Enoch Powell And The Rivers Of Blood Speech

In 1968 a new Race Relations act came into force making it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to people because of their ethnic background. The Act extended the powers of the Race Relations Board to deal with complaints of discrimination; and set up a new body, the Community Relations Commission, to promote “harmonious community relations”.

Presenting the Bill to Parliament, the Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, said, “The House has rarely faced an issue of greater social significance for our country and our children”
In April of the same year Enoch Powell, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West made a speech at the Midland Hotel in New Street, Birmingham which would see him destroy his political career.

He warned that Britain must be “literally mad” to allow mass immigration from Commonwealth countries. He predicted disaster for Britain with a reference to the Roman poet Virgil, warning “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. His words were interpreted by many as a prophesy that immigration would lead to violence on the streets of Britain.

In the speech Powell quoted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man who had told him, “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country…I have three children, all of them have been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas.” The man concluded by saying “In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.

Powell continued, “Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.”

Powell described what he thought the position of the indigenous population would be, “For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

Powell also quoted from a letter he had received from a woman about an elderly woman living in a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident. The woman had lost her husband and her two sons in World War II and had rented out the rooms in her house. Once immigrants had moved into the street, her white lodgers moved out. Two black men had knocked on her door very early one morning and asked to use her telephone and she had refused and then was verbally abused. Because of her lack of tenants she had asked the local authority for a reduction in her rates, but was told by a council officer to let out the rooms of her house. When the woman said the only tenants would be black, the council officer replied: “Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.” Powell quoted the next part of her letter where she described how she was becoming too afraid to go out; “Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English but one word they know “Racialist” they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she wrong? I begin to wonder.”

Powell argued that although “many thousands” of immigrants wanted to integrate, he contended that the majority did not, and that some had vested interests in fostering racial and religious differences “with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population”.

Soon after making this speech Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet for his racist views.

In an interview in 1999 Ayub Khan Din speaking to Mark Olden, and said:
“When all these events started happening, I was Sajid. I was living in a parka. Enoch Powell was always being thrown in my face as a child, and the whole Bangladesh war of independence had a big effect on our household, because what happened in the house always revolved around the TV news.“

Image taken from BBC News website