UK faces 'flames' of unrest if mass immigration continues: ex-race tsar

Britain risks racial and religious unrest if it does not combat mass immigration, the country’s former race tsar has warned in a new report that directly references Enoch Powell's infamous "rivers of blood" speech.

Trevor Phillips, who headed the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says in a new report that the UK is being allowed to “sleepwalk to catastrophe” due to a “liberal self-delusion” about immigration and integration, calling anti-immigrant sentiment a ‘smouldering’ tinderbox that threatens to ignite.

The report, Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence, written for the Civitas think tank, criticises British politicians and media for their “smugness” when dealing with issues of race and religion and says that the country has shied away from debating the issues due to a “deafening silence” from political elites.

“By and large, our nation is complacent about its ability to manage its own diversity; our opinion-formers watch events in the USA and on the continent with detachment, and congratulate themselves on the perception that there is no longer a substantial anti-immigrant or nativist party active in British politics,” Phillips wrote.

He said that while Britain had been a relative success story of integration, growing migration, backed by the growing complexity of diversity - which no longer divides society into just black and white but fractures it on scores of religious and ethnic lines – has led the integration process to stall. Certain Muslim groups are particularly singled out for criticism for their failure to integrate and adapt.

He notes that at a lecture dominated by Muslims almost none wore the Remembrance Day poppy, a British sign of commemorating the war dead of the World Wars, while in groups of Sub-Saharan African and Eastern European immigrants many are seen wearing the symbol.

Phillips also cites several studies that point to an apparent clash with British values, including findings that a third of UK Muslims would like their children educated separately from non-Muslims, and that a quarter were sympathetic to the ‘motives’ of the Charlie Hebdo killers who attacked a controversial satirical magazine in Paris for publishing cartoons of the Prophet.

“These facts should presage a society in a turmoil of preparation for change; and a political and media elite engaged in serious debate as to how we meet this challenge to our fundamental values,” he wrote.

Modern day Britain houses “incompatible attitudes to sex, religion, belief and the rule of law are producing frictions for which the tried and trusted social lubricants seem just too thin”, Phillips wrote.

“So far, attempts by both right and left to deal with these flashpoints have been either incendiary or ineffective,” he added.

According to Phillips, the situation has become all about a fear of “white racism”.

The social media response has been predictably mixed.

Phillips references a 1968 speech by Enoch Powell, who warned mass immigration from Commonwealth countries would end with "rivers of blood" - itself a reference to the the Roman classic Aeneid about the future of Rome, although Powell’s exact interpretation has been contested.

The address cost Powell his ministerial post, a development Phillips argues taught everyone in British public life to “adopt any strategy possible to avoid saying anything about race, ethnicity (and latterly religion and belief) that is not anodyne and platitudinous.”

“Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion,” he added. He said that ominous “muttering in the pub or grumbling at the school gate” could spiral and must start to be taken seriously.

The report comes less than two months before Britain is due to hold a referendum on EU membership, with growing immigration being used as the main argument for leaving the 28-member block.

While the majority of the immigration has come from Eastern European states, the majority of the concern has tended to focus on ethnic and religious minorities.

A 2015 report by the Conservative-linked Policy Exchange think-tank suggested that up to 30 percent of the British population will be non-white by 2050, up from about 14 percent today.

Britain’s Muslim population is likewise growing, almost doubling from 2001 to 2011 in England and Wales although it still only stands at less than 5 percent nationally.  

Last week, London - which makes up more than 10 percent of the UK's population - voted it its first Muslim mayor, Labour's Sadiq Khan. Khan had been accused by his Conservative rivals of sharing platforms with alleged Islamic State supporters but the claims fell flat, with Khan securing 56 percent of the vote.