http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/enoch-powell-hanif-kureishi
"Racism is the lowest form of snobbery." Discuss.
Unlike Hanif Kureishi, I was 17 and in the 6th form, when Powell made his famous speech.*
I remember going to the Plough around that time (with a couple of mates from SHC) and getting into an argument with an elderly gent (and his wife) sharing the same table as us, who were staunch defenders of Powell.
He concluded the discussion by saying :-How would you know,you've hardly got the cradle marks off your arse?"
Well, I think I got "the cradle marks off my arse" a long time ago now and yet I still thoroughly agree with Kurishi's remarks on Powell,who is still today a bench mark in GB politics, as Russell Brand confirmed yesterday on QT when he called Nigel Farage " a pound-store Enoch Powell."
For me, nothing has substantially changed in the UK about this debate, except that UKIP voters (and other closet supporters of racism) have got more subtle over the years.
They now talk in coded terms of "caps" on immigration,a quota system and leaving the EU, rather than calling for an outright ban on immigration,as such.
*(PS I saw Powell talk in person a few years later, during the referendum campaign and was impressed by his intellect,if not by his politics).