The Eyes of Asia

Thanks to Cheradenine Zakalwe

 Can't resist some more Enoch Powell quotes. The prescience almost makes you weep.

Indians and others protested last night that a speech by Mr Enoch Powell yesterday to Southall Chamber of Commerce was dangerously inflammatory and damaging to race relations in an area that contains one of the highest concentrations of Indians in the country. Mr Powell said that Asians posed more of a threat to Britain than Black Power. "Our towns and Cities are being taken over and transformed not by the Caribbean but by Asia". he said. "It is by Black Power that the headlines are caught, and under the shape of the Negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. "Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him the possession of his native land."

...Referring to the example of Detroit, Mr Powell quoted a British planner's writing in a professional journal, who found in particular "the polarization of attitudes and locations, fear, lack of contact between various income groups, diminishing contact between black and white populations, go hand in hand with changing locations". Mr Powell prophesied: "The name of that city a generation ahead could be Bradford or Birmingham or London. Yet it need not be. The power of decision is still in our hands, and that power is a power over numbers; but it is a power which grows weaker as each year goes by and which once lost is never to be had again."

Source: The Times, November 5, 1971