Et Tu, Suella

 

What on earth motivates a Buddhist woman, a KC no less, and the offspring of first generation economic migrants herself, to make a Tory party conference speech as Home Secretary that echoes so strongly the 'Rivers of Blood' speech made by Enoch Powell in 1968? It beggars belief that someone, only her own generation away from people - her parents - seeking to find a better life in the UK in the 1960s: the very kind of migrants she now deems it necessary to demonize in her appalling diatribe to conference this week, could conceive ideas such as these. I simply don't see how she reconciles her views with her family's history, her religion, or even her work as a barrister. Doesn't compute. I quote from Powell's speech directly, and I challenge anyone to refute the parallels with Braverman's diatribe; or indeed not to see the rank hypocrisy, cloistered self-entitlement and class-blinkered attitude that informs her thinking:

Powell, talking of a conversation he'd had with a constituent of his, and whom he quoted as saying: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." '... here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman [my italics], who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English* history. 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. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.'

For God's sake, have we achieved so little in over half a century? And this is the woman who says multiculturalism has failed. Wake up...

*This also begs so many questions - speaking from the Celtic fringe, as I do - and let's face it, what on earth is 'English' anyway, if not a random hybrid of Germanic, Roman, Nordic, Gallic and Celtic bloodlines garnered through thousands of years of colonization from outwith this archipelago we call home...