A river of blood

45 years ago last month, British MP Enoch Powell gave a stunning speech.  In it, he looked on the immigration of foreign peoples into the Kingdom and the way that this was changing the UK's culture.  It was widely criticized by all Right Thinking People® but at the same time was wildly popular with working class Britons.  Indeed, a thousand dockworkers marched on Parliament in protest when Powell was sacked from his positions of leadership.

Dockworkers marching in support of a Tory politician.

The most famous line in his speech is where he quoted Virgil:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.

He was roundly damned for his "inflammatory" and "racist" remarks.  And so the British Political Class went back to sleep - indeed, the last Labour government intentionally accelerated immigration to make the UK "less British".

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

They remembered the unions striking in support of Enoch Powell.  What's unclear is why Powell could see so much more clearly 45 years ago, and they were so blind even 5 or 6 years back.  None so blind as him who will not see, I guess.

And to the charge of inflaming racial hatred, where no less than the London Times called his speech "evil"?  We see this played out on the streets of London.

Indeed, we see it playing out on the streets of Boston and Paris and Stockholm and Ft. Hood and Amsterdam.  The Right Thinking People® who stripped Powell of office have no answer to what Powell say nearly half a century ago.  Like the old Bourbon monarchs, restored to the throne after the fall of Napoleon, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

And the river foams red.