Ray Honeyford was vindicated. When will the same recognition be given to Enoch Powell?

By Abhijit Pandya
19th February, 2012

Ray Honeyford, who died last week, warned us about the harm to national identity multiculturalism would cause, and the alienation of ethnic minorities that would result as a consequence of implementing this policy.

Make no mistake about it - 'multiculturalism' is the deft and subtle practice of racism.

It precludes immigrants and many of their children from integrating, and without integrating they cannot have the social skills, behavioural norms and subtle cultural characteristics, to achieve their full potential in our country. It also prevents them from fully understanding and enjoying the enormous British historical and cultural contribution in the creation of the modern world.

Multiculturalism, or religious and cultural segregation, has resulted in literally hundreds of young Muslims rotting in jails around the country as a result of their exposure to Islamic extremism.

If only for them, and the tax-payer, an opposite policy of removing the barriers to integration in mainstream British society, that is based on Judeo-Christian values, had been pursued. They might have been able to make more of their lives, and possibly contributed in a meaningful way to our country.

The misjudgment by parts of the media, and the public, of Ray Honeyford echoes the treatment of one of the great British patriots of the 20th century, Brigadier and Professor John Enoch Powell.

Few people know or understand that Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech was about the treatment of aliens. The story underlying the quote in the speech 'Foaming with much blood' was about Aeneas, an immigrant who was assaulted in a foreign land.

Powell was simultaneously highlighting the plight of the unassimilated immigrant, raising an attack on immigration and, what is not grasped, protecting the immigrant from what he intuitively saw as a damning choice between either forced assimilation, or ostracisation.

For a man such as Powell, who loved the culture and history of different peoples across the world, both were morally unacceptable. His contemporaries chose mass-immigration without assimilation. As a consequence segregation became morally acceptable and, perversely, morally unacceptable to dissent from.

His speech hinting at the treatment of Aeneas echoed an important forewarning about the treatment of sub-continent Asians and Blacks by a growing National Front in the 1970s, a reaction to increasing immigration that could have been avoided. This growth of extremism was as a result of consecutive Governments allowing ghettoisation of immigrants. This was a result of allowing them to spread unevenly across the country in relation to their population as a minority.

This policy, of mass immigration coupled with segregation, was grossly unfair to locals in varied parts of the country who saw their neighbourhoods changed in a way that left them unrecognisable. This was as a result of the sheer numbers of immigrants and the fact that they could not assimilate due to multiculturalism encouraging them to ‘stay in their place’.

No one of sound mind could say that the uprooting and forced homelessness of Palestinians to create the state of Israel was morally sound. It is odd that it is unacceptable to voice similar sympathies for, amongst others, the peoples of Bradford and Birmingham that saw their world turned upside down by mass immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. The lack of defence of Enoch Powell’s concerns on this front illustrates that we live in a time of deplorable moral cowardice.

No one was better placed than Powell, a Professor of Ancient Greek and a fervent admirer of the range of cultures on our planet, to understand the difficulty of assimilation that came with mass-immigration.

For example, Powell knew more about Indian culture than anyone in any Conservative government in which he had served. He spoke fluent Urdu and had deep understanding of Indian history. He was one of very few British senior officers who could say that when leaving India, the Indian’s serving with him actually wept because of the extraordinary lengths he undertook to appreciate their culture.

Powell saw and practised a post-colonial respect for the Indian culture remarkably both before Indian Independence, and before the United Nations and the global policy of self-determination of colonial peoples in the 1960s was in full flow.

Powell’s sentiments have been appreciated by some Ugandan Asians arriving into Britain in the 1970s. Some of them are aware of how their anglicanised colonial upbringing, in contrast to some of the deeper rooted religious fervour of their sub-continent ethic Indian and Pakistan counterparts, has led them to greater success in Britain.

They, as many others now, see that multiculturalism has resulted in losses of gainful opportunities that would have come with assimilation for their ethnic and foreign counterparts. More importantly multiculturalism has hindered for many a new arrival, regardless of ethnicity, the ability to understand and then contribute to traditional British culture.

Multiculturalism is also the most disgusting statement of contempt for British history and culture- it fosters the idea that British culture cannot be practised exclusively on British soil. This latter aspect weakens our national identity and, in turn, our country.

Multiculturalism is a blessing for any racist who believes that the ability to assimilate and understand British culture is racially restricted. This is a view that would have, absurdly, precluded Professor Powell’s study of the ancient world on the basis that he was not a Roman or a Greek.

With Cameron’s multicultural speech in mind it is time that we stop hounding men such as Honeyford and Powell. Men who understood the problems of mass-immigration without assimilation.

Only then will we be able to protect, and support, our national identity and the long rooted cultural traditions of our country. This is pressingly needed as a result of Labour’s thirteen year open-door immigration policy which has exacerbated the assimilation problem to no end.