It is sometimes claimed – most often by those on the ‘soft Right’ I find – that Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech did more harm than good and made discussion of immigration impossible to have in subsequent decades. I believe this to be profoundly untrue, for reasons I will now set out.
I most recently heard this claim made by the otherwise excellent Michael Reiners on Nick Dixon’s Current Thing podcast. It had me yelling at my speaker. It’s the sort of thing that op ed writers on the likes of The Times say, to imply ‘I’m on the Right, but I’m not that Right-wing’. It’s from the same school of tactics that the Daily Mail uses when it slags off Tommy Robinson – it allows them to be Right-wing in other ways because they can say ‘Hey, we’re slagging off Tommy Robinson; we’re respectable’.
When Powell made his Birmingham speech (as he preferred to call it) on 20 April 1968, it was not the first time he had tackled the subject. As Simon Heffer details in his essential biography of Powell, Like The Roman, he had made several speeches on the subject previously. They had got some attention, but not as much attention as Powell felt they deserved – and he was correct in that view, given the importance of the subject (the subject being: the civilisational catastrophe of foreign cultures, especially Islam, taking over Britain, which is happening right now).
Powell felt that he should make a speech that would ‘fizz like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up’. He knew his message must not be ignored – and he knew he had the rhetorical skill to ensure it wasn’t. Powell was a brilliant man, possibly the greatest intellectual to ever sit in the Commons. He was a professor of Greek at the age of 25, brigadier at the age of 32, fluent in seven languages – including Urdu – a biblical scholar, a poet, an economist and a learned Parliamentarian. Despite his intellectual genius he understood and could converse with ordinary people. He had his home telephone number in Who’s Who and often took the bus to work. It’s no wonder he was Radio 4’s Man of the Year twice in the early 1970s.
There was no politician more articulate than Powell. Which is one of the reasons why criticism of him that he damaged the anti-immigration argument is so absurd. He knew what he was saying and he said it superbly. Who else would you want delivering the message? And what the hell was he meant to do instead: keep quiet, or just put out occasional vanilla warnings that um, you know, Britain might, er, possibly, want to slightly, y’know, slow immigration a bit. Like his wet Tory colleagues, Quintin Hogg might do.
A fresh read of his Rivers of Blood speech reminds you how magnificent it was, from its first line (‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils’) to the last (‘All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal’). He sympathetically recounts a conversation with a constituent concerned about demographic changes taking place (Gordon Brown would have instead denounced the person as a bigot), reads out a letter from a woman distressed about what was happening in Wolverhampton (no wonder the ruling class despised Powell – he spoke for ordinary people) and he intones: ‘The tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic … is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.’ He says we must change course. It’s a fine, literate, measured speech and Powell, if anything, underestimated the future numbers of the immigrant population.
Yet it saw Powell sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by incel/traitor/yachtsman Edward Heath, all while opinion polls showed that the vast majority of the country supported his position. The working class marched in support of him: they instinctively sensed, correctly, that changes were taking place in their country that would be negative for them, their families and their descendants. It was a classic case of the political class being detached from the people they were meant to represent, a gulf which would grow and grow in the coming decades, and now has never been bigger.
Powell’s intervention made things happen, despite the Establishment disliking him and his ideas. In 1969 the Labour government passed the more restrictive Immigration Appeals Act. In 1970 the Conservatives won the General Election, a result often attributed to Powell’s anti-immigration stand, and then lessened the flow further with the 1971 Immigration Act, which Powell had a hand in. Under the Thatcher premiership, Acts in 1981 and 1988 further limited incomers.
So much for Powell harming the cause of those who wanted to stem Commonwealth immigration into Britain. It wasn’t till after his death in 1998 that the British government chose to open the immigration floodgates once more.
In terms of restricting what could be discussed around the subject it was – and this is the crucial point – the political and media class that restricted debate. It was nothing to do with Powell. Politicians and journalists who didn’t have the bravery or the brains of Powell sought to stop others speaking out on the subject, or didn’t speak out themselves. They were frit. Powell did their dirty work.
When in 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then Opposition leader, said that people were feeling ‘swamped’ by immigrants, she was chastised by all the usual suspects in the liberal Establishment. (Powell remarked that this always happened when politicians dared talk about the issue.) So, I repeat: it wasn’t Powell’s fault that discussion of the slow invasion of the country was stymied, it was the Establishment, who preferred to look the other way and pretend that it wasn’t happening, or believed that it wasn’t happening, or were secretly glad that it was happening.
Powell did Britain a favour by speaking out in such an articulate, wise and powerful manner. He became the most famous and most widely loved MP of his era. He brought the issue of post-War immigration to the fore, and he demonstrated to the electorate that someone in Westminster was attuned to their concerns. It was his success in doing so that caused the snivelling, undemocratic, treacherous ruling class to react and it was they who attempted to shut down discussion.
Blame the Blob. Don’t blame the Great British hero who was Enoch Powell.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
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(Photograph: Allan warren, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
