NEW TRENDS IN CONSERVATISM. The latest old-time conservative to be rehabilitated is Enoch Powell. Roger Scruton, and Winds of Change echoing him, think the author of the "Rivers of Blood" speech decrying anti-discriminatory housing laws (and, secondarily, darkly-hued immigrants) got a bum deal from liberals, and compare his situation to that of the lonely voices of reason who want Muslims kept out of everywhere.

Of course a different class of political activists has always revered Powell, but his renaissance among mainstream conservatives is, I believe, new.

Here's a bit from the "Rivers of Blood" speech (to which, by the way, neither Scruton nor WoC link):

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

I know that Powell's inheritors want Muslims kept out of their respective paradises, but I wonder if they also believe, with Powell, that the immigrants who came to Britain in the 60s, and their children, were a blight on the nation, and should be repatriated?

UPDATE. Let me clear this up: commenter Conservative Guy is not a sock-puppet created by me to make right-wingers look like racist clowns.