‘Dirty Enoch Powell said to the immigrants, immigrants you better get back to your commonwealth homes,’ rapped Paul McCartney, as John Lennon and George Harrison twiddled on their guitars and Ringo Starr shuffled along with a swing beat. The Beatles were improvising a song that (unsurprisingly) never saw the light of day, but can be found on youtube as ‘The Commonwealth Song’. Recorded in the spring of the revolutionary year of 1968, bootleg tapes of those sessions include a version of their Number 1 hit ‘Get Back’ that satirically instructs Pakistani immigrants to the UK to ‘get back to where you once belonged’.

The Beatles were, of course, satirising the aforementioned Conservative MP Enoch Powell – the Cory Bernardi of the Turnbull-esque Heath Government – who had made international headlines with his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he decried ‘the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history’; namely, mass third world immigration to the UK.

‘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. 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.’

In the speech, not only did Powell warn of working class Britons becoming strangers in their own towns – which is precisely what occurred – but, equally presciently, he also warned of the inherent danger of ‘anti-discrimination’ legislation which was being enacted at the time. This early form of what was to become political correctness Powell decried as ‘a one-way privilege… a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect [Britons] or redress their grievances, [but] to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them.’

It is impossible, in the light of recent events in the UK, Europe and Australia, not to conclude that Powell was correct.

The first wave of multiculturalism occurred directly after the Second Word War, when the displaced and disenfranchised from that horror show sought a new and safer life outside of Europe. Like the UK, Australia benefitted greatly from the arrival of Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, Hungarians and others who were determined not only to integrate into their new Anglo culture but to ‘add value’ to it. Which they did in spades.

However, the second wave of multiculturalism has been an unmitigated disaster for not only Australia and Britain, but also much of Europe. This is the wave of immigrants and refugees who have poured out of the Islamic hell-holes of the Middle East, Africa and Asia over the last few decades, bringing with them a political ideology disguised as a religion that has no interest in integration, but only wishes to leech off the generous welfare and political freedoms of the West.

Powell lost his job because of his supposedly ‘inflammatory’ speech, and thus began fifty years of anyone who dared to question the wisdom of unfettered immigration and non-assimilation (ie 2nd wave multiculturalism) being labelled that very worst of all sinners: a racist.

‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”,’ concluded Powell, in what was viewed at the time (but possibly less so now) as disgraceful hyperbole, before adding: ‘All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.’

The greater betrayal, of course, came from the other side. From the political elites of all parties, the leftists, the luvvies, the bedwetters, the bureaucrats and those like ASIO’s woeful Duncan Lewis who still deny ‘a connection between refugees and terrorism.’ Or between Islam and, er, ‘Islamist’ terror, for that matter.

In echoes of the Beatles’ sentiment that all we need is love, a ‘One Love’ rock concert was held in Manchester the other evening to honour the teenage victims of the recent atrocity there. As the crowds were singing and swaying, hands aloft, two beautiful young Aussie girls and five others were having their throats slit on London Bridge.