Tebbit: Enoch Powell’s prophecy for Britain was correct
By James Cusick, Westminster Editor
Lord Tebbit, the former chairman of the Conservative Party, has claimed Enoch Powell’s controversial “river of blood” speech in 1968 was a correct prophesy of the climate of fear that Britain is now facing following the two terrorist bomb attacks in London last month.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald, Lord Tebbit claimed Powell’s views were misinterpreted as racist and that Powell’s warning was focused on the dangers of a multicultural British society that would be fed from uncontrolled immigration.
Tebbit’s comments follow on from the views expressed by the current front-runner for the leadership of the Conservatives, David Davis, who said last week that Britain’s pursuit of multiculturalism had been “misplaced” and should now be abandoned.
However Tebbit’s overt backing for a Powellite stance on immigration, shows the extent to which criticism of multiculturalism has become almost mainstream since the London attacks.
Despite Tebbit’s attack on what he calls “the impossibility” of multiculturalism, he also attacks the current state of British culture which he said “was no role model to recommend to anyone in Bradford who looked over their garden fence and was told ‘this is what you have to aspire to’.”
He cites binge drinking, drunken behaviour, yob culture and “15-year-old single mothers pushing prams” as part of the “need to clean up our own act”.
Tebbit in his own Powellite revision, repeated a long-held view that Britain now had to reduce immigration to a trickle or else it “risked turning our cities INTO phpbb_terrorist breeding grounds”.
Tebbit’s entry INTO phpbb_the post-bombing debate over integration comes as the fragile cross-party consensus that has followed the bombings appears to have been shattered.
Following the 12 new proposals announced by the Prime Minister in Downing Street last Friday, Charles Kennedy stated that Tony Blair was trying to introduce new anti-terror measures not based on legal principles but on the current mood of the nation. “You can’t legislate by mood,” the Liberal Democrat leader said.
Although Davis offered broad support for Blair’s proposals, the retiring Tory leader, Michael Howard, accused Blair of using legislation to target key Muslim activists like Abu Qatada and Omar Bakri Mohammed who are likely to become the first Muslims to be extradited to Jordan and Syria under new powers to be given to the Home Secretary Charles Clarke.
Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim council of Britain said Blair’s plan to ban the group Hizb-ut-Tahrir was not the correct solution. He claimed the ban would drive the group underground and would prove counterproductive.
Imran Waheed of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir insisted the group was non-violent and warned the government that if the ban went ahead there would be “serious repercussions”.
Liberty, one of Britain’s leading civil rights pressure groups, said Blair appeared to have learned nothing from recent events. The groups director, Shami Chakrabati, said the Prime Minister “seems to no longer have much truck for fundamental human rights at all … He is playing INTO phpbb_the hands of the terrorists.”
Despite the criticism the Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, insisted the “whole government” was behind Tony Blair and that there was a “very widespread sense in the country that subsequent to July 7, that things have to change.”
07 August 2005
http://www.sundayherald.com/51207