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This whole show is worth watching in full. Above all, to see how, even 50 years ago, the pro-mass immigration side had the same talking points. The whole debate basically *started* frozen in amber, and wouldn’t budge for the next half a century.
Also, the obsession with minutiae
Also, the obsession with minutiae
and various points of semantic order—“‘Occupation,’ Mr Powell? Ohhhh, you know who else had an ‘occupation,’ ehh? Austrian fellow...vegetarian...” [arches brow knowingly] The entire bag of Establishment tricks with which the whole West would become familiar over the next 50 years
is on display in this interview. Also, one somehow senses from the audience, even though they’re not visible, that feeling of looking over one’s shoulder—a-am I supposed to cheer that line? C-can we laugh here?—already present whenever this topic is under discussion. It’s a
fascinating document. Also worth listening to his debate with Michael Foot on immigration and race; Foot was a brilliant and cultured man with a mind that would shame Current Year libs, but it’s astonishing to hear him, in the early 1970s, as a sort of
sounding board for all the cliches with which we’re all now so familiar: ‘What about the Nazis? Hitler happened, therefore we can’t have immigration restriction. Think about the curry takeaways, Enoch! There are only positives, they’re enriching us and helping the
economy! Also it’s punishment for the British Empire!’ etc etc. The whole ‘debate’ sprang from the head of Zeus in roughly the same form it would hold for the next half century, it’s really something..All freely available on YouTube (for now....)
Just be warned that Jonathan Miller (the man on the left in the clip above) is hard going...Imagine someone who was 50% Stephen Fry and 50% Simon Schama (but knew a lot less about the French Revolution and the Dutch Golden Age)
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