UKIP MP: Enoch Powell was wrong to be 'pessimistic' about immigration

Douglas Carswell, who won a shock by-election victory in Clacton after defecting from the Tories last year, also spoke out against 'multiculti groupthink' and defended UKIP's demands for Britain to 'have control of our borders'.

But in an article for The Times he said the former MP for Wolverhampton South West, who made the so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968, 'underestimated the ability of a free society to adapt'.

Mr Carswell made history last year when he resigned as a Conservative MP and stood for re-election for UKIP.

In his opinion piece he hit out at the European Union free movement rules, saying Britain 'prioritises an EU citizen with a criminal record over someone with a doctorate from India or Singapore. It makes no sense'.

He said anxiety over 'large scale immigration' was 'entirely legitimate' and called for an Australian style points-based system.

"Because we want to attract brightest and the best, we would exclude university students from the annual quota total," he wrote. "If there was, say, a shortage of doctors or fruit pickers one year, there would be a rational debate about the need to raise the quota accordingly.

"Half a century ago, Enoch Powell made a speech about immigration that made it difficult to even mention immigration in Westminster.

"Full of foreboding, Powell warned of mass immigration leading to major unrest.

"Powell was, as Tony Blair put it, 'one of the great figures of the 20th-century British politics'.

"He was also a distinguished soldier, linguist and classicist. Yet in his pessimism, Powell was wrong.

"Immigration has not been without its challenges. Yet it has been, overwhelmingly, a story of success.

"Britain today is far more at ease with the multi-ethnic society that we have become than once seemed imaginable - and not just to Enoch Powell. Like many before and since, Powell underestimated the ability of a free society to adapt.

"Powell talked of Britain 'heaping up its own funeral pyre'.

"Yet our country has more than survived. We have, in all kinds of ways, thrived.

"Equally wrong, too, has been the 'multiculti groupthink' of much of the past few decades. That too, underestimates the strength of social cohesion to create and renew common identity.

"Social cohesion has happened precisely because people have been defined by what they share, not by difference.

"Only by having control of our borders can we build the level of social cohesion the future is going to need."

Paul Uppal, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, said his election to the seat as a British Asian had shown how far the city has come.

He said: "I disagree with Douglas on many things but where he does have a point is how communities have come together. In Wolverhampton race relations have been pretty good."

Pat McFadden, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East, said: "This article simply exposes the deep divisions in UKIP. Mr Carswell says that Enoch Powell was wrong and that 'immigration is overwhelmingly a story of success'.

"That is certainly not the view we hear from Nigel Farage and many other UKIP representatives. Every time UKIP comes under the microscope on policy, chaos is exposed. This is the latest example."