Some choice Youtube comments:
* Would you like to backdown? No.
Would you like to backdown? No, not really no.
Would you like to denounce your past colleagues? No.
Would you like to renounce political heresy? No, back off!
Totally biased, marxist interview.
* Frost (in 1969) tries to ridicule Powell’s figures that, on present trends (i.e. trends of 1969) there would be around 8% to 10% of the population in Britain of immigrant origin by around the year 2000. Well, that’s precisely what has happened.
* The progressive left wing dominated mainstream media have brainwashed the people of Britain into total submission over the last two decades. We are slowly approaching the point of no return & should the people fail to wake up & vote it out at the ballot box then our children will have their freedom and culture erased.
* Frost got thrashed. Both during the interview, and retroactively throughout the decades that have since vindicated many of Powell’s suppositions.
* Powell: Brilliant: What I would give for a leader like him today. As a White British heterosexual male I have experienced being treated differently to others just for that reason. I fear for my children 9+ 8, who are now members of an ethnic minority within their own age group, as White British Children now make up less than 50% of Britain’s primary school pupils. Why was this man so vilified, why was he not listened to, was this the beginning of the being right is no excuse, telling the truth is no defence.
* It may have been a better show if the audience member who challenged Powell toward the end and Frost had changed places throughout. As Powell points out, Frost does seem unclear about whether his task is to interview Powell, debate Powell, or make speeches. Certainly it’s desirable for an interviewer to challenge his subject, but Frost doesn’t seem to understand when to cease pressing a point, and consequently Powell bests him repeatedly. I doubt that would have happened if the interviewer had been, say, Mike Wallace.
* The British Establishment Media Networks still enlist their biased audiences just like the BBC do even today some things never change. Filthy dirty sniper tactics from Frost trying to set Enoch up on National TV with misquotes and lying about the dockers and Enoch this country owes you a huge debt of gratitude for being truthful and destroying the politically correct trash spewed out by the liberal establishment media. The media are still pedalling the same old politically correct garbage today.
* Frost later goes on to bait Powell on whether he believes that there are differences in intellectual potential… TWICE. Powell answered him TWICE. He didn’t fucking know nor care because it wasn’t relevant to the changing ethnicity/cultures etc of British identity. Powell wasn’t ducking an awkward question. Indeed, Frost only thought that he landed a few blows. Frost looked stupid in Powell’s presence.
Powell was lambasted because he spoke of the unspeakable. He was honest to his own detriment (political suicide). He was in a political, social and intellectual league of his own. Grossly misunderstood and misquoted.
Was Enoch Powell right?
Yes, in principle. But he underestimated the influx and subsequent progeny. But Enoch also suspected that this would be the case!
An honest politician that told it like it was. Certainly a man before his time… and ours!!!
* Each to his own and all that, but David Frost did have sex with a lot of black women, and his sexual inclinations might explain his approval of mass uncontrolled immigration.
* This is a great interview. People unfamiliar with Powell outside of the “Rivers of Blood” speech whereupon he was painted as some hostile raving loon would be well served to view it.
Here is a serious, admirable man and politician. Measured, thoughtful, affable, appreciative of language and determined to ably represent his constituents.
Worthy of note is that Frost nearly went through his Birmingham speech line by line to nitpick over singular words used. This shows both how far downhill political reportage has come in that Frost expected an audience to sit through such an exercise as well as showing the adversarial milieu in which Powell found himself at the time. After all, Frost seems to have given him a far more even handed time than most journalists at the time.
Lastly it would be interesting to note the predictions of Powell’s constituents which he recounts in the interview in places like Wolverhampton (?) and which Frost scoffs at, and the actual condition of such places today.
* The prissiness of Frost and an audience member over language and “inflammatory” terms is interesting. It shows how an emphasis on “hate speech” pre-dates our era of political correctness. I think it was the idea that Hitler used words to cast a magic spell over the Germans that made people like Frost so terrified of words and phrases.
* What it shows is the power of the media to the point of the media as the fifth estate. The absolute disrespect Frost is allowed, cutting Powell off, wise cracks, jabs and snide remarks, purposefully misconstruing his words, throwing out insinuations and associations. Whenever Powell made a point, Frost could throw out a joke and his audience of minions would laugh as if on cue. As Solzhenitsyn asked at Harvard, who elects them and whose interest do they serve?
* Why was Robert Frost a big deal? Because he worked for a company that had one of a handful of broadcasting licences and the towers and cameras to exploit that licence. That’s a pretty shabby claim to authority when you think about it.
With not one word changed, Powell’s speeches on Lords reform, some delivered half a century ago, could be delivered today. This is because his analysis was not dependent on day-to-day events and a transient national mood. His approach was based on first principles, extraordinary learning and a rigorous understanding of the British constitution.
It was this intellectual clarity which caused him to oppose British entry to what was then known as the Common Market. At the start of 1971, during the final stage of negotiations, Powell took himself round Europe speaking in Turin (in Italian), Frankfurt (in German) and Lyon (in French). As he remarked: “There is no more ignorant vulgarity than to treat language as an impediment to intercourse, which education, habit, travel, trade, abolish and then remove.” He used these speeches to warn his French, Italian and German audiences that the British tradition of national sovereignty and parliamentary democracy was incompatible with European economic and political union.
He warned: “A common currency means common government; the one is meaningless and impossible without the other.” This remark defines today’s European predicament. On foreign policy he was equally clear-sighted, arguing for a defence strategy based rigorously on the national interest. He was against the American invasion of Vietnam from the start: “The point is that the Americans do not live in south-east Asia, whereas the North Vietnamese and their neighbours do.” On the same principle it can be assumed that Powell would have opposed the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya interventions.
He demanded equal treatment for enemy combatants, as his speech condemning the Conservative government cover-up of the Hola Camp massacre, in which Britain killed 11 Mau Mau rebels, shows. Powell condemned parliamentary colleagues who called the Mau Mau “sub-human”. The Labour politician Denis Healey called Powell’s contribution (delivered at 1.15 am) “the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard”, with “all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes”. His cold and lucid anger could equally well be applied to Guantanamo Bay and the other illegal detention facilities and torture centres around the world today.
But now we must come to Enoch Powell’s notorious speeches on immigration, which have defined his posthumous reputation and established his pariah status. He challenged the culture of denial that surrounded the subject even then, predicting that the immigrant community would rise much faster than official statistics suggested. His claims were denounced as alarmist and irresponsible, even by The Daily Telegraph. As Tom Bower shows in a well-researched and fair-minded essay, Powell’s projections turned out to be much nearer the truth than the official ones.
But he was wrong on every other point. The bloodshed he forecast has not occurred, while his language was dreadful. He described the fate of an elderly widow who “finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes out to the shops, she is followed by children, charming wide-eyed piccaninnies.” Journalists searched for this woman, but she could not be found. Questioned by David Frost on television, Powell acknowledged that he had never spoken to the woman, and could not even vouch for her existence.
The case for the defence goes like this: at the time immigration was surrounded by a culture of silence, and Powell was doing no more than bravely voicing the concerns (and using the language) of his constituents. He was no racist, as even opponents like Michael Foot acknowledged, and as his stance over the Hola Camp suggests. And let’s not forget that Powell, who had a brilliant war, risked his life for five years in the fight against fascism. But I am certain that the Conservative Party was right to drive him out for his remarks, which had the malign effect that no mainstream politician dared raise the issue of immigration for a generation.
For some, this single episode has been enough to damn his memory, and that can be understood. But Enoch Powell was a man of extraordinary integrity. He walked alone. To quote the late Daily Telegraph commentator TE Utley, doing his best to stand up for Powell in the wake of the notorious “rivers of blood” speech of April 1968: “He does not believe that politics is a hand-to-mouth affair, a succession of expedients to meet unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances.” He was never distracted by the tyranny of the present, and was one of the last politicians prepared to resign or to refuse office on a point of principle or out of loyalty to friends.
Mr Duncan Smith writes that “it is Powell’s belief in the importance of the democratic nation state as the source of political power and his fight to ensure the British people did not leave their sovereignty to supranational institutions which carry the greatest weight”. It is this conflict between the European Union and the nation state, clarified so brilliantly by Powell more than 40 years ago, which continues to animate British politics. Do not be surprised if in due course Mr Duncan Smith were to follow the example of Enoch Powell and resign over the Coalition’s stance on Europe.
