THEY SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ENOCH.

There was a most interesting juxtaposition of items on Radio 4 yesterday lunchtime when a talk by Jim Naughtie about the life of Enoch Powell was followed by a news story concerning the 2011 census.

As many will be aware, Enoch Powell was a man of strong convictions and unpopular views, at least amongst his political brethren. In 1968 he made a speech about immigration which caused huge anger and effectively ended his political career, not because what he said was wrong but because it was not in line with the liberal thinking of that time. Powell expressed serious concerns about the impact of mass immigration on our society and spoke against 'anti-discrimination' legislation which was then before Parliament. He warned that a continuation of the immigration being experienced at that time, which was much less than we have seen in more recent years, allied to the continuing growth of communities derived from these immigrants, would lead to serious imbalances in our society and implied that civil unrest might follow. At the time, he was roundly condemned by the intelligensia and, even today, his 'Rivers of Blood' speech is frequently misquoted and misinterpreted by those with a left-wing bias.

Immediately after Naughtie's biographical piece on Powell's life, came the 1 o'clock news, which included an item on the initial results of the 2011 census. Apparently, the population of England and Wales showed a greater increase between 2001 and 2011 than had ever been experienced before, somewhere in the region of 7% in the 10 year period. This increase was partly attributable to greater longevity but seems to have been largely due to the effects of immigration and general increases in the numbers of immigrant-derived communities. The enormous strain that this change is placing on our society is all too evident from the increasing emphasis places on all matters racial.

When Powell spoke in 1968, the number of recent immigrants in our society was small. In my own family's area, a coloured face was rarely seen and I recall the surprise when a boy of West Indian origin turned up at my secondary school, not that he was treated as being particularly different, neither was he discriminated against in any way. Since that time, the same area has become largely dominated by immigrant families; to revisit the area today is to trek through an alien world, one that has nothing in common with the place of my youth and is unrecognizable to me. Such change has been replicated across large swathes of our country with the major cities particularly affected; many now have areas where the local population is predominantly immigrant in origin and where the common language and customs are anything but English.

Whether or not Powell was right in his predictions of possible civil unrest, he was certainly right about the potential for growth in the immigrant population, a potential which successive governments have tried to ignore and even to hide from the native population. Powell was vilified for suggesting that the level of immigration should be reduced and even reversed; today, at least some of our politicians are saying these same things. Sadly, they are 40 years too late for their words to be of any use.