The UK is reeling from the shock of more than a hundred arrests and faces the prospect of more and more protests both for and against racism but let’s make one thing perfectly clear; it may be their problem now, but this is not the fault of the current or even the longstanding previous government. It’s most definitely not the fault of the migrants coming into the UK. The problems there have two root causes, one is the post war policies of immigration and the second compounds this because Britain’s support for the USA’s War on Terror has created so many refugees. A problem the US caused but is geographically exempt from resolving.

This long-standing problem was forecast by Shadow Minister of Defence Enoch Powell in 1968, in a speech media nicknamed “Rivers of Blood”. It got him fired from the Parliamentary front benches; vilified by the establishment as a racist; but hailed as a hero by many people. His Party Leader, Edward Heath apparently never spoke to him again but Margaret Thatcher is on record as supportive

Powell taught himself Greek as a child, because he thought it would help him get to University, he learnt Russian during the war because he thought Russia would enter the war on the allies’ side and become far more important than all other allies, he taught himself Urdu because he thought one day he would be appointed to work in India but, more importantly it became a commonly used language in Birmingham where he was an MP 30 years later and was able to communicate with many of his constituents in their language. He was also as a fluent German speaker who travelled to Germany to rescue several Jewish friends with visas and false passport for them before the War. Hardly the action of a racist!

In 1943 he predicted in a letter to his parents from North Africa where he was serving in the British Army, that after the war, the USA would do everything they could to take away the British empire.: 

"I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America".

In every respect, he was right

He was also Britain’s youngest ever professor at only 24 years of age and taught at Sydney University in Australia where one of his students, Gough Whitlam went on to become Prime Minster. Australians, all know who Gough Whitlam was; he was the Prime Minister of Australia who opened to China several years before Nixon and Kissinger. The CIA disliked him so much they conspired with the British Monarchy to have him removed; if Australians believed they had democracy, that fallacy was completely destroyed.

When the war broke out Powell left Australia and returned to England to enlist as a Private Soldier; when it finished he was a Brigadier. One of only two men in British military history to have done this. He was, in short, quite an extraordinary man.

Powell came from the Midlands, a part of the UK which was flooded with migrants after the Second World War and he recognised that the White population were feeling inundated, entire streets and neighbourhoods were now West Indian, many white people had moved away and only isolated pockets who couldn’t afford to move were left in a region where unemployment was rising and with it, crime.

He foresaw, racial inequality because many white people had money, jobs and better education, he foresaw problems because there were also many white people who didn’t have education and they saw the few available jobs going to the immigrants. Both whites and immigrants were feeling disenfranchised.

Personally, I believe he was right too. He saw that the white population of the country resented the migrants and he also saw that there were no policies to help either side, the government simply made laws at the time that said it was illegal to decline them rental accommodation, jobs, or services because of colour but how does that help Mrs. Cotterill, who lost her husband and two sons in the war and who was forced to rent out rooms in the only home in her entire street that had a white person living in it. When her white tenants moved out because they too felt overwhelmed by the influx of immigrants, she closed up her rooms and lived in reclusive poverty.

In this day and age Mrs. Cotterill would be declared a racist but imagine in the space of less than 15 years, being a white Anglo-Saxon wife and mother in a white Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood in a white Anglo-Saxon country to being alone, living in a street where all your neighbours look different, have different accents and different foods, her sense of alienation is palpable.

Powell may have met with her but most certainly received her letter before crafting his Rivers of Blood speech, he referred to her as an anonymous source who only came to public attention many years later; he recognised her alienation in her own neighbourhood.

In August 1977, I went to Lewisham, I was a 19-year-old police officer, only two months out of the training school and, by late afternoon, I had experienced bricks, petrol bombs and dustbins being thrown at me – our job was to allow a group of mostly Indians and Pakistani residents make a peaceful protest about a lack of safety and security; their kids were getting beaten up regularly, their stores were getting robbed often and they were victims of daily violence and insults. And to prevent it mixing with a larger group of white supremacists who wanted to prevent that protest. It became the worst riot in Mainland Britain for many years.

The National Front came out in force and it was my first experience of seeing the ultra-right – skinheads mostly, who were very nasty people. Their goal was to turn Lewisham into a warzone and they did it. Week after Week I went to the same area for more of the same treatment – Powell’s Rivers of Blood were already on the streets, he said within 50 years, this was within 10 years of his speech.

In April 1981, one Sunday morning, I went to work at my own station and was called back at 1pm for a briefing – go home they said, get a change of uniform and report back here before 4pm. I lived very nearby so I had a meal with my wife and son, said goodbye to them and didn’t see them again for 10 days. I went to Brixton. The 1981 Brixton riots made Lewisham seem like a picnic in the park. More rivers of blood, this time ethnically West Indian and African people protesting police violence against them. The circumstances were different but cycle was continuing.

All of it would have been avoidable with some decent policies – the people protesting were the disenfranchised youth, the children of the original migrants. British by birth, disenfranchised by colour. The National Front and, shamefully, many in the British police felt these usurpers didn’t belong in a white Britain.

No one was asked what they wanted – the white population didn’t get what they wanted, the black, brown and other coloured populations crammed into dense public housing in the inner cities weren’t getting what they wanted but the country got what Enoch Powell had predicted; racial violence.

Post War immigrants came from Britain’s colonies to take up jobs that the British could no longer fulfil due to the wartime losses, places such as the West Indies, where their grandparents were taken as slaves, they came from Africa where their parents had worked the farms and mines of British exploitation, they came from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh where the Brits had employed them as housekeepers and administrators. They may not have liked the British much but they took the jobs, made the country their home and, for the most part became part of the British society we know today.

The immigrants of today are different; they now come from war zones. Desperate people not coming on the promise of jobs and a better life, they come because their homes are destroyed, their families slaughtered and their lands occupied by US and allied military. They are often suspected or even accused of being terrorists, their religion, Islam, which is a religion of peace has been turned by media into a religion of hatred and now, large groups of white supremacists operate openly, recruiting more members online.

This problem isn’t going away. Britain prides itself on democracy and freedom of speech but its education system has let each side of this issue down, unregulated immigration has created a white extremism which new laws are being created to punish – punishment isn’t the approach needed, education is, such massive upheavals in the cultural norms of any nation, any corporation or even any family need preparation, education and time.

Our governments tell us aggression and violence are not the answer and then recruit us into the military so we can be aggressive and violent on a global scale. This is what’s wrong, the example our Western governments give us, contradict the laws they make to control us.

Lewisham was bad, Brixton was a lot worse. Rivers of Blood was predicted by one of the smartest men ever to have sat in Parliament but what he couldn’t have known is that the USA’s War on Terror would unleash a new wave of immigration into a country that has such a poor record of managing it that Rivers of Blood would be an understatement.

Editor's Note:

The views and informations expressed in the article are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect the views of The International. We believe in providing a platform for a range of viewpoints from the left.