Enoch Was Right

“Rivers of Blood” is a misnomer. It should be called the “Preventable Evils” speech. Enoch Powell said forestalling preventable evils was the “supreme function of statesmanship,” and warned that Great Britain was importing racial conflict: “That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic . . . is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.”

The government didn’t listen. The British let in non-whites and now face bitter racial division and endless an endless war against “racism.” The annual Stephen Lawrence Day combats “institutional racism.” State broadcaster BBC discriminates against whites. Leftist violence and government repression suppress nationalists.

Enoch Powell. (Credit Image: © PA Wire via ZUMA Press)

One practitioner of the resulting anarcho-tyranny is London mayor Sadiq Kahn. In a column for The Guardian, he said it’s “un-British” to welcome President Trump because “our values” — “our hard won rights and freedoms” must be defended “from the rise of the far right.”

Rights and freedoms? No — censorship, surveillance, and sharp limits on the freedoms of speech, association, and self defense. Great Britain has more surveillance cameras per capita than any other country but China, and Mayor Khan wants to regulate “hate speech” even more tightly. He attacks President Trump and Twitter trolls, but knife crime, burglary, and murders are all on the rise. London is both Orwellian and chaotic.

It’s changing in other ways, according to comedian John Cleese, who says the capital is “no longer an English city.” Mayor Khan to retorted that “diversity is our strength” and said Mr. Cleese was “in character as Basil Fawlty,” a conservative buffoon. British satirists such as Monty Python and Harry Enfield (another comedian accused of racism) used to lampoon the British Establishment. Today’s establishment can’t take the heat.

The British media scorned Mr. Cleese. The television show “Good Morning Britain” hosted a panel that mostly criticized him. Activist Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu declared that “Britishness is not determined by the color of my skin.” It’s about “integration and inclusion.” Of course, Dr. Mos-Shogbamimu promotes intersectionality, hates Brexit, and wants diversity on British banknotes.

Black Labour MP David Lammy piled on. “I am as English as you mate,” he tweeted to Mr. Cleese. “Deal with it.” Mr. Lammy’s career highlights include calling Oxford a “bastion of white, middle class, southern privilege” and saying the school was “failing badly” because it didn’t have enough blacks. He also wants an “ethnically representative judiciary and magistracy.”

Mr. Lammy compared Eurosceptic Tories to Nazis — and later said his comments weren’t “strong enough.” “I’m an ethnic minority,” he once said to explain why he doesn’t like the German Alternative for Deutchland. Mr. Lammy clearly sees himself as black first, British second.

Mr. Cleese has muddled views. He criticized political correctness, defended cultural preference, and expressed nostalgia for historic English culture, denounced “guilt by association,” and suggested race is biological. But he also groveled.

Another British icon, the singer known as Morrissey, is more explicitly political. He isn’t conservative, but his work is occasionally identitarian. In “Irish Blood, English Heart,” he yearns to be “standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or partial.” “National Front Disco” is about friends and family mourning that they “lost our boy” to nationalism, but the song explains the yearning of idealists who are homesick for a country they never knew: “There’s a country, you don’t live there, but one day you would like to, and if you show them what you’re made of, oh, then you might do.” Whether young nationalists are tragic heroes or deluded losers, Morrissey is a better guide to their motivations than most journalists.

Recently, Morrissey wore a badge for the nationalist political party For Britain during a media appearance and explained the party wasn’t racist or fascist. In response, Spillers Records in Cardiff — the oldest record store in Britain — stopped stocking his music. Merseyrail, a British commuter train, banned Morrissey ads because they did not reflect “its values.” (Morrissey also made a stink by mentioning Faith Goldy at a concert in Toronto.)

Morrissey was a counter-culture icon. By-the-numbers leftist musician Billy Bragg says Morrissey, a onetime member of The Smiths, is “betraying those fans, betraying his legacy, and empowering the very people Smiths fans were brought into being to oppose.” Fans are not “created” for a political agenda, and Mr. Bragg doesn’t seem to realize he is now part of the humorless establishment rather than a rebel.

“Diversity” means conflict in Britain, just as it does everywhere else. David Lammy and Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu claim to be British when it’s convenient, but campaign against British tradition and history. They insult dissenters like John Cleese or Morrissey. Muslim Mayor Khan defines British “values.”

Enoch was right: Mass non-white immigration doomed Great Britain to conflict. The cities are crime-ridden, the surveillance dystopian, whites learn shame and non-whites learn resentment. And South Africa shows that even after whites surrender, there will be no “unity” or “equality.”

The way to win the “diversity” game is not to play it. If Britain had heeded Enoch Powell, some would have cried “racism,” but today there would be far fewer cries of “racism.” Poland and Hungary today face cries of “racism” precisely because they see what is happening in places like Britain.

The preventable evil took root. The struggle to remove it will be hard. Before the fight can begin, the British must recognize they have a right to exist. They have a right to their homeland. “England for the English” — and that doesn’t include David Lammy.