Enoch Powell Quotes
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.
Powell, J. Enoch. Speech to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, Birmingham, 20 Apr. 1968. Printed in Powell, J. Enoch. Freedom and Reality. Elliot Right Way Books, 1969, p. 283.
Although generally a supporter of immigration, he began to oppose it when the very large numbers of immigrants who were ethnically and culturally different began to enter the United States. Northern Italians were OK but the Southern Italians were from a different social class. German Jews had made great contributions to America but the Russian Jews were peasants and serfs. Polish immigrants also. Walker was worried that for the first time in America there would be a social class division as the historical difference between rich and poor in America he believed was within ethnic groups and not between them.
Most of us are surprised that such an enlightened leader as Franklin could have such a strong anti-immigrant bias. Franklin was a strong supporter of immigration as the economic characteristic of America at the time was a plethora of land and a dearth of labor. But Franklin was a cultural chauvinist of the first order.
After the 6 Day War, Israel was in control of the West Bank.
This was a tragic prediction for some as it was used as a theoretical reason for little intervention in the Irish famine a few decades later. The then population density is exceeded by many countries today.
See {621891} for a similar view.
John Enoch Powell MBE was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).
