27 February 2008
Forty years after the notorious speech, Robert Shepherd explores its origins —
Powell’s fear of Indian ‘communalism’ and his views on the US race riots
What was in Enoch Powell’s mind when he made his explosive ‘rivers of blood’
speech on immigration 40 years ago this spring? His repetition of wild
allegations [ Like what? Ed. ] against immigrants made by his constituents and his apocalyptic
[ Make that entirely reasonable - Ed. ]
warnings of bloody racial conflict ended his front-bench career. Overnight
Powell was transformed into a folk-hero for many and a hate-figure for others.
Four decades later, the fallout from his outburst is still toxic, as a Tory
parliamentary candidate, Nigel Hastilow, discovered to his cost last autumn
when he echoed the view sometimes muttered outside polite society and stated
that Enoch had been right.
Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking
recently about Sharia law, Powell deliberately set out to shock [ Unsourced
assertion - probably a lie at that - Ed. ] . But what was
in his mind when he made his fateful speech in the Midland Hotel (now the
Burlington) in Birmingham on the afternoon of Saturday 20 April 1968? Was it
ambition, racism, or his duty as an MP to voice the concerns of his Wolverhampton constituents? Or was there something else preying on his mind?
These are the questions I set out to answer
[ No you didn't - Ed. ] in a documentary for BBC Radio
4 in the first of a major new series of programmes recalling the momentous
year of 1968. My investigation hears from eye-witnesses to Powell’s speech and
the drama surrounding it. With the help of Peter Brooke, the historian, and
the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, where Powell’s papers are held, the
programme draws on the latest research to trace the real source of the ‘rivers
of blood’.
Ambition and Powell’s rivalry with
Edward Heath
[ A fat communist paedophile with an unhealthy interest in brown envelopes - Ed.
], the then Conservative
leader, were important tributaries [ sic ] of his speech. Before making it, Powell
confided in his close friend in Wolverhampton, Clem Jones, editor of the Black
Country’s Express and Star newspaper. Likening his forthcoming speech to a
firework, Powell remarked that whereas the stars of an exploding rocket
usually fell back to earth, on this occasion the stars would light up the sky
for quite a time.
Immigration was a huge issue in the West Midlands in the 1960s, and although
Powell was shadow defence minister, it was quite reasonable that he, as a senior
local Tory, should speak about it. But he went to extraordinary lengths to keep
the subject of his speech secret from his Tory colleagues, particularly Heath.
Powell was to address the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre, but he
gave no hint of his chosen subject to the chairman of the meeting, Sir Reginald
Eyre, then a Birmingham MP and Tory whip for the area. Although being reticent
with colleagues, Powell had tipped off journalists, as Eyre discovered when film
crews arrived.
Eyre recalls the audience being ‘stunned’ by Powell’s dire warning that,
‘like the Roman’, he saw ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’. As soon as
the meeting ended Eyre phoned Willie Whitelaw, then Tory chief whip, to report
Powell’s comments and the media interest. Powell soon realised that his life was
about to be transformed when he called to collect his daughters from the Joneses
and was greeted by Clem’s wife, Marjorie. She was shocked that he had quoted
racist language and told him their friendship was over.
Powell’s speech led the evening news bulletins and was splashed across the
Sunday papers. On Sunday evening, Heath sacked Powell. Jim, now Lord, Prior,
Heath’s parliamentary private secretary, recalls that Heath had no choice,
because if he had not sacked Powell, both the shadow home secretary, Quintin
Hogg [ An arrogant oaf - Ed. ] (previously and later Lord Hailsham), and the shadow chancellor, Iain
Macleod, would have quit. They were furious with Powell because, ten days
earlier, when the shadow Cabinet agreed a policy of measured opposition to the
race relations bill, he had said nothing. Simon Heffer, Powell’s biographer,
says that by 1968 Heath and Powell were at odds on many fronts — Powell ‘wanted
to provoke Heath’ and probably felt that his speech was ‘a chance worth taking’
Powell’s gamble took a fearful toll on immigrant communities, who had been
recruited by employers as a quick fix for Britain’s postwar labour shortage.
Bill (later Lord) Morris [ a black ] worked in a Birmingham engineering factory. He
recalls that after Powell’s speech, workmates wouldn’t look him in the eye and
there was a loss of trust between blacks and whites. Unforgivably, Powell’s
speech gave succour to racists [ An accusation from an anti-English
Racist
- Ed. ]. But the charge that he himself was racist
cannot be reconciled with his parliamentary onslaught against a Tory
government in 1959 for having failed the Africans beaten and murdered at the Hola detention camp in British-ruled Kenya.
