Raheem Kassam accused London mayor Sadiq Khan of heaping up Britain’s funeral pyre Friday, in remarks at the U.S. CPAC conference that directly reference those made by British politician Enoch Powell 50 years ago.
Invited to speak on the CPAC main stage — the largest conservative conference in North America — Breitbart London editor in chief Raheem Kassam introduced Brexit leader Nigel Farage but in doing so took the fight to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and the forces moving against the Presidential and Brexit votes of 2016.
Discussing Sadiq Khan to a chorus of boos from delegates, Kassam said: “One of those voices in the Brexit nullification process is the London mayor… who has spent his first time in office publicly attacking President Donald Trump, and spending his time overseeing the heaping up Britain’s funeral pyre.
“Overseeing London’s crime rates skyrocketing, rape up 18 per cent, youth homicide up 17 per cent, robbery up 33 per cent. This is London today, under Sadiq Khan.”
Kassam’s comments were a close paraphrasing of a 1968 speech by British politician Enoch Powell, the 50th anniversary of which is approaching this year. Powell, who was known as a soldier, classical scholar, and poet, as well as for his campaigns against Britain’s membership of what would become the European Union and mass migration, ultimately felt he had to leave his own party after the Birmingham speech.
Powell’s speech on how mass migration was rapidly changing Britain, which came to be known for his quote of Virgil’s Aeneid as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ changed the way Britain discussed immigration forever.
Discussing levels of migration which are now hundreds of thousands below the numbers seen in Britain 50 years later but which at the time were seen as fundamentally changing for the nation, Powell said in 1968:
Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.
Kassam also spoke on the efforts by establishment forces to thwart Brexit and the Trump presidency, telling the hall: “I believe the fate of our nations are inextricably linked, not just through history but right now in the present when you have the attempted nullification project that is going on here, which is led by Antifa, George Soros, and CNN… they are trying to nullify what you guys chose in 2016. And at the same time in the United Kingdom, there is a Brexit nullification project in place.”
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