Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's infamous Rivers of Blood speech, delivered in Birmingham, in which the Tory front-bencher railed against immigration and repeated a constituent's forecast that in Britain by 1988 "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man".
Powell's inflammatory language - he told of the last white woman left living in a street in Wolverhampton whose life was made a misery by immigrant families and their children whom he described as "charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies" apt to chant "racialist" at her - shocked Conservative Party leader Ted Heath and Powell was promptly sacked from the shadow Cabinet.
Two days ago, Nigel Hastilow resigned as prospective Tory candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis rather than apologise for declaring in a newspaper column that "Enoch Powell was right". Conservative Party chairman Caroline Spelman left him no choice, a decision that reflects the sensitivity the Tory party rightly attaches to this issue.
Hastilow, a former editor of The Birmingham Post, is an experienced political operator who, presumably, took a calculated gamble on the impact his remarks would have both on the Conservative hierarchy and in his constituency. The Black Country, it should be noted, has become something of a stronghold for the far-right British National Party and it comes as little surprise that a Wolverhampton website has recorded almost universal support for Mr Hastilow - another indication of the potential immigration has to stir up strong, sometimes violent, reactions.
Not only were Mr Hastilow's remarks severely embarrassing to the Conservative Party, which has been steadily repositioning itself as a party of modern liberal-Toryism, his comments were also out of step with the multi-cultural West Midlands where, in the main, immigration is not a divisive issue.
Enoch Powell spoke about the last white lady left in a street full of immigrants, Mr Hastilow had the single-parent mother and her children forced to live with her granny because all the available council accommodation "had gone to immigrants". Neither women were ever actually identified, so that they could be quizzed as to the veracity of their stories.
Forty years passed between the two speeches, but the subtext remains the same - immigrants are ruining British society, and taking our jobs and houses, to boot.
To label Mr Hastilow's remarks as merely a tactical error is to miss the point.
He said he was responding to a higher level of debate started by Tory leader David Cameron, but he in fact subverted that debate by handing extremists a golden opportunity to stoke the fires of racism.
His comments fit the Powellite agenda perfectly - casual references to foreigners, almost as if they are a sub-species, the mythology of immigration, the clear insinuation that a further influx of immigrants to this country must be a bad thing because immigrants are a bad thing. It was Enoch without the Oxbridge classicist allusions - repackaged for a 2007 audience, but Enoch just the same.
Once an argument is constructed at this level, it is impossible to have a sensible debate about how best to control the number of immigrants permitted to settle in this country.
In 1967 The Birmingham Post ran a story pointing out the remarkable fact that Cadbury had appointed its first black guide at Bournville. The story displayed, at best, a patronising attitude towards immigration, but it captured very much the mood of the time.
Today, The Post is proud to play a part in informing a very necessary debate about immigration and it does so from a position of recognising that the West Midlands' economy and culture has been and continues to be enriched by thousands of people who have chosen to settle here from all over the globe.
That is not to say indiscriminate immigration should be permitted or that there should be no controls at all. We do not subscribe to the barmiest disciples of the diversity agenda.
Neither, though, do we wish to travel with Mr Hastilow back in time to 1968. And as a matter of fact, it is clear that Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision, in which immigration would lead Britain to "heap up its own funeral pyre", has not come to pass. To suggest, as Mr Hastilow does, almost casually, that Enoch was right is as dangerous as it is inaccurate.
Proof, if it were needed, of Powell's legacy can be found by typing "Rivers of Blood" into any internet search engine. Close to the top of hundreds of thousands of entries will be the website of the National Front, which carries the speech in full alongside an explanation that Mr Powell was "sacked for telling the truth".
Powell was actually sacked because he was hopelessly out of touch with a changing society.
Mr Hastilow is no longer a prospective Tory parliamentary candidate because he revealed himself to be a relic of the past and an unacceptable face of today's Conservative Party.
