The New Normal

There was a time – and not so long ago – when being an outright racist would get you shuffled off the political stage with a polite cough and a backbench seat. When Enoch Powell delivered his infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech, the establishment recoiled. He wasn’t sacked because what he said was technically untrue – he was sacked because it was un-British to say it out loud. Powell, for all his pomposity, was never a party leader. He was a prophet without portfolio – a ghost at the Westminster feast. The Conservative Party dumped him, the press turned the page, and the country, by and large, moved on.

That’s not to say racists and xenophobes vanished. They didn’t. They just simmered quietly in pubs and clubhouses, grumbling into their pints about immigrants, crime, and how things were better when you could smack a kid for chewing gum. They knew – at least back then – to keep it down. Society didn’t reward bigotry. It rolled its eyes at it.

But now? Now the floodgates are wide open. Social media – that digital pub with infinite seating – gave the mutterers a microphone. It took the bloke who used to bore his mates with racist rants and handed him a global audience. Algorithms wrapped his prejudice in a ribbon and sent it to a thousand like-minded arseholes who clicked, shared, and nodded along. And the more bile he spewed, the louder the applause. That quiet, socially unacceptable bigotry didn’t vanish – it metastasised.

What Powell hinted at in Latin, today’s charlatans shriek in tabloid headlines. We’ve got elected MPs – elected, mind you – who make a career out of blaming foreigners for everything from NHS waiting lists to soggy toast. And the worst part? They're not outliers. They're not fringe. They are the conversation. This isn't dog-whistling anymore – it's a bloody marching band.

Nigel Farage – that pint-wielding prophet of decline – is the case in point. He’s never held proper office, never passed a law, never done the hard graft of government. But his fingerprints are all over our national discourse. He didn't just drag the Overton window to the right – he booted it off its hinges and pissed through the frame. And the Tories? They didn’t resist – they took notes. They saw the polling, donned their Union Jack ties, and climbed aboard.

We’ve now got politicians talking about sending desperate people to Rwanda as though they were parcels, while whipping up fear about "invasions" on the South Coast. When did it become patriotic to punish the vulnerable and sneer at compassion? When did decency become "woke"? The British sense of fair play – that long-prised national virtue – has been flogged off for votes by men who wouldn’t know honour if it smacked them with a cricket bat.

And let’s not pretend this is about economic anxiety or community cohesion. It’s not. It’s about power. It's about deflecting blame. If you're poor, it's not austerity’s fault – it's because of "them." If your hospital is overwhelmed, it’s not because the Tories gutted it – it’s because "they" came here. It's always "them." That old, poisonous trick: divide, distract, and dehumanise.

So here we are – with a political class that no longer merely tolerates xenophobia but actively courts it. They’ve replaced shame with swagger, turning racism into rhetoric and bigotry into policy. Powell was at least exiled for his outburst. Today, they’d give him a show on GB News and a peerage.

We haven’t just failed to learn the lessons of the past – we’ve invited them back, poured them a pint, and called it patriotism. Britain, unfortunately, always has been, and remains, a deeply racist country.