The Rest Is History - 606. Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Who was Enoch Powell, the deeply controversial British conservative politician? Why is he the father of Brexit, and possibly even Reform? And, how did he come to make his inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood speech’, in 1968?    Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Enoch Powell - one of the most incendiary and contentious figures in all of British political history - and his enduring shadow today. Start generating your own greener electricity for less, with £500 off Solar. Visit https://www.hivehome.com/history for more information. T&Cs apply* *Output and savings varies by season, electricity usage and system size. Paid-for surplus requires an eligible SEG tariff. Offer for new customers only. Ends 17th November. Learn more at https://www.uber.com/onourway Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Producer: Tabby Syrett Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the rest ishistory.com and join the club. That is the rest is history.com. This episode is brought to you by SAP. With investors, customers, and workers demanding more from your business,

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he suddenly said, If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country. I have three children. I shall be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country, in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing?

I dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation. The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, is a member of parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.

What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history so the unmistakable tones there of John Enoch Powell who was MP for Wolverhampton southwest and he is beginning what is perhaps I in fact I would say certainly the single most incendiary speech in British political history and he was speaking on the 20th of April in 1968 to

conservative activists at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham and his subject was of course as you could tell from that extract the ever sensitive topic of immigration and the speech became associated with one phrase

above all. It was a quotation from Virgil's great epic poem The Aeneid spoken by the Sybil. And the Sybil said in Powell's translation of it, like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tyber foaming with much blood. And so Dominic, that speech ever since has been remembered as the Rivers of Blood speech. Yes, and although it may not mean much to our overseas listeners, to anybody in Britain, it will be very, very well known, even to people who are perhaps not

massively familiar with the details of Powell's career that have heard of his name and they'll heard the phrase, Rivers of Blood. And actually this speech made Enoch Powell a household name in Britain for the next 25 years. So he was the kind of politician. He was the kind of public figure. I think that almost everybody had heard of. His name became a shorthand for the issue and for a particular kind of politics. And his name Enoch is so striking, isn't it? So it became a kind of shorthand. Exactly. To a lot of people, he was the walking embodiment of nativism and nationalism, English nationalism, I suppose. And a lot of people, and including many of our listeners, would probably go further than that,

and they'd say he was an out-and-out racist. And then on the other hand, there'll be some of our listeners who say, no, not at all. He was the one man who dared to say the unsayable. He was a prophet. He was a man who sacrificed his political career for his principles. So I think you can argue that his influence is far greater than that, and many people who actually became prime minister. You know, Enot Powell's name is remembered today in a way that, frankly, Harold Wilson's or even Jim Callahan's, Tom, are not.

I mean, he's remembered overwhelmingly today for the River's blood speech. But, Dominic, he was also, I mean, a huge influence on Mrs. Thatcher's economic policy. And also, he was virulently opposed to the common market, which became the European Union. So in a sense, also he was the kind of the godfather of Brexit. He completely was. I think so many of the arguments that Brexiteers make when they're sort of more cerebral arguments. can be traced back to Powell. Even today, to liberals, his name is short-hand for kind of what they see is the ugliness

of populism. And to his admirers, he is the ultimate example of a politician who dared to say what he believed, even though he knew he'd be pillared for it. So it's a fair guess that those of our listeners who vote liberal, Democrat or Labour, think Powell as awful, the devil incarnate, and those who vote conservative, or if we have reform voting listeners, they would see him very much as a hero. I'm not sure about conservatives. Well, conservatives are divided.

I think so, well, there are only about three conservatives left, aren't there? That's true. But I mean, certainly the conservative leadership has always been very anxious to distinguish itself from Enoch Powell. You're right about that. And actually, there is an argument which will perhaps come to later in the program, that one of the effects of Powell's speech, unexpectedly and perhaps inadvertently, is that actually muffles the political debate at Westminster to some degree

because politicians are nervous about following in its footsteps. Now, I thought it would be good to do this. It's a history podcast. I'm not going to preach to the listeners about what to think. It's so controversial. The issues are still so raw that I think it's good for listeners to make up their own minds. And because we are a history podcast, we should begin with the historical figure. So there's a great book on Enot Powell, like the Roman, by Simon Heifer.

Now, Simon Heffer is himself a man of very robust opinions, but his book is really, really, it's great. I mean, I shouldn't say but, as though there's a contradiction. And his book is really, really good. It's really, he really gets under Powell's skin. And Powell is a pretty strange character, I think, Tom, wouldn't you agree? I mean, he's a very, very, he's an eccentric figure. Yes. He's fantastically strange.

He is. So he's born in, we have a lot of Birmingham people on this show. He was born in Birmingham in 1912, so he's 20 years behind another Brummy, very intense, very romantic kind of man, J.R. Tolkien. And indeed, they went to the same school. So Powell is an only child. His father was a primary school headmaster. He's an incredibly precocious little boy. So he's called the, his parents call him the professor. Do you know what he was called at school? What was he called at school? Scowly-Powley. Yeah, because he's, he very rarely smiles, or at least never smiles in public. So when he would, do you see this?

when he was six on Sundays, he would make his parents sort of assemble, and then he would give them a lecture about the books that he'd read that week. And then when he goes to school, everybody says he's a really unfriendly, austere boy. He walks around, he's got this piercing cold blue eyes. He's always on his own. He's always carrying this gigantic pile of books. But Tom, if the parallels are not striking enough already, he's also very keen on the classics, isn't he? Well, and particularly Herodotus. So he begins translating Herodotus when he's 14. How old were you when you started, Horotus? Oh, much, much, much later. But one of the reasons, so he's called John, but he changes his name, his second name is Enoch, and he starts

using Enoch as his first name because there is a classicist who's done a translation of Thucydides called John Powell, and the young Enoch Powell is already looking ahead and thinking, well, I don't want to be muddled with him. I mean, that's a strange thing to be thinking when you're eight or whatever it is. So he was so clever that he started the sixth form at King Edwards, Birmingham, two years early, by which point he was already reading Goethe and Nietzsche in German. I don't think they even did German at school. It was just learning in his spare time.

