Powell regarded the most important paragraph in his speech to be this warning given by America’s experience of race which was very present in British minds because of that year’s (1968) riots in major American cities:

“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the twentieth century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know.All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

Has this prediction been fulfilled? It seems so. Britain now experiences the racial and religious tensions of a multicultural society, including terrorist murders and bombings; the mass rapes and forced prostitution of young English girls by mainly Muslim Pakistani “grooming gangs”; widespread cases of female genital mutilation; “honour” killings; the emergence of sectarian Pakistani-Muslim political parties, now represented in Parliament; and weekly marches through London and other cities of crowds chanting anti-Semitic slogans and intimidating individual Jews that police seem helpless or unwilling to prevent. Increasingly people talk about a future civil war.