In Spiked, Mick Hume discusses the resurgent controversy after a BBC re-broadcast of the original Powell speech this past weekend:
Here are the news headlines. There were no reports of race riots, pogroms or waves of hate crimes across Britain on Saturday night, as the BBC broadcast a radio show marking the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamously anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In other news, the US, UK and France have bombed Syria…
Why all the overblown fuss about the BBC Radio 4 programme that broadcast the full text of Powell’s 1968 speech for the first time? To judge by the political denunciations and demands for a ban and the many ‘what next – Hitler’s Mein Kampf as Book at Bedtime?’-type tweets, one might imagine that the BBC had cleared the primetime schedules to give the late Powell the full Nuremburg Rally treatment.
In fact, the radio programme, ‘50 Years On: Rivers of Blood’, presented by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, was tucked away in the quiet Saturday evening Archive on 4 slot, where few might have noticed if not for all the calls for it to be taken off air. Far from giving us the full Enoch, the speech was cut up into chunks read by an actor and interspersed with critical commentary that went on rather longer than Powell.
But then, the ruckus over this programme really had little to do with Enoch and the anti-immigrant politics of 1968. The pre-emptive backlash was more about Brexit, and the anti-working-class politics of 2018. The essential message of the protests was that if the demos today heard Powell’s words from 50 years ago, they might go straight out to attack Britain’s immigrant or ethnic-minority communities and turn the Thames or the Tees into real-life rivers of blood. They think we are all Enochs now.
Ironically, it is these leading Remainers who sound more like modern-day Enochs, echoing a PC version of his warnings about a coming race war caused by anti-immigrant feeling. If Powell’s rhetoric was overdone back then, theirs is ridiculous today.
For us colonials who may not have been fully immersed in late-60s British politics, the Wikipedia page helps put it into some sort of perspective.
The “Rivers of Blood” speech is a speech given by British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the UK and the then-proposed Race Relations Bill.
Powell always referred to it as “the Birmingham speech” and the expression “rivers of blood” did not appear in the original speech. The phrase is an allusion to a line from Virgil’s Aeneid quoted by Powell (“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”).
The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about, and divisive, politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath. According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell’s perspective on immigration may have played a decisive contributory factor in the Conservatives’ surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent rebels opposing the subsequent Heath government.
