COMMENT: UKIP MEP's 'rivers of blood' speech 'at best misguided, at worst downright hateful'
When Enoch Powell alluded to rivers of blood in a speech criticising immigration it caused a political tempest.
The Wolverhampton South West MPs address in Birmingham in April 1968 polarised public opinion and led to his axing from the shadow cabinet by Tory party leader Edward Heath.
His vision of Britain was one where white people were afraid to leave their homes, where minority communities became the majority and forced their customs upon the indigenous population.
His words were fuelled by a mixture of fear, race hatred and a thirst for political gain, but over the years his alarmist predictions have proved to be wholly incorrect.
They are words clung onto by racists and fringe elements unable to come to terms with the ever-changing face of British society.
Yet last week - 47 years after Powell's speech - UKIP MEP Bill Etheridge saw fit to echo his words in a battlecry of his own.
In front of a crowd of 20 people in Dudley, he rallied against the EU, describing it as 'a weakness'. He said it was madness for the UK not to control its borders, and that those coming to live in the UK should embrace British values.
Unregulated migration had invited terrorists into the country, he added, while the EU 'frittered away' our democracy.
But underpinning his whole spiel was his pronouncement that the creed of multiculturalism was 'a creed of surrender'. It would lead to 'rivers of blood', he opined.
Come on Bill, pull the other one.
The immigrants that Mr Powell feared had been invited into this country to do the jobs that many of the indigenous population felt were beneath them. They started families, worked hard and contributed to society.
Mr Powell's forecast was wide of the mark.
It beggars belief that Mr Etheridge is dragging out the same rhetoric almost half a century later, seemingly implying that by accepting other cultures we are somehow guilty of weakness.
His comments were at best misguided, at worst downright hateful. We can only assume that he knew the controversy that referencing Mr Powell's speech would bring.
But he carried on regardless.
By doing so he stoked the flames of fear that burn brightly in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
One of the ways that IS functions is to breed divisions within the ranks of its enemies. Mr Etheridge has helped them to do precisely that.
