Ex-bishop brands Woolas new Enoch

OLDHAM East MP Phil Woolas has been branded the new Enoch Powell by a former bishop.

The Rt Rev Dr Peter Selby, president of the National Council of Independent Monitoring Boards and a former bishop of Worcester, made the comments writing in the Church Times.

Enoch Powell, who died in 1998, lost his place in Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet 30 years earlier after controversial comments about immigration.

They were made in what is always remembered as a speech predicting rivers of blood, although Powell, who was a classical scholar, actually said he saw the Tiber foaming with much blood.

Powell eventually left the Conservative Party and served as an Ulster Unionist MP.

Dr Selby wrote: “No doubt the new Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, was appointed on the basis that he would raise the temperature of the immigration debate.

“So he has done, declaring that it has been too easy to get into Britain, and that he will change that.

“This has delighted Frank Field and Migration Watch. At last, they say, the Government has had the courage to advocate policies most strongly supported by Labour’s core supporters.

“These new tough measures are being planned, we are told, to prevent a threat of overpopulation and racial tension.

“Yet none of this talk of tough policies is quite as unfamiliar as we are invited to believe. Mr Woolas and Mr Field may not use the classical rhetoric of Enoch Powell, but the message is the same.”

Mr Woolas was appointed to his post last month, and has since come under fire for openly speaking about plans to toughen up UK immigration policy.

He said: “Dr Selby has seriously misunderstood both what the Government’s policy is and the new world we live in.

“This is diagonally opposed to what Enoch Powell talked about. My remarks are about how to make society work not to divide it.

“Enoch Powell was trying to divide our society, I am trying to heal it.”

Dr Selby’s article continued to criticised people who advocate tougher action on immigration and said government policy would end in more destitute people on the streets and more held in expensive custody.