This was our last day and the wind was said to be at hurricane levels. We decided that walking near cliffs in such conditions would be foolhardy, so regretfully we called it a day. It’s been a great walk.
As I mentioned earlier, we will soon bid a sad farewell to three loyal workers. Allow me to pay tribute to them here – although, for security reasons, I will not use their real names.
Mary has run our extensive food programme with a rod of iron, yet with kindness, humour and warmth – a rare combination. She knows every detail of the care homes we support. Home managers tell us that without this essential work, they could not have survived – and collapse would have spelled catastrophe for thousands of pensioners. She will be greatly missed.
Then there’s Yvonne, who more or less founded our “pop up” classes programme. A deeply committed Christian, her dedication and love for this critical work have been remarkable. It’s a miracle she didn’t burn out years ago. ZANE has been privileged to work alongside her.
Finally, Hannah has worked in Bulawayo for 20 years, caring for the needs of pensioners with unmatched skill and dedication. She will be deeply missed, both by those she helps and by her colleagues.
The Price of Political Cowardice
For decades, tens of thousands of young girls across the UK were subjected to sexual abuse on an industrial scale – many of them targeted by grooming gangs, often involving men of predominantly Pakistani heritage.
This abuse, horrific in its scale and cruelty, remained largely hidden from public view for years. Why? The craven social workers, the police and the politicians were frit of being labelled as “bigots” or “racist scum” if they made a fuss. So instead of doing the right thing, they chose to suggest the children – some as young as 10 – had brought it upon themselves. File closed, acute misery hidden and injustice embraced.
The politicians inanely thought (if they thought at all) that if you took a farmer from rural Pakistan – where attitudes towards women and the LGBTQ community can be profoundly conservative – and set him down in a modern British city, then he would adopt liberal, Western values overnight – as if by magic.
This wanton drivel was never included in any of the political parties’ manifestos. If anyone complained, they were instantly labelled “racist”.
As we can’t bring ourselves to deport criminals, the results appear to be irreversible. Did senior politicians really enter politics to be cowards? It’s not as if they weren’t warned about the consequences, but I suppose there are none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear.
Speaking the Unspeakable
In a sermon delivered in January 1977 at St Lawrence Jewry, Enoch Powell warned of the long-term political and social consequences of large-scale immigration. He said, “…the prospective size and distribution of our population of New Commonwealth ethnic origin… cannot be otherwise than destructive of this nation… The basis of my conviction is neither genetic nor eugenic; it is not racial, because… I have never arranged my fellow men on a scale of merit according to their origins. The basis is political. It is the belief that self-identification of each part with the whole is the one essential precondition of being a parliamentary nation. And that massive shift in the composition of the population in… cities of England will produce, by the sheer inevitabilities of human nature in society, ever-increasing and more dangerous alienation.”
This quote is taken from Simon Heffer’s excellent biography of Powell, Like the Roman.
Ted Heath dismissed Powell from his role as Shadow Defence Secretary in 1968, following the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. He loathed Powell who was much brighter. For the record, by the age of 23, Powell was a fellow of Trinity Cambridge and later became Professor of Ancient Greek at Sydney University. When war broke out in 1939, he enlisted as a private and became the only man to rise to the rank of Brigadier within four years. He was fluent in German, Italian and Urdu – and above all, he was a Romantic, deeply devoted to his country.
Heath labelled Powell a “racist”, scorning his many crystal-clear warnings about the dangers of mass immigration. Today, we are facing the consequences. Powell, now buried in the Warwick Cemetery – dressed in his full Brigadier’s uniform – would likely be deeply saddened, though I suspect not surprised, by the events unfolding around us.
Benyon’s Crystal Balls
I am in favour of controlled immigration. But this is not what has happened, is it? It was Thatcher who worried that the UK was being “swamped” by 30,000 immigrants. Those were the days.
Major pledged to control numbers – he failed. Blair’s immigration minister, Barbara Roche, allowed the doors of the UK to swing wide, laying the foundations for the crisis we face today. Brown fared no better (famously forgetting to remove his mike, and calling a concerned constituent, Ms Duffy, a “bigot”).
Cameron promised to reduce immigration figures to the “tens of thousands”, yet numbers soared to over half a million annually – so he was perceived as either a liar or a fool. May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all made similar promises but failed to deliver. As for Starmer, it’s clear he hasn’t a clue what to do!
My forecast in simple: the electorate will not tolerate being taken for mugs over immigration. If reasonable governments continue to turn “House UK” into a seedy hotel, voters will elect unreasonable ones to do their bidding instead. The failure of successive governments to control immigration – despite repeated promises – has become one of the defining issues of our time, and public frustration is growing. The numbers are uncontrollable, and sooner or later, the government will be forced to discard what are perceived as “foreign” laws set up years ago to protect human rights and refugees. Voters are angry that clever lawyers are making huge sums of money by exploiting loopholes that allow illegal immigrants – many with criminal profiles – to stay in the UK. They shouldn’t be allowed to pass “Go”. They must be deported.