1/17/2024 0 Comments Paul temple radio echoes![]() ![]() "People who want to allow immigration on a grand scale protect that argument by saying anyone who criticizes is by definition a racist," he says. "The biggest single issue in the Brexit debate was immigration," said Nigel Hastilow, a columnist with the Wolverhampton Express & Star newspaper and a former politician who was dropped by the Conservative Party in 2007 after writing a column arguing that "Enoch was right" when it came to immigration. His echoes could be heard in 2016, during Britain's debate to leave the European Union. But in a documentary, he said, "I hear my voice coming through by what is said." Powell, who died in 1998, once said that all political careers end in failure. "So it just became easier not to talk about it." "I mean, throughout British political history, if you ever said 'Enoch was right,' you lost your job," says Sanghera, the writer from Wolverhampton. "Enoch Powell was wrong," says Edwards, now a teacher of trade union studies at Shrewsbury College.Īfter "Rivers of Blood," Powell became a pariah in politics. "And he didn't want to live in a country full of racial tension."īut Britain thrived as even more immigrants arrived. "He feared that would cause great racial tensions," Heffer says. Powell saw that the new immigrants were arriving in huge numbers, Heffer says, and instead of integrating, were living in separate communities. Powell's "main worry in making that speech in 1968 was about things happening against the will of the British people, without them being consulted," says historian Simon Heffer, Powell's official biographer. "Dirty Enoch Powell said to the immigrants, immigrants you better get back to your Commonwealth homes," Paul McCartney sang. The Beatles even referenced the controversy in an early version of "Get Back" called "The Commonwealth Song." Uteldra Veronica Warren, who's from Jamaica, remembers how white schoolchildren chased her mother down the street, trying to lift up her skirt, yelling, "Let me see your tail, I heard you people have tails." Many protested, saying, "Enoch was right." The speech emboldened racists. "I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions," Heath said.īut polls showed a majority of Britons supported Powell. The Times of London immediately labeled it an "evil speech." Conservative Party leader Edward Heath dismissed Powell from the party leadership. Powell's address became known as the "Rivers of Blood" speech. "As I look ahead," he said, "I am filled with foreboding like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.' " Powell said inviting mass immigration was akin to "watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."Ī classics scholar, Powell also quoted Virgil's Aeneid. "How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? My answer is that I do not have the right not to do so." "I can already hear the chorus of execration," Powell continued. "This is why to enact legislation of the kind before Parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match onto gunpowder."ġ968: How We Got Here 'Today In 1968' Replays A Historic Year - On Twitter "The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming," he said. He said it was whites who were facing deprivation and that Britain "must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting" large numbers of immigrants to enter. He attacked the bill that outlawed discrimination. is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect." In the speech, Powell warned, "That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic. when BBC Radio 4 decided to broadcast an actor's reading of the speech last weekend. Even now, 50 years later, there was outcry in the U.K. On April 20, 1968, he took the stage at a Conservative Party event at the Midlands Hotel in Birmingham and gave an incendiary speech that would come to define him - and divide his country. The tension was especially obvious in Sanghera's hometown, Wolverhampton, in England's West Midlands, which he calls "one of the first cities in Britain to experience mass immigration."Įnoch Powell, who represented Wolverhampton in Parliament, feared a race war coming because of mass immigration. ![]()
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