The Birmingham Post - the newspaper that Nigel Hastilow used to edit - has turned on Mr Hastilow today in a front-page leader, signed by current Editor Marc Reeves.
Highlights of the leader:
"Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech, delivered in Birmingham, in which the Tory front-bencher railed against immigration and repeated a constituent's forecast that in Britain by 1988 "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man".
Powell's inflammatory language - he told of the last white woman left living in a street in Wolverhampton whose life was made a misery by immigrant families and their children whom he described as "charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies" apt to chant "racialist" at her - shocked Conservative Party leader Ted Heath and Powell was promptly sacked from the shadow Cabinet...
Not only were Mr Hastilow's remarks severely embarrassing to the Conservative Party, which has been steadily repositioning itself as a party of modern liberal-Toryism, his comments were also out of step with the multi-cultural West Midlands where, in the main, immigration is not a divisive issue...
it is clear that Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision, in which immigration would lead Britain to "heap up its own funeral pyre", has not come to pass. To suggest, as Mr Hastilow does, almost casually, that Enoch was right is as dangerous as it is inaccurate. Proof, if it were needed, of Powell's legacy can be found by typing "Rivers of Blood" into any internet search engine. Close to the top of hundreds of thousands of entries will be the website of the National Front, which carries the speech in full alongside an explanation that Mr Powell was "sacked for telling the truth".
Read Mr Reeves' words in full here.
