"The River Tiber foaming with much blood" - 40 Years Later

Forty years ago Enoch Powell made a speech at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre. Earlier in the week, Powell had said to his friend Clement Jones, who was a journalist at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."

The actual speech is recorded on the Daily Telegraph's website here, should anyone wish to read it. Personally I found it a bit too over dramatic - one, ten or even a hundred constituents' views do not equate to the views of the whole constituency and much less those of the nation. I find Powell's contempt for Heath's view that Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority just as irksome now as I daresay it was to many back in 1968.

Lest I be thought of as completely hypocritical I do not feel that mass immigration into the UK is the cause or the root of any of our problems, nor has it ever been so. People may often whine and whinge about the Somali who arrives at Heathrow with no passport and but one word ("Home" or "House") in his vocabulary but our society is rather uniquely created from a melding of differing cultures, differing views and different religions. The simple fact is, from my own perspective, that I do not believe that this land holds any further promise for me. I believe that the economy is being mishandled by imbeciles on both sides of the House of Commons who have no idea of what they are doing and whose only apparent way out of their predicament is to surtax and to shift blame onto those who are the least likely to complain. In short it is time to vote with ones feet, a good, time-honoured tradition of how one peacefully demonstrates one's contempt for those idiots who would insist on their right to be our lords and masters.