Words That Apparently Have Come Back To Haunt Us.

[anotheoldgit]

/// ‘The indigenous population found themselves made strangers in their own country, their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition.’ ///

A recent statement made by someone who agrees that mass immigration on the scale that we have witnessed it in this country creates many problem?

No, it was part of Enoch Powell's controversial speech 1968 "Rivers of Blood"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2534353/Basic-principle-Enochs-Rivers-Blood-speech-right-says-Nigel-Farage.html

[anotheoldgit]

The thread above,

*** Senior Met. Officer To Be Taken Off The Stephen Lawrence Murder Investigation. ***

It isn't all that difficult.

[Baldric]

Well I can see why you drew attention to it,
It does appear to need a little help!

[Zacs-Master]

Let's take this back to basics:

The indigenous population found themselves made strangers in their own country. Completely untrue of Britain. Please note it states 'country' AOG, so please don't start to cite cities like Birmingham.

wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth. Completely untrue. And I doubt it ever will be the case.

their children unable to obtain school places. If they are, that's more to do with stupid catchment areas than any take over bid by an imaginary invasion.

homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition. Some inner city areas have certainly been taken over but certainly not 'beyond all recognition'.

So you and Mr Farage (no surprise there) are both wrong.

[emmie]

so it;s not the case that in certain boroughs in the capital, white people are in the minority, only throw that in because that seems to have happened in the last few years, and some towns, cities even, Asians predominate, that black people are being outstripped in the population stakes by Asians, that West Indians are being supplanted by Africans,
that Islam is second only to Christianity if you want to boil it down to that, that this country has changed out of all recognition, in a relatively short space of time. No country stands still, population changes, as to our involvement in the eradication of the indigenous population in Australia, were we the only ones to settle there? i also ask because it seems to me that this gets sidetracked into its all our fault.
if we were all brown coloured there would still be tension, culture religious differences, you only have to look at a country that is mostly brown folks.

[emmie]

one distant relative works for a school, they have had no choice but to accommodate rafts of Polish children, this is not in the capital, they had no budget for it, but had no choice. As other schools in the area had to do.

[FredPuli43]

AOG, since you refer to it, you might as well read the speech. Third paragraph from the end, we read " with foreboding, like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood"

Not 'rivers', true, but 'the river Tiber' but it appears that, subject to that, the misquotation and the quotation amount to the same. By "the Roman" he must mean Virgil giving the words of the Sibyl,but that's a convenient precis

[youngmafbog]

It really depends on the area you live.

without doubt, in some areas enoch had the right idea.

[FredPuli43]

Typo, just spotted. Cumae, not Cunae. The point about 'the Roman' saying about the Tiber is that it was said by a Sibyl from Cumae. She was Greek. Cumae was at Naples, then a Greek city

[emmie]

interesting this, as others have said he never said anything at all along the lines of Rivers of Blood, though of course for reasons its now known as that

nor did he say anything about the black man one day having the whip hand, that was told to him by one of his constituents, at least according to this, perhaps he repeated the chaps remarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech

[LazyGun]

He recounted a claimed conversation with an alleged constituent ( not an uncommon invention in political speeches, so we have no actual proof this constituent actually existed, or whether Enoch had invented him as a rhetorical device) when he used the phrase regarding the "whip hand", and Enoch was obviously and self-evidently sympathetic to the sentiment.

That vision has not materialised.

[emmie]

so you are assuming Powell was lying for political gain
"

Powell recounted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier. Powell said that the man told him: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country… I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas." The man finished by saying to Powell: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."[5] Powell went on:

[LazyGun]

No, emmie, I am not "assuming that he was lying for political gain".

I am saying that it is not unknown for politicians to lie, dissemble or just plain embellish/exaggerate for political gain, and we have no means of independent corroboration of Enochs tale.

Aside from that, Enoch was self evidently sympathetic to the claimed constituents view - and that cassandra-like prophecy has not come to pass.

[bednobs]

love the irony that "the constituent" wo is worried about immigration planned to become an immigrant himself!

[Zeuhl]

Powell's speech should we recalled and reviewed at regular intervals.

It is a good demonstration of the pitfalls inherent in predictions and hysterical scaremongering.

[FredPuli43]

emmie, he said nothing along the lines of rivers of blood ? Is saying that 'with foreboding' he sees, like the Roman. 'the river Tiber foaming with much blood' saying nothing 'along the lines of' 'rivers of blood' ? The Roman, or rather the Greek, was prophesying the consequences of outsiders coming in, so the context was right for Powell's purpose. That's no surprise. Powell had been a professor of Classics and was quoting from one of the great works of classical literature

[emmie]

may i ask how many people in Britain would know anything at all about Roman history, historians, and allusions to these words, unless one is a scholar and some not even then.

[sandyRoe]

Didn't Powell invent a story about an old lady chased from her home by 'coloured' people pushing dog turds through her letterbox?

[Zeuhl]

/how many people in Britain would know anything at all about Roman history, historians, and allusions to these words/

Well, enough for 'Rivers of blood' to enter common parlance as a supposed consequence of immigration

So Powell's literary allusion achieved its purpose.

[emmie]

half a dozen on here perhaps, i doubt very much many would know what he was alluding to, as you say he was a classical scholar. wasn't the tag line of rivers of blood attached by the media, the newspapers who picked it up.

[emmie]

only time will tell if he was remotely right, some don't care anyway.