Allgunsblazin wrote:DB10GOONER wrote:A11M11 wrote: I wonder if you people have actually read the speech that he was villified for . I would think you should as many of you would not have been old enough to have heard it first hand. As i said earlier he was diametrically opposite to Heath who was in the same circles as many newspaper owners who in those days had a lot more power in influencing public thoughts and they bought the whole gammut of their power to discredit him. Yes he was a divisive figure and he said a number of things which today in our overly PC world would be unacceptable but you have to put things in the context of things the way they were at the time.
"" It is very good that there are yellow French, black French, brown French. They show that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion.
Don't tell me stories! Muslims, have you gone to see them? Have you watched them with their turbans and jellabiyas? You can see that they are not French! Those who advocate integration have the brain of a hummingbird. Try to mix oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a second, they will separate again.
Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think the French body politic can absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty million, after tomorrow forty? If we integrated, if all the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria were considered French, would you prevent them to settle in France, where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-The-Two-Churches but Colombey-The-Two-Mosques.""
That was a leader of a similar age , Charles de Gaulle a speech he won the man of the year award by Time magazine.
A total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3 ½ million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. ... Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. 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.
If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so. Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.
All who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. ... This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow citizen and another.
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right over their heads.
To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible.
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
De Gualle's speech was more flowery could say more eloquent but essentially the message was the same. It was the way things were in those days . You have to judge the world the way it was , you can't put today's morals on yesterday's happenings.
I was bought up on a North London market , as a child in the 50's & 60's you heard many things following the war, People were jittery , suspicious ,and very protectionist. All Powell did was voice in a speech what was being said on the streets.
He was vilified (rightly) for more than that one speech, mate.
You are quoting a xenophobic and racist speech from 1968 to justify some of the less palatable attitudes around Brexit, excusing that racism because it was a "different time" and because it was similar to stuff "being said on the streets"? You can't see the paradox there? Or how unsavory that is to most right-thinking people? There is plenty of racist things still being said on the streets nowadays, but by ignorant racist scum.
Blaming a country's problems on immigration is the inflammatory cheap shot of the far right, of nazis, of racists. It discounts and ignores the millions of immigrants that work hard, pay taxes and improve the business and cultural and social structure of a country.
Why quote Charles de Gaulle? Two wrongs don't make a right.
I was still playing with my Action Man!
You old sages you!....
Oooh think i've still got my one with the Panzer Commander Uniform and my Eagles Eyes British Para uniform one somewhere (admittedly they were originally my older brothers)
Immigration works brilliantly if it is well controlled, if it doesn't you have the problem of too many people too quickly for Public services to manage and that's the problem we have currently, too few doctors, nurses teachers, carers. Insufficient school places, hospital beds and houses etc.
Immigration is not the problem but un-managed immigration has caused a social disaster in this country and much as i am loath to admit this, it isn't all the Tories fault this was going on under Labour too (I hate all political parties
).
We need to take a step back, cut immigration completely for a few years, work out what we need and go out and actively recruit them, and in the mean time build houses, hospitals, schools etc to accommodate the peoples needs, oh and find the fucking money from somewhere (the few billion we give to the EU per year might be a good start though).....a social utopia, if only.
It might also help if the fcuking MPs stock bickering like children and actually worked out a cohesive plan between all of them for all this mind, you know like they're supposed to be elected to do
