On This Day: Enoch Powell delivers ‘Rivers of Blood’ anti-immigration speech

APRIL 20, 1968: Senior Tory Enoch Powell warned of an impending immigration disaster in his controversial and hard-hitting ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech on this day in 1968.

The MP was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet and accused of inciting racial violence when he warned of native Britons becoming ‘strangers in their own country’.

Yet many others also praised the right-winger’s apparent candour and supported his calls for an end to immigration and for settlers to be encouraged to leave.

Powell, who falsely claimed that immigrant descendants would number 7million by 2000, said Britain ‘must be mad’ to allow in 50,000 dependents of settlers each year.

In his address to a Conservative association in Birmingham, he compared this policy to ‘watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’.

He also claimed the Labour government’s Race Relations Act - making it illegal to refuse housing, jobs or services to a person on the grounds of ethnicity - would foster discrimination against whites and be like ‘throwing a match on to gunpowder’.

Furthermore, Powell denounced multiculturalism, saying it would allow foreigners to ‘overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided’.

Meanwhile, he claimed that native citizens had already found ‘their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places [and] their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition’.

Using inflammatory language throughout the 45-minute speech, he recounted stories of racial tension and attitudes among his Wolverhampton constituents.

In one such engagement, he spoke of an ‘ordinary working man’ who had told him: ‘In 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’.

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Powell also told of a war widow whom a letter writer said was the ‘only white’ left on a once ‘respectable street’ after ‘a house was sold to a Negro’ eight years earlier.

The elderly boarding house owner refused rent any of her rooms to black people and was now scared to leave her home after becoming hated by West Indian neighbours.

Repeating the letter, Powell said: ‘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 so wrong? I begin to wonder.’

But the most provocative part of the speech came towards the end, when he said: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’’

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Despite only containing this allusion to a line from Virgil’s Aenid, the address quickly became called the Rivers of Blood speech.

And it continues to be remembered as one of the most powerful and divisive political lectures in British history.

At the time, it was both deeply criticised and passionately praised.

MPs, led by Labour’s Edward Leadbitter, referred the speech to the Director of Public Prosecutions on the grounds of incitement, although charges were never made.

The Times derided it as ‘evil’ and said: ‘This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our post-war history.’

The traditionally Tory-supporting newspaper went on to report incidents of racist attacks during the aftermath and noted a rise in violence.

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Prime Minister Edward Heath, who sacked Powell as Conservative Defence spokesman the day after the speech, said it was ‘racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions’.

But Powell, who later quit the Tories over his opposition to the European Community and then served as an Ulster Unionist MP, was also backed by many other Tory MPs.

He was also supported by thousands of workers – notably London Dockers – who staged strikes and marched carrying placards reading ‘Enoch Was Right’, ‘Don’t Knock Enoch’ and ‘Back Britain, Not Black Britain’.

A Gallop opinion poll also found that 74 per cent agreed with what Powell had said in his speech, while only 15 per cent disagreed.

And the address by Powell, who was shown in a British Pathé newsreel attending the 1968 Conservative Party Conference, continues to garner support.

Most recently, UKIP leader Nigel Farage, said the fellow right-wing Eurosceptic’s view on immigration was right ‘in principle’.

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Many others, such as eventually Heath, have claimed that the remarks by Powell, who died aged 85 in 1998, were ‘prescient’.

His prediction that seven million British residents would be of foreign descent proved to be unfounded as 2001 Census revealed the actual figure was 4.6million people.

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Yet by 2011, the number had risen beyond his estimate to 7.5million, or 13% of the population, following record levels of immigration from Eastern Europe.

However, despite the surge in new arrivals and recent rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, Britain today enjoys considerably much more racial harmony than Powell predicted.