The Times They Are A’ Chaining
Civitas, 20 October 2006
Incensed no arrests followed a demonstration that took place last year in London against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, despite one demonstrator having worn a suicide-belt and others having displayed banners calling for the killing of those who insult their prophet, a 35 year old man from Aberporth draped over his garden-fence a sheet on which he had painted the words: ‘ Kill all Muslims who threaten us and our way of life. Enoch Powell was right’.
Fearful that reprisals might be taken in his in his locality, the man’s neighbour reported him to the police who arrested him and brought him to trial this week on a charge of religiously aggravated disorderly conduct.
In the course of defending his plea of not-guilty, the accused asked his prosecutor whether Jack Straw would be similarly charged for having publicly expressed criticism of Muslim women who wore the niqab in public. His prosecutor reportedly replied the accused’s exhortation had failed to confine its scope to extremists.
Finding him guilty as charged, the presiding magistrate said that what the accused had written on his banner was likely to ‘cause someone distress’.
A remark by a judge at another case heard this week has a bearing on this one. That other case was Ken Livingstone’s successful appeal against the finding of the Adjudication Panel of England that he had brought his office of Mayor into disrepute by having likened to a Nazi concentration camp guard a journalist who had asked him a provocative question, and by then refusing to apologise or withdraw the remark after being told by the journalist that, as a Jew, he had found it particularly offensive.
Finding in favour of Livingstone, the judge presiding over the appeal said: ‘The right of free speech does extend to abuse’.
So, apparently, our right of free speech extends to giving verbal abuse, but not to saying or writing anything that may distress others. Hmm.
That we may no longer be at liberty to upset others by what we say or do– or, at least, that some of us might not be able to upset certain others — seems borne out by the reported arrest this week of a 40-year old man for having worn a black balaclava when out collecting signatures for a petition backing Jack Straw for his remarks. He was apparently arrested because his balaclava had upset members of the public, despite that being his precise reason for wearing it. By seeking to demonstrate such forms of full facial covering do cause consternation in others, he had wanted to show their being worn in public objectionable.
I trust the magistrate who found guilty the man from Aberporth had not, in so doing, been intending to suggest no one any longer may say or write that Enoch Powell was right. It has taken three decades and a lot of innocent bloodshed for the country’s political elite finally to admit that much of what he said about immigration thirty odd years ago was correct, although they still won’t credit him for his prescient insights. Among these are those contained in the following remarks he made back in 1976:
‘The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimilable populations … in the heartland of the state. … The disruption of the homogeneous “we”, which forms the basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a “divided community” take charge and begin to operate… The two active ingredients are grievance and violence.
‘There is one factor which not yet been injected. That factor is firearms and explosives… with the escalating and self-augmenting consequences which we know perfectly well from experience in … other parts of the world. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years: but it will come.
‘At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence. Then follows exploitation by those who use violence of the ascendancy they have thus gained over the majority and over authority. The things goes forward, acting and reacting, until a position is reached in which … compared with those areas, Belfast today will seem an enviable place’.
Had Powell been listened to rather than dismissed in tones of outrage, and had appropriate action been taken at the time, who can possibly doubt that the country would today be a far less divided and dangerous place in which to live?
The political establishment effectively silenced and marginalised Powell in fear he might otherwise upset those about whom he was expressing his concerns.
Are we now to think that today no one may claim that Powell was right lest they cause upset to anyone?
What a strange, un-free, dangerous, and divided country we have allowed ourselves to become.
The modern day Enoch Powell is Mark Steyn. He has the advantage of having a sense of humour, rather than a classical education. Those who wish to see the future must read his book ‘America Alone’. Enoch should have been intelligent enough to know that, given the time and the prevailing circumstances, his words would be twisted to achieve the ends of the enemy of the day: black communist racists. He committed political suicide, which always happens when politicians tell unpopular truths. Mark Steyn is a journalist and as such has more power than Powell had. It is probably too late to avert the demographic disaster that is already under way. Prepare for Dhimmitude ye denizens of England. In many areas, it exists de facto. In some areas it is voluntary; in others inescapable because of ignorance, stupidity, poverty and immorality. Within 20 years it will be universal. And it’s our own fault. It is no good complaining when aliens take advantage of weakness. ‘Twas ever thus. For those who wish to know the predicament of our capital city, read ‘Londonistan’, Melanie Phillips’s latest book. But truth hurts and if you love England get in a stock of analgesics before you burn the midnight oil reading them. In some areas the future is already here – and it is bleak.
Mr East – face West if you care to… Enoch Powell ‘devastated’? Surely not someone like him who, as Health Minister was ACTIVELY responsible for a huge influx of immigrants who were ‘needed’ to work in the National Health Service – well, they were ‘cheap’ weren’t they, Enoch.
His subsequent career was one that had ‘mea culpa’ written all over it. He was just one of that generation of tawdry scum that ‘won’ the Second World War only to deprive subsequent generations of Englishmen of being able to ‘live’ in England.
I would say that Enoch Powell did give an accurate prophecy for what events are shaping our times in comtemporary British society, but his reactionary ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, I do recall, hides his immigration policies of the 1950s with the influx of West Indian immigrants.
His greatest pupil Margaret Thatcher also attempted to carry out his vision. But neither, I believe, understood the British character. We are a very liberal-minded society and will never take any action that deviate from the path to greater prosperity, whether that be mass deportations and the like, because then who would be our taxi drivers, road sweepers? etc.
Although this Muslim veil debate is an obvious attempt by the media to cover for a lack of political news, I do believe it’s an attempt to install the Tories as the middle party with Mr Cameron conveniently taking a middle ‘British’ stance toward pressing domestic policy. With a right wing press in this country, very few real political issues, such as in depth coverage of day to day environmental and energy issues, come to our ears.
I do agree the Muslim arrogance toward their attitude to their fellow man and woman is shocking. They expect the native Briton to bend over backward to accommodate them and their customs. But the veil is a cultural item, NOT RELIGIOUS. To be British should be to dress British, speak English, and respect their adopted or, in most cases in this day and age, native country. I say that, until acceptance of our way of life is universal in Muslim circles, then our charity should be strictly withheld, and that does include the £1100 pay out to the Muslim teaching assistant, a classic example of playing the race and religious card to extort money from the seriously failing system.
Other Britons should be able to have a voice and, as mentioned have been arrested, for using it. Apartheid has arrived in the UK and is here to stay. Would it be better to live in the dream that it’s not there and let the dreamers in Westminster carry on or use the next election to elect realists into power and to take a serious look at society and change of ‘soft’ attitude toward the influx of suppressionists that want only to destroy our way of life and establish a mono-culture regardless of any rational reasoning by 21st century standards.
I was a great fan of Powell in my youth before he made his “Rivers of Blood” speech. He was a wise, classically literate man renowned as a great orator.
It’s just as well he is no longer with us. He would be devastated to see, and baffled by, today’s world.
Incidently, as long as one assumes an ongoing overwhelming native majority, I think he was probably wrong in saying that certain groups of immigrants are unassimilable. I would agree that many generations might pass with much bloodshed along the way before the most difficult to assimilate groups are absorbed, but eventually absorption would be unstoppable.
I just worry a bit about the veracity of the assumption, “an ongoing overwhelming native majority.”