The Shofar is the ancient trumpet which called the people of God to prayer, repentance, sacrifice and war.

RIVERS OF BLOOD - 70 YEARS ON

22nd April 2008

Just 40 years ago, on 22nd April 1968, the late Enoch Powell MP told a meeting in his Wolverhampton constituency that Britain 'must be mad' to allow 50,000 dependents of Commonwealth immigrants to settle every year in Britain .  He said enacting legislation like the Race Relations Bill was 'to risk throwing a match onto gunpowder' and described Britain as a nation 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre'.

Mr Powell quoted a constituent who said that 'in fifteen or twenty years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.'  In a speech replete with Biblical and Classical imagery and quotation, Mr Powell warned that there would be forces working against integration which would begin as 'a cloud no bigger than a man's hand' that 'can so rapidly overcast the sky'.  'As I look ahead,' said Mr Powell, ' I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'

Enoch Powell was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet and became a political pariah.  The race relations industry which he was so afraid would exacerbate the problems he saw grew into a Behemoth granting money in patronising fashion to favoured projects of its subservient immigrant client groups.  The same philosophy exists today.  The Government's only answer to Muslim extremism is to hurl cash at it in the belief the money indeed answereth all things.

The so-called race riots  of the 1980s, in Bristol , Toxteth, Brixton and Birmingham seemed to prove that 'Enoch was right'.  But they came and went and the West Indian population, although still over-represented in certain areas, has greatly assimilated.  Whether race relations money helped or hindered might depend on one's point of view.

African Christians also quickly became part of the indigenous culture, enriching it as they came.  Amongst the Asians, Sikhs appear to have mixed in, even as they try to keep their culture intact, whereas middle-caste Hindus have simply got on with what they do best, which is opening shops and making money.  Christians from Asia, like those from the Caribbean and Africa , have brought nothing but good to these shores, and many tell how let down they feel by what they thought was the Christian country they were coming to.

Which leaves the Muslims.  Even the mention of Islam shows how wrong Enoch Powell was to see the problem as one of colour.  He should have known better, but like many of his time he was a religious Christian but a cultural atheist.  Parliament had only the year before he spoke passed the Abortion Act and the Sexual Offences Act.  Innocent human life had been further devalued by the abolition of the death penalty just two years earlier.  The Theatres Act would abolish censorship in the year Mr Powell was speaking, whilst the Divorce Reform Act would blow away the Christian legal basis to marriage the year after.  Even while he was speaking of a nation heaping up its own funeral pyre, secularists in government and the civil service were, like the Mole Man of Hackney, just as busily undermining its very foundations.  The problem then, as now, was never black, largely Christian, faces walking about the streets, it was already white atheist backsides sitting in the corridors of power.

But even if Enoch Powell had been as far-sighted as the Christian campaigners who were to initiate the 1970s Festival of Light, he would never have seen the rise of militant Islam.  The seeds were already there in the Muslim Brotherhood, but it was only 9-11 which thrust the activities of Brotherhood derivative Al-Quaeda into the limelight.  Nevertheless, the Festival of Light, to whose legacy Christian Voice must aspire to succeed, knew that it would be the abandoning of our Christian heritage, rather than black immigration, which would lead to the destruction of Britain .

Today, as then, it is not against flesh and blood which Christians wrestle, but against spiritual wickedness in high places.  The wickedness being enacted, anti-life embryology, the destruction of our Christian constitution and so on, shows secularism to be a jealous devouring god which allows no dissent.  Yet even now, Islam is loitering in the wings of the political stage, and secularists have no answer except to use the old race relations model of hurling money in the hope of appeasing it.

But it will not work.  Islam, like fire, will never say 'enough'.  Unless Christianity is re- asserted as the faith of this realm, and quickly, Muslims will try to substitute Islam as the faith of these Islands .  Secularism is powerless to resist Islam.  Secularist politicians, as we have so clearly seen in the establishment response to Islamic terrorism, don't have a clue what they are dealing with.  Secularism also leaves a spiritual vacuum at the heart of government and nature, as we know, hates a vacuum. 

If present birth-rates amongst Muslims continue, and there is no sign of Muslims becoming secularised to the extent that they adopt the anti-child contraceptive mentality of the rest of us, then they will be in a majority within 40 years.  But the experience of Tower Hamlets shows that the vacuum could easily be filled ten years before that.  Even at 30% of the population, Muslims will want power and they will get 'the whip hand' as Mr Powell's constituent put it, over black, brown and white alike.  Then, if they gain a majority in Parliament, they will want to impose Sharia.

At that point, which I suggest could be in thirty years' time, the majority may well decide to defend their desire not to live under Islam by force of arms.  Whose side the Police and Armed Forces will be on in such a conflict is anyone's guess.  The European Union will be powerless to come to the rescue, even if it is still in existence that far in the future.  Germany will be facing the same Islamic problem.

It could of course be that the EU will already have blown apart with or without bloodshed.  Eastern European immigration is now leading to pressures on British health facilities, housing, schooling and benefits, whilst rival gangs from the Baltic to the Balkans are stretching police resources beyond the limit.  Enoch Powell never foresaw that ingredient in the mix.  But if one country, Britain perhaps, were to call time, secede and take back its natural resources, which in our case would most visibly mean our fishing grounds, there could be retaliatory EU naval action which could easily escalate into full-scale war.

So either from the EU or from Islam there is trouble looming.  It could easily become external war or that most bestial of monsters, civil war.  We must pray for national repentance, because only God in Jesus Christ can save us, and He will only do so if we turn to Him in our despair and cry out of the darkness for His mercy.  Christians must take courage and confidence in the Gospel and in the rule of Christ and pray and work for His Kingdom, in earth as in heaven.  God has not forgotten mercy, but time is running out.  None of us wants to say, 30 years hence, 70 years after his Wolverhampton speech, that in a peculiar sort of way, Enoch was right.

Please see: The Heart of a Stranger