It has often been said that Enoch Powell was one of the most briliant politicians of his generation. Yet his political career never hit the heights that were expected of it. It has been said that his influence lives on, perhaps so, but it is for one moment in a career spanning almost fifty years that he is best remembered. A speech given in a grim little hotel in Birmingham on a chilly April night in 1968, on a subject that to this day remains taboo – immigration. A speech for which he has been villified for ever since. In a series of Great Speeches recently published in the Guardian Newspaper the Editorial Team felt obliged to explain why the Rivers of Blood had been omitted. They explained that it was because it was essentially negative and had contributed nothing to the development of modern society. The truth is that it is perceived as being intolerant and to have incited racial hatred. But is this truly the case, is this indeed the tenet of the speech? Or is this merely the propaganda that surrounds it? Eleven years after the death of its author it is perhaps time to re-visit the life of a remarkable man and look again at that infamous speech. This is not, however, intended to be a vindication of Enoch Powell, merely an explanation.

John Enoch Powell, was born on 16 June, 1912, in Stechford near Birmingham. Though of common stock, Enoch was decidedly middle-class, even if he never quite lost his brummie accent. Not that being middle-class was necessarily an advantage in the highly patrician Tory Party he was later to join. He attended school in Birmingham where he proved to be an exemplary student, even achieving a 100% pass mark in an English exam. His entry into Trinity College Cambridge to study the Classics, therefore, was a foregone conclusion, and he took to academic life like a fish to water, pouring over ancient manuscripts and translating academic works into Welsh and Greek. In 1937, he was appointed Professor of Greek at Sydney University at the age of just 25. He was disappointed, always a driven man he had wanted to beat the German philosopher Nietzsche’s record of becoming a professor at 24. Likewise, he studied Urdu to foster his desire to be made Viceroy of India, again he was to be disappointed.

He returned to Britain upon the outbreak of war determined to do his bit to wipe clean the dishonour he felt the appeasers of Hitler, particularly within the Tory Party, had brought upon his country. In October, 1939, he enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a private soldier. By the wars end he had risen to the rank of Brigadier-General, the youngest in the British Army. In the General Election of 1945, he, like the majority of returning ex-servicemen, voted Labour.Much later in life when questioned about his career, he was to say, ” I should like to have been killed in the war.”

In 1950, he was elected Conservative MP for the constituency of Wolverhampton South-West. He was soon considered to be the most brilliant man in his party but had to endure the snobbery of those who believed themselves his better in every other way, and he never really became one of the inner-circle, he was an outsider, a maverick. He also found it difficult to tow the party line and very quickly acquired the reputation as someone who could not be wholly trusted. He had been an Imperialist but gave up on Empire after the Independence of India and his frank acknowledgement that Britain was no longer a world power, and he could never reconcile himself to the idea of a commonwealth. He opposed British policy and behaviour in Kenya during the Mau-Mau insurrection, and the speech he gave on this subject in the House of Commons on 27 July, 1959, Denis Healey, the future Labour Party Deputy Leader and Foreign Secretary, described as the greatest parliamentary speech he ever heard. He was ferociously anti-American, the country he believed posed the greatest threat to British independence and opposed British entry into the European Economic Community. He was also an avid deflationist, a polcy he was willing to resign from the Conservative Shadow Frontbench over. Indeed, the economics he advocated were an early form of monetarism not too dissimilar from the policies later adopted by the Government of Margaret Thatcher. He was admired by all, yet except for brief periods as a junior Transport Minister and as Health Secretary he never attained high office. When he ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1965, he received just 15 votes. His career which had always seemed to be on a steep upward arc had appeared to stall.

On Saturday, 20 April, 1968, he addressed party workers at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His speech was intended as a response to the Labour Governments proposed Race Relations Act. It was destined to go down in history as the Rivers of Blood speech. It is not my intention to give a verbatim account of the speech or to deconstruct every word of the text, but merely to provide an overall assessment of it and discuss its impact on the country and on its author.

Powell insisted that all citizens should be equal before the law but this does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a special or privileged class. He argued that the passing of anti-discrimination laws, or indeed positive discrimination, would be used against the indigenous population, ” they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant workers the same standards of discipline and competence required of the native born worker.” He also argued that whilst thousands of immigrants wanted to integrate there were just as many who did not, and that some had a vested interest in fostering racial and religious differences with a view to domination over their fellow immigrants. Given our recent experiences with home-grown terrorism perhaps such claims should not be taken with a pinch of salt.

Powell thought that Britain was in danger of being swamped and much of his speech was devoted to a letter he had received from an elderly constituent whom he insisted must remain anonymous. She had refused to rent out lodgings to immigrants and had suffered intimidation as a result. Powell quoted from the letter and said, “she is afraid to go out. Windows are broked. She finds excretia pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know, is “Racialist.”

He feared that Britain would undergo racial conflict similar to that which had blighted the United States and the riots that had set American cities ablaze. “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see, the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” It was a quote from Virgil’s, The Aenid, and one he had originally intended to give in the Latin. He went on, ” we must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” His answer was place curbs on future immigration and adopt a plan for voluntary repatriation.

Powell’s language had sometimes been coarse and crude and the subject matter provocative but it had caused little stir in the auditorium. Indeed, only one man had complained. But Powell knew it would kick up a storm. The  degree of the furore, however, seemed to take him by surprise. The political establishment were outraged. He was accused of being a coward who was hiding his true feelings behind political rhetoric, he was threatened with prosecution for incitement to racial hatred, and many of his senior colleagues refused to work with him any longer and threatened to resign from the party. The following day, Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet.

The views of the political establishment and that of the media did not reflect those of the British public, however. Strikes broke out in Smithfield Market, Tilbury Docks, and factories up and down the country in support of Powell. More than 1000 dockworkers marched on Parliament to demand Powell’s reinstatement to the shadow cabinet, and MP’s were jeered and jostled. In the next few weeks he was to receive more than 130,000 letters in support of his stance with only 4 against. In opinion polls 74% supported him in his view that restrictions should be placed on immigration. It was the pinnacle of Powell’s political career but it was also to herald his downfall. Ostracised within his own party he had become a political pariah. Over the coming years he was to find himself marginalised. In 1974, aware that the Labour Party was intending to hold a referendum over continued membership of the EEC he urged the public to support them in the coming General Election. Aware that his career within the Conservative Party was effectively over, he soon after resigned.

Enoch Powell, went onto become an MP for the Ulster Unionist Party but his days as a big political player were over. With that wonderful sonorous voice with its gentle brummie lilt fading fast he quite literally became a silent backbencher. In a newspaper interview given soon after the speech, he had been asked if he was a racialist? He replied, “What I would take racialist to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who speaks and acts in that belief. So the answer to that question is, no.”

Retiring from Parliament in 1987, he spent the remaining years of his life delighting in the company of his grandchildren and translating Latin texts. He died on 8 February, 1998. All those years before he had wound up his Rivers of Blood speech with the words, “ All that I know is that to see and not to speak, would be a great betrayal.” Perhaps, in hindsight, our great betrayal was not to have listened.