So very Tolkien-like, actually, learning all these languages. And then he wins a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. And there, if you read the accounts of him at Trinity College, Cambridge, they are hilarious. So he would get up every day, start work at 5 o'clock in the morning. Again, like you, he would work until 9 o'clock at night. He turned down every social invitation, including an invitation from the master of the college and his wife to dinner. Because he said, I'm so sorry, I've got massive work pressure. I can't do anything.

So he never did anything but work. But he won all these prizes. And just to say on the prizes, he enters every prize that is open to a Classics undergraduate in his first year. And he wins every single one. and that is a feat that's never been achieved before or since. So, I mean, he is an astonishingly brilliant man. I mean, there's no doubt about that. You know, whatever you think of as politics, there's no denigrating his intellectual

sort of calibre. He became a fellow. He started work on a herodotus lexicon, which I have. You have that? Is it good? Yeah. I mean, it's very useful. I used it when I did my translation.

He worked on Thucydides as well, didn't he? He started working in a revised edition of Thucydides. and he's also writing these sort of very deeply wrought poems under the influence of A.E. Houseman. So he's a massive, massive Houseman. Yes, and like Houseman, he has kind of unrequited crushes on beautiful young men, doesn't he? And writes lots of poetry about it. Yeah, I think at this stage, he's, I mean, insofar as he's a sexual creature at all, he's gay. You know, his passions all lie in that direction.

What's still alive at 22? what is it, a clean up standing lad like you, all that kind of thing. That's his vibe. Exactly. All that stuff. And he actually writes to his parents at one point. He says, I have absolutely no interest in women at all. So, you know, there's no doubt what's...

I mean, he does actually later on get married and has children. So he has three slightly contradictory ambitions. First of all, he's obsessed with Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a professor at the age of 24, and Powell wants to beat him. And he fails by not by much. So at 25, he has made professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. So this is in 1937. At this point, he's the youngest professor in the British Empire.

Number two, talking to the British Empire, he wants to be viceroy of India. And actually, again, in this slightly eccentric way, since he was a student, he's been teaching himself Urdu so that he can communicate with his future subjects. And actually, when he becomes MP for Wolverhampton, he would talk to some of his constituents and keep notes on them in Urdu. on his Indian constituents. One other thing he wanted to do, which I learned from listening to his desert island discs with Sue Lawley, is that he apparently wanted to become a musician. And unsurprisingly, with his nationalism and his love of German, he's obsessed by Wagner. So four of his eight discs are from Wagner, one from each of the operas in the ring cycle.

And one of them is a bit of Wagner that I sang on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. Do you know, the parallels are so, so striking. it's really, really chilling, actually. Well, all of this, I mean, the Wagner thing is interesting because I think it expresses something very important about Powell that's often missed. Powell appears to be a very austere, chilly man, but I think deep down, he's basically a 19th century

German, capital R, romantic nationalist. Do you not think? I mean, the Wagner, the Nietzsche, all of that. So he's a man out of time. When you hear him on Desdandes talking about each of the Wagner extracts, I mean, he's choking back tears. He's astonishingly romantic with the capital R. I think he's the classic example which you sometimes get of this kind of incredibly bright only child who just from the moment he can walk and talk is like somebody from a different century and completely inhabits that persona and just seems completely adrift in the modern world.

Anyway, well, actually, I'm being being a bit harsh, because when the war breaks out in 1939, he immediately leaves Sydney and he comes back to England, he's determined, he's been, you know, he's very anti-appeasement, he saw the war coming, he always said he would join up straight away, he becomes a private and the Royal Warwickshers, and then he rises really rapidly, I mean, he has a really good war. He goes to North Africa, he becomes a major, then a colonel, he works on the logistics for El Alamein, he goes into military intelligence, he's sent to Delhi. By the end of the war, his deputy, director of intelligence in Delhi, and he is one of the youngest brigadiers in the British Empire. His big regret, I don't know if he talked about this with Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, he is gutted that he hasn't been killed. So he never saw combat. And when he was asked, how would you like to be remembered? He said, I should like to have been killed in the war. I think that's on Desiland Discs. It's in the context of the person that he's written his love poetry to.

and Sue Lawley presses him about who this person is and he says, I'm not going to say. But I think we know who it is. It was a kind of young undergraduate called AWJ Thomas, who died during the fall of Singapore. And I think his statement about he wished he died in the war is kind of tied up with that. I mean, very, very deep waters, very housemanian waters. Very, yes. Anyway, he comes back to England and he's decided by now he wants to make his name in politics. Remember, he wants to be viceroy of India.

So he voted Labour in 1945 to punish the Tories for appeasement. But then he joins the Conservative Research Department, working under the big rising star of the Conservatives