I’m beginning to have doubts about Nigel Farage – not that I can ever be an unequivocal admirer of any politician.
By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that he gave an interview to our leftmost broadsheet The Guardian. Farage is duty-bound to seek an audience wherever he can find it, making his views heard as widely as possible.
The trouble begins when he adapts his views to his audience, especially that particular audience. The only way to endear oneself to that crowd is to start spouting the same things they say between cocktails at Notting Hill and Islington.
This is what Farage tried to do by referring to Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech as “a disaster”. “Everybody ran scared of discussing this [immigration] for decades,” he added.
“Now, I think what UKIP has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate.”
UKIP has done nothing of the sort. This debate can never become “moderate” because it’s never conducted on merit, at least not by both sides. The left side of the debate only ever uses it either to restate its PC credentials or, more macabre, to rip even wider the traditional fabric of our society.
Powell, possibly the last great parliamentarian, knew that uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens, or especially hostiles, would achieve this very purpose. And he communicated this knowledge with prophetic powers seldom seen this side of the Scripture.
“We must be mad”, he said, “literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
As we’re bracing ourselves for the likely arrival of 500,000 Romanians and Bulgarians next year, most of them Gypsies, we should recall Powell’s rhetoric and tremble.
“The urban part of whole towns and cities in Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Home Counties would be preponderantly of exclusively Afro-Asian population. …The people of England, who fondly imagine that this is their country and these are their hometowns, would have been dislodged…”
At that time the non-white population of England was a mere 1,000,000, but Powell saw the signs with the clarity of a prophet. At this writing the populations of Inner London, Bradford, Leeds, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and so forth are a quarter to a third Afro-Asian – and the demographic takeover is accelerating by the day.
This is no longer mere immigration – when it reaches such proportions, immigration becomes colonisation. And it’s not as if the greater Muslim part of the colonisers are adapting to our civilisation. On the contrary, they expect us to adapt to them.
Already whole communities live by Sharia law; our ministers and prelates are already saying that “elements of Sharia should be incorporated into our law”; already the BBC is broadcasting a muezzin’s call to prayer every day at Ramadan.
That’s what Farage’s new friends either don’t want to hear or choose to ignore. All they remember from Enoch Powell’s speech is one turn of phrase, which they first distort and then repeat ad nauseum.
The classically educated statesman quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead,” he said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”
That was exactly the figure of speech the lefties needed. They grabbed it with both hands and have been waving it like a PC flag ever since.
Whoever wishes for England to remain England is a sadistic fanatic who can’t wait to see – or better still to spill – rivers of blood. Never mind that ‘rivers of blood’ appear nowhere in the speech – if facts don’t support ideology, so much the worse for facts.
That’s all it was, a figure of speech, pure and simple. Some may like it, some may find it unfortunate. But the point remains, and I’ll spell it out in capitals: POWELL WAS RIGHT.
The leader of the party whose main plank is protecting Britain’s sovereignty ought to be throwing this capitalised phrase contemptuously in the faces of The Guardian lot. Instead of calling it a disaster he should be calling it prophecy.
It’s not because of Powell that “everyone ran scared… for decades”. It was because of our predominantly leftwing press that has been repeating the ‘rivers of blood’ mantra with maniacal persistence.
It was because our PC mouthpieces correctly see uncontrolled immigration as the battering ram of modernity, punching breaches in what used to be the impregnable walls of our civilisation.
By trying to speak to them in their language, one runs the risk of eventually thinking in their way, or at least of muting one’s own thought to a point where it’s hardly heard. If that’s the price one has to pay for electoral success, the success isn’t worth having.
Words matter, Nigel, and what’s behind them matters even more.