’t really add much to the debate though.
Why did you leave Ireland?
Non'sense, haven't yeh ever heard o' the black Irish boy-oh?
I wanted to try out the US - I’d spent my earliest childhood years in America and had always planned to try living there at some point. So far, so good.
Excellent! We are pleased to have you in America. We hope you decide to stay. If you’re ever bored where you are right now, we have 49 other states for you to experience living in!
I doubt if I’ll ever be bored in NYC. I might need a bit of a slow-down in pace at some point though!
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