Tory agrees with Powell on immigration—but will he stand by his guns?

(UPDATE: Nigel Hastilow has already stepped down as Tory parliamentary candidate, before even going to the meeting with the party chairwoman to which he had been summoned. What a jerk! What did he think would happen when he wrote a column saying that Enoch Powell was right? Was this fool born yesterday? Is he not aware of what happens to people, especially Tory politicians, the moment they criticize immigration seriously? If he wanted to challenge the liberal race orthodoxy of Britain, then he should have been prepared to challenge it. And if not, he should have stayed away from the subject. But to come out with a simple, true statement that immigration has vastly transformed Britain, and then resign the moment he came under attack, accomplishes nothing but to strengthen the liberal race orthodoxy and further crush the spirits of the already crushed British people. If Hastilow’s moronic performance had resulted in his death, instead of just his resigning from his candidacy, he would be a winner of the Darwin Award.)

A Conservative parliamentary candidate, Nigel Hastilow, has written a newspaper column saying that Enoch Powell “was right” on immigration, and has instantly landed himself in hot water. Hastilow wrote:

Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right.”

Enoch … was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically.

A Labor government official has said that Hastilow’s comments reveal the “racist underbelly” of the Conservative party. (Isn’t that lovely, comparing human beings to disgusting lizards?) He has also been criticized by Conservative Party higher-ups and called to an urgent meeting with Caroline Spelman, the party chairwoman, to “explain himself.”

At least initially, however, Hastilow seemed to be holding his ground:

Hastilow later said his views were in line with party policy and reflected the views of many people in the West Midlands.

“Uncontrolled immigration will do this country great damage,” he told the Observer. “In the last 10 years we have had more or less uncontrolled immigration.”

Let’s hope that Hastilow not only stands by his position, but that he does much more, namely that he challenges the current tyrannical orthodoxy which silences any debate on the most fundamental issue facing Britain. It’s that orthodoxy that should be on the firing line here, not Hastilow’s agreement with Enoch Powell’s true statement that immigration would change Britain. THAT’s the way to turn the issue around. If Hastilow is stripped of his candidacy, so be it. The ONLY way to stop this horror is for people to start opposing it.

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Bill writes from England:

Yes, it is asking too much to believe that this chap didn’t know the score—one strike and your out. So why did he take a dive before anyone laid a glove on him?

Maybe he is plant or been “got at” in order to destabilise Cameron’s get tough on immigration stance, which started last week.

Bert R. writes:

You may be interested to know that the Guardian CIF apparently has the speech given by the Enoch Powell, MP, to a meeting of the Stretford Young Conservatives, 21 January 1977.

… Throughout the last twenty years, locally at first, then nationally, one political subject has been different from all the rest in the persistence with which it has endured and the profound and absorbing preoccupation which it has increasingly held for the public. This is all the more remarkable because of the sedulous determination with which this subject has been kept, as far as possible, out of parliamentary debate, and the use which has been made of every device�from legal penalty to trade union proscription�to prevent the open discussion and ventilation of it. No social or political penalty, no threat of private ostracism or public violence, has been spared against those who have nevertheless continued to describe what hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens daily saw and experienced and to voice the fears for the future by which those fellow citizens were haunted. The efforts that were made during the 1930s to silence, ridicule, or denounce those who warned of the coming war with the fascist dictatorships and who called for the peril to be recognized and met before too late, provide but a pale and imperfect precedent.

In all this suppression more than one powerful motive can be seen at work. On the one hand there is the primitive but widespread superstition that if danger is not mentioned, it will go away, or even that it is created by being identified and can therefore be destroyed again by being left in silence. Akin to this is the natural resentment of ordinary people, but especially of politicians, at being forced to face an appalling prospect with no readily procurable happy ending. The custom of killing messengers who bring bad news is not confined to the kings and tyrants of antiquity or of fiction. On the other hand there are at work the dark motives of those who desire the catastrophic outcome which they foresee. All round the world in various forms the same formula for rending societies apart is being prepared and applied, by ignorance or design, and there are those who are determined to see to it that Britain shall no longer be able to escape. I marvel sometimes that people should be so innocently blind to this nihilism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2007 03:05 PM | Send