A strong current coursing through the ‘rivers of blood’ speech is Powell’s
expression of the intense frustration felt among working- and
lower-middle-class communities that immigration was changing their towns when
they had not been consulted. Powell represented such people, and at Walsall,
two months before his Birmingham speech, he compared their position to being
‘trapped or imprisoned, when all [their] efforts to attract attention and
assistance bring no response’. Powell’s rhetoric had also become more potent
after 1967, when he visited America and saw the devastation wrought by race
riots, and following the arrival in Britain of Kenyan Asians fleeing President
Kenyatta.
The final clue to the real source of the ‘rivers of blood’ came in Powell’s
Walsall speech when he warned against ‘communalism’, describing it as ‘the
curse of India’. Powell’s wartime military service had taken him to India in
1943, and there he developed a burning ambition to be viceroy. The word
‘communalism’ often sprang from the lips of British sahibs in justification of
the Raj. Peter Brooke’s research finds Powell echoing this imperialist
rationale in Delhi in 1945, when he noted that each Indian party was dominated
by a communal group — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Untouchable and other minorities.
Powell concluded that ‘communalism’ ruled out self-government for India in the
foreseeable future because individuals would not behave as rational voters or
accept majority decisions if they were in a minority.
On returning to civvy street in 1946, Powell imported this thinking into his
work at the Conservative parliamentary secretariat, advising against
immigration from India because it would undermine Britain’s homogeneous
electorate. The following year Attlee’s government pushed ahead with Indian
independence. As his beloved India descended into communal violence, Powell
received leaked, confidential reports via his contacts, including a former
Indian civil servant, Frank Brayne, detailing the bloodshed. At the foot of a
report from Lahore dated March 1947, Brayne scrawled, ‘Quem deus vult perdere
prius dementat’ — the chilling phrase intoned in translation by Powell in
1968, ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad’.
Although Powell abandoned imperialism, he never discarded his fear that
immigration would introduce communalism, thereby destroying Britain’s
homogeneous electorate on which, he believed, its parliamentary system
depended. For Powell, India’s bloodbath and America’s race riots confirmed
where communalism led. This nightmare was the real source of his ‘rivers of
blood’ speech.
Enoch Powell's Failures
QUOTE
The BBC [ Those three letters guarantee left wing
bias - Editor ] documentary on Enoch Powell’s 1968
“rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, currently featured on The
Occidental Observer, reminds us of how White loyalism has been
systematically defeated since the Second World War throughout the West (though
with some recent exceptions in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and even
Britain). It also reminds us of the tragic failure of our elites to respond to
prophetic, principled voices such as Powell’s. Nevertheless I think Enoch Powell is an
inappropriate role model for White activists.
Despite personal failure as a politician,
Powell could have succeeded in the long term by planting the seeds of
understanding and thus resistance in the public mind. Infuriately his argument
was flawed. He did not get to the heart of the issue, of why Western nations
need to stop large scale immigration. Yes, violent unrest is bad. But Powell
would have had Britons believe that violence was the only threat. People soon
realized that rivers of blood were unlikely to flow. Indeed, over time
Powell’s emphasis of violence may have worked against immigration restriction
because he effectively set the criterion of success so low that immigration
even of tsunami proportions passed the test.........
It would have been a patriotic service to
have exposed the Jewish factor in Britain’s immigration disaster. Why did
Thatcher, of all people, not cut immigration after the 1981 riots?.......... This was a dimension of politics Enoch Powell never
broached. As reported in the European Jewish Press (30
Dec. 2005 - see FO had concerns over Thatcher’s Jewish links) it was known in government circles that Thatcher had a
long-running close relationship with the Jewish community and that there was a
large and supportive Jewish constituency in her electorate.......
Surely Powell knew of Thatcher’s Jewish ties
and understood political Zionism. If he had talked about these and other
underlying issues he would still have been met with overwhelming opposition.
But more of the public would have realized over time that he was right. They
could have made sense of what was happening to them as the passing years saw
their dispossession accelerate.
UNQUOTE
The fact that Charles Dodgson needs to be used as an alias tells us about the
corruption, the oppression of English politics. The original article is longer
and worth reading.
.
The [ almost ] great man, a war time brigadier.