Editing Enoch Powell (section)

===1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech===
{{Main|Rivers of Blood speech}}

The Birmingham-based television company [[Associated Television|ATV]] saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, Powell said to his friend Clement 'Clem' Jones, a journalist and then editor at the [[Wolverhampton]] ''[[Express & Star]]'', "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."<ref>{{cite news|title=My father and Enoch Powell|work=Shropshire Star|date=8 October 2016|page=3 (Weekend supplement)}} Article by Nicholas Jones, Clem Jones' son, condensed from book ''What Do We Mean By Local? The Rise, Fall – and possible rise again – of Local journalism'' (Abramis, 2013).</ref>

Powell was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature. On 20 April 1968, he gave a speech in [[Birmingham]] in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked mass immigration from the Commonwealth to the UK. 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:

{{blockquote|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. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/enoch-powells-rivers-blood-speech/|title=Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech|newspaper=The Telegraph|date=12 June 2020|via=www.telegraph.co.uk}}</ref>}}

''[[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."<ref>''The Times'' editorial comment, Monday 22 April 1968.</ref>

The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction of the [[Race Relations Act 1968]] (by the Labour Government at the time), which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of [[Race (human categorization)|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.<ref>{{cite Hansard | url=https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1968/apr/23/race-relations-bill |title=Race Relations Bill | house=HC | date=23 April 1968 | column_start=53 | column_end=198 |volume=763 }}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Powell|1969|pp=285–286}}</ref>

One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in [[Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)|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 non-Whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox.<ref>{{Harvnb|Heffer|1998|p=460}}</ref>

When Heath telephoned [[Margaret Thatcher]] to tell her that he was going to sack Powell, she responded: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". Heath sacked Powell from his [[Shadow cabinet]] the day after the speech, and he never held another senior political post again. 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.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_Tl6AAAAMAAJ&q=%22In+general+do+you+agree+or+disagree+with+what+Mr.+Powell+said+in+his+speech |title=Ethnicity, structured inequality, and the state in Canada and the Federal Republic of Germany |publisher=Lang|author=Robin OOstow |year=1991|isbn=9783631437346 |access-date=20 February 2012}}</ref> One poll concluded that between 61 and 73 per cent disagreed with Heath sacking Powell.<ref name="Shepherd 1994, p. 352"/> According to George L. Bernstein, many British people felt that Powell "was the first British politician who was actually listening to them".<ref>{{cite book|author=George L Bernstein|title=The Myth Of Decline: The Rise of Britain Since 1945|year=2004|publisher=Pimlico|isbn=1844131025|page=274}}</ref>

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 for the writer, who refused to waive it.<ref>[[Express and Star]], 20 January 2014. [https://www.expressandstar.com/news/2014/01/20/right-or-wrong-the-legacy-of-enoch-powells-speech-lives-on/] Accessed 28 June 2015.</ref>

Powell had also expressed his opposition to the Race Relations legislation being put into place by the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] Prime Minister [[Harold Wilson]] at the time.<ref>{{Citation | url = https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/background/pastelec/ge70.shtml | publisher = BBC | place = UK | title = Background}}</ref>

Following the "Rivers of Blood" speech, Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across the UK.<ref name="dumbrell"/><ref name="alor"/> Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]], 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against the "[[victimisation]]" of Powell, with slogans such as "we want Enoch Powell!" and "Enoch here, Enoch there, we want Enoch everywhere". The next day, 400 meat porters from Smithfield 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.{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=354}}

Conservative politician [[Michael Heseltine]] stated that in the aftermath of the "Rivers of blood" speech, if Enoch Powell had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide".<ref>{{cite book|author=Douglas Murray|title=The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam|page=15}}</ref>