Boris Johnson blames the bombings on ... Enoch Powell

Also in the Daily Telegraph, talented editor / Tory MP / loverboy Boris Johnson writes:

The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are many culprits, and foremost among them is Enoch Powell. As Bill Deedes has pointed out over the years, the problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade [you can read Powell's speech for yourself here and see whether it was a "tirade" or not] against immigration, but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration, and how a multiracial society ought to work.

In the wake of Powell's racist foray, no one had the guts to talk about Britishness, or whether it was a good thing to insist - as the Americans do so successfully - on the basic loyalty of immigrants to the country of immigration.

There's nothing that makes people hate you more than being right. Tories like Johnson and Ferguson are still mad at Powell for being right 37 years ago about the current situation. Powell correctly observed in 1968:

"... people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen”. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical."

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer