British politician Enoch Powell was a distinguished soldier and a fine classical scholar known for his oratorial skills and mastery of several languages. But he was a rabble-rouser or demagogue when it came to talking about immigration and race. Powell was sacked from the shadow Cabinet of his Conservative Party after he made a hard-hitting speech attacking the government's immigration policy. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood,” he said addressing a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20, 1968. It was this “rivers of blood” speech that ended a promising political career. Powell was drawing the attention of his countrymen to the supposed dangers of unchecked immigration. Britain, he said, had to be mad to allow in 50,000 dependents of immigrants each year. He likened it to watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. Even though Powell died in 1998, his ghost seems to be influencing the current debate in UK on asylum seekers and migrants. For example, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean.” This was a reference to the recent refugee exodus to Europe. His Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is worried over the threat posed by “marauding” migrants. Not to be outdone, the newspaper Daily Mail warned “this tidal wave of migrants could be the biggest threat to Europe since the war.” The Daily Express harps on the migrant “flood.” Even some sections of the British media find the language used by politicians and newspapers dehumanizing and scaremongering. One newspaper pointed out that the word “swarm”, as used by Cameron, echoes a phrase in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf ("promiscuous swarm of foreigners"). The point not to be missed here is that Britain is not one of the main destinations for either refugees or illegal migrants. Almost 200,000 men, women, and children have arrived in Europe this year. Some 2,000 lost their lives trying to reach the continent. But UK has taken in only a fraction of refugees compared with its European neighbors. Last year 25,870 sought asylum in the UK and only 10,050 were accepted. By contrast, Sweden accepted three times as many and Germany had more than 200,000 asylum and new asylum applicants. To be fair, Britain is not the only country where public opinion is increasingly turning against accepting refugees. In France, the National Front led by Le Pen dynasty has been carrying on a campaign against immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The Pegida movement in Germany is hostile to outsiders. Recently there were anti-Islamic protests in the country and Chancellor Angela Merkel had to warn against right-wing populism. Everyone knows what Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party in Holland stand for. In Italy we have Northern League. All these countries will do well to remember that the present refugee crisis is caused by war and the resulting violence and instability in some countries. Neither Britain nor France and their allies can deny the role played by them in most of the wars or military interventions that are forcing large numbers of people in Iraq, Syria and Libya to flee their homes. In the case of Libya, the British and French-led bombing campaign in 2011 led directly to the civil war and social breakdown making the North African nation the main conduit for refugee trafficking from Africa. True, “mainstream” European parties are worried over more extreme parties cutting into their support base. But by becoming more and more extreme themselves, they will be only making themselves more and more irrelevant. Those newspapers that never miss an opportunity to inflame fear and loathing toward migrants, especially Muslims, should realize they are weakening the social fabric of their countries and adding to the fears of ethnic minorities.
