The 20th of this month marks a significant anniversary in Britain. For it is the 50th anniversary of what is probably the most famous — and certainly the most notorious — speech by any mainstream politician since the war.
On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell gave a speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham on the subject of Commonwealth migration, integration, and possible re-emigration. It was a carefully chosen moment, and a carefully chosen intervention from a man who was then the shadow defense minister in the Conservative opposition of Edward Heath. Powell knew what he was about to do, telling a friend who edited a local newspaper, “I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up.” For half a century, Powell’s speech has certainly lingered in some fashion — whether by staying up or by rumbling away underneath Britain’s political debates.
One thought on “Rivers of Blood 50 Years Later”
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Some contextualization. Around this time London’s Brixton area had become, through a voluntary process of self-ghettoization, the 1st racial no-go zone for whites. The dominant Jamaican population there was selling drugs, soft and hard, in dangerous and unprecedented quantities, but if a white person wanted to go there to buy some hashish it was much safer if he was accompanied by a person of colour. In Jamaica itself England, Canada, US, and other countries where Jamaicans emigrated to were known simply as “Foreign.” These migrants had so little interest in integration they did not even bother to learn the names of their new countries.
Also at this time Prime Minister James Callaghan issued British passports to millions of Ugandan Asians terrorized by Idi Amin. He did so on the grounds that these Asians were citizens of the British Commonwealth. Asians from Kenya, South Africa and elsewhere followed suit. Enoch Powell was not the only politician who spoke vigorously against this new system of automatic dual citizenship for Asians who had not previously even visited Britain. Peregrine Worsthorne of the Daily Telegraph was the most articulate of them.
People who wanted to demonize Powell pretended that his reference to the Tiber foaming with blood predicted the mass murder of immigrants in the UK on such a scale that rivers of blood would flow in the streets. Of course this is hysterical rubbish. Powell does not even hint at anything like this. The Roman reference was to the idea that the Tiber appearing to foam with blood presaged an imminent disaster for Rome. In those days a politician could count on most of his audience .having a sound education in ancient history, especially of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the selling of citizenships to non-citizens was one of the factors that caused the fall of Rome.
I lived in the UK between 1966-68.