It was forty years yesterday since Enoch Powell made “Rivers of Blood” speech. It is forty years today since the misunderstanding and misinterpretation began - and it has continued pretty much unabated since, starting with with The Times reporting it under the title ‘An Evil Speech’:
The Birmingham speech was of course, disgraceful – because it was racialist… the more closely one reads the text of Mr Powell’s speech, the more shameful it seems. The language, the innuendoes, the constant appeals to self-pity, the anecdotes, all combine to make a deliberate appeal to racial hatred. This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred, in this direct way, in our post-war history.
This was not a speech that deviated much from Powell’s previous speeches, just using more direct turns of phrase. The only real difference was the media’s reaction, and the impact this created.
The effects of this speech were peculiarly divided. From journalists and politicians he got almost nothing bar attacks, but from the people he got much support. He got huge levels of public support in opinion polls, which were between 67% and 82% in his favour; he received a deluge of letters, with very few (six out of about 4,000) concurring with the public espousals of the journalists and politicians against Powell. Powell’s ratings grew in all directions. The polls also showed a rise in support for Powell to be the leader of the Conservative Party, to 24%, from a figure as long as 1%. Not only in the opinion polls was there evidence of public support, but there were great demonstrations of popular support for him, such as the docker’s march on parliament, with placards demanding ‘Don’t knock Enoch’ and ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’.
For Powell, the issue was not as s often claimed the immigration of people per se, but their integration within the existing community. In a newspaper article in the Sunday Times four years prior to the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell wrote that:
the immigrants who have come already, or who are admitted in the future are a part of the community. Their most rapid and effective integration is in the interests of us all. Anything which tends to create a separate market for the labour and abilities of the immigrants prejudices the general interest as well as that of the immigrants themselves. [emphasis added]
They are a part of the community. They do have importance. They are people who deserve and have rights on the same basis as any other citizen of the United Kingdom. And Powell also declares, in another newspaper article in the same year, that “I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of the country and another on the grounds of his origin.”
It was the lack of integration that was the cause of “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” in Powell’s speech, not the amount of immigration. And this quote from Virgil’s Aenied that formed much of the “part-prophecy” quality of the speech has constantly been misattributed to Powell himself, and misunderstood as referring to immigration being the cause of violence.
Trevor Phillips obviously hasn’t actually read up on Powell, and his researchers deserve to be sacked for idiocy. In his recent speech, he said:
In effect Powellites believed that we are all prisoners of our race, our heritage or our religious beliefs. And just as they lost sleep over interracial relationships, I guess we could see a parallel with people who are today consumed with fear at sharing the planet with lesbian or gay people.
They obviously missing this quote from Powell:
[I]f there were intermarriage on a large scale, the dangers which I foresaw would be very much less.
Oh, and the other so-called “three key propositions” supposedly “at the heart” of Powellism? Utterly wrong. So, CRE: buck-up your ideas, and your research.
I challenge every reader of this blog to read the speech without the pre-conceptions that have been beaten in to them. Read it properly, and you will understand that it isn’t racist or even anywhere close.
UKIP now have their first MP, former Conservative MP Bob Spink, who resigned/was kicked out of the Conservative Party last month. I doubt that he will be missed much, if the claim that “you won’t find many tears being shed over this in the Conservative Party - more like the sound of popping corks” is true.
