Ramification | Is the ‘River of Blood’ finally flowing through ‘Londonistan’?

Recently, London saw a protest march led by Tommy Robinson, one of the United Kingdom’s most well-known anti-immigration campaigners. English actor, musician and political activist Laurence Fox also joined Robinson to lead the protestors walking to Parliament Square. Over 10,000 people showed up carrying banners that read: “This is London, not Londonistan” while chanting “We want our country back”.

The sobriquet “Londonistan” referring to the growing Muslim population in the British capital of London was further highlighted by the waving of the flag of Saint George. The flag with a red cross on a white background was adopted by England and the City of London in 1190, but more significantly, the flag is associated with Saint George, the military saint as well as the Crusades.

At the protest march, the two-tier policing charges that were once brought up by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, resulting in her resignation, were echoed by Robinson. He alleged that the police had been soft on left-wing protestors such as those supporting Palestine while hard on those who opposed the protests—an accusation that implied the institutionalisation of discrimination against the English in favour of the refugees.

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The other speakers at the rally also implored protestors to not rent their homes to those who were not British, some referred to themselves as natives who were fighting to protect their values and others pointed out the falling Christian birth rates. The message of the protests was clear—Muslim immigrants whose ideology, culture and lifestyle is at odds with the values of their host nation and the laws of the land, are a challenge to the English identity.

However, not everyone agreed with Robinson’s views. While his followers saw it as a patriotic march, there were those who saw it as the rise of the far-right. Around 300 protestors were brought by the ‘Stand Up To Racism’ group. They had to be separated from Robinson’s group by a police cordon while they chanted “Nazi scum off our streets” and “Say it loud, say it clear: refugees are welcome here.” Others held placards reading “Oppose Tommy Robinson” and “Stop fascists and the far right.”

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Though, the anti-Islam banners that some carried and abusive slogans that they chanted at Robinson’s march didn’t do them any favours, to simply disregard them as “fascists” or “far-right” in order to delegitimise their concerns would be utter complacency.

It was in 1968 that Conservative British MP, Enoch Powell gave a speech as a response to the proposed Race Relations Bill which allowed unabated immigration through lax immigration policies. It became infamous as the “Rivers of Blood” speech because he quoted the following lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, “War, fierce war, I see: and the Tiber foaming with much blood.” Powell said, “In this country in 15- or 20-years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.  So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.”

Unfortunately, Powell was unforgivingly punished for speaking against guilt-driven multiculturalism. He was sacked from Conservative Party chief Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet, ridiculed by the famous band Beatles with song lyrics like “dirty Enoch Powell” and had his career destroyed.

Today, one might be compelled to think that Powell’s premonitory speech is more relevant than ever. What Powell considered an insane number of immigrants in 1968 has increased six-fold in merely four decades, reaching 330,000 in 2015. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK, the Muslim population has risen by 44 per cent in a decade. London is now two-thirds ethnic minority. Other major cities like Leicester, Luton and Birmingham have become home to “minority majorities”.

Islam is the second-most practised religion in the London area and it has been reported that a third of Muslims want Sharia Law in the United Kingdom (UK). There are already over 100 Sharia councils and tribunals that deal with divorce, marriage and even criminal matters. Women’s groups have called these councils patriarchal and problematic as councils operate based on their own personal knowledge and biases. Further, extremist activities have been on the rise in the last two decades with over 850 British citizens joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Acts of terror include the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, the 2005 London underground bombing, the 2020 Streatham and Reading stabbings, and the 2021 Liverpool Women’s Hospital bombing, among many others. This list does not even include individual attacks by extremists. The sheer number of these incidents point towards a radicalised Muslim population within the UK.

Professor David Coleman, a supernumerary fellow in human sciences and professor of demography at the University of Oxford, has stated that uncontrolled immigration, especially from the Islamic world, will lead to  Finis Brittaniae, which means the end of Britain as we know it. Elaborating on his dystopian prediction, he stated that “there are strong currents in Muslim society which wish to see Muslim approaches to diet, to marriage and would like to see Sharia Law incorporated formally into British Law or, in respect to some extremist groups, would like to see Sharia Law replace British Law.”

However, in comparison, to a growing radicalised Muslim population that is not afraid to assert its identity, religion or culture, the Western  Christians seem to be declining, let alone asserting. Those identifying as secular or non-religious are increasing alongside other religions in London. The majority who identify as secular would have previously been Christians, while Islam has become the second-most practiced religion in the London area.

It was once said of the British Empire that it is “the empire on which the sun never sets”. Today, the phrase seems to have lost its lustre, much like its society. The comfort and luxuries that were enjoyed for centuries through the wealth that the empire plundered ushered in an era of complacency. It also ushered in the shackles of post-colonial guilt. This guilt allowed for endless concessions to foreign colonies, resulting in a decline of an articulate English identity. Additionally, their obsession with Islam continued when they toyed with Wahhabism- the source of extremist ideology of terror groups such as ISIS.

It was none other than Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who blamed the Western allies for pushing Saudi Arabia to invest in mosques and madrassas overseas, in order to prevent Moscow from making a play for Muslim countries. But as it stands today, without the strength of religion to counter the zeal of radical Islam, any anxieties expressed by white Christians will continue to be gaslighted, just as Powell was four decades ago and Robinson was last month.

On July 27, Robinson will hold his next rally at Trafalgar Square. Maybe if Powell was alive today, he’d be on the stage, this time with a sense of validation as he would quote Aeneid and say “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ’the  River Tiber’ foaming with much blood.”

Rami Niranjan Desai is an anthropologist and a scholar of northeast region of India. She is a columnist and author and presently Distinguished Fellow at India Foundation, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.