Europe's Cassandra
This article was originally published in 2008, on the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in Birmingham, England, 1968. The events of the past few days have made his words, in retrospect, seem understated.
On April 20, 1968, on a Saturday afternoon, Enoch Powell delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. He went there fully aware that what he was going to say would be of historic importance. Earlier in the week, he had told his friend Clement Jones: “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.”
In his speech, Powell warned of the dramatic and tragic results which mass immigration from the undeveloped world was going to have on Britain. He referred to the Roman poet Virgil, who has the Sybil prophetize, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
Powell was a leading member of the British Conservatives. He was the shadow defense secretary, a former minister of health, and during the Second World War had been the only British soldier to rise from private to brigadier, and the army’s youngest brigadier at that. Despite his credentials Edward Heath, the shadow prime minister, sacked him the day after the speech. Heath considered the speech to be “racialist in tone.”
Of course it was not. The speech was merely politically incorrect at a time when political correctness was beginning to smother public debate. Moreover, Powell confronted his colleagues with the responsibility to address “future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils”—a duty which most politicians, as Powell realized well enough, “knowingly shirk.”
Powell said that Britain, by allowing in thousands of immigrants from an entirely different culture, was “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He warned that by the year 2000, there would be five million to seven million immigrants and their descendants in Britain, around one tenth of the population: “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population,” he warned. And he was right. In fact, the situation is worse than Powell predicted.
