20-APR-1968 :- English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial Rivers of Blood speech.

"Rivers of Blood" speech

Powell was noted for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature. Despite initially welcoming Commonwealth immigrants, on 20 April 1968, he made a controversial speech in Birmingham in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. Above all, it is an allusion to the Roman poet Virgil towards the end of the speech which has been remembered, giving the speech its colloquial name:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.

The Times declared it "an evil speech", stating, "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."

The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction by the Labour Government of the Race Relations Act 1968, which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years.

One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last white person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from nonwhites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox. The woman was revealed in 2007 as Druscilla Cotterill, widow of a second cousin to Mark Cotterill.

Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech and he never held another senior political post. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74 per cent of those asked agreed with his speech and only 15 per cent disagreed, with 11 per cent unsure. After The Sunday Times branded his speeches "racialist", Powell sued it for libel, but withdrew when he was required to provide the letters he had quoted from because he had promised anonymity from the writer, who refused to waive it.

Powell had also expressed his opposition to the race relations legislation being put into place by Labour prime minister Harold Wilson at this time.

Powell had issued an advance copy of his speech to media personnel and their appearance at the speech may have been because they realised the content was explosive.

After the 'Rivers of Blood' speech Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across Britain.Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against the "victimisation" of Powell and the next day 400 meat porters from Smith field market handed in a 92-page petition in support of Powell, amidst other mass demonstrations of working class support, much of it from trade unionists, in London and Wolverhampton.

The future Labour leader Michael Foot remarked to a reporter that it was "tragic" that this "outstanding personality" had been widely misunderstood as predicting actual bloodshed in Britain, when in fact he had used the Aeneid quotation merely to communicate his own sense of foreboding.

Thirty years after the speech, Edward Heath admitted that Powell's remarks on the "economic burden of immigration" had been "not without prescience."

In an interview for Today shortly after her departure from office in 1991, Margaret Thatcher said that Powell had "made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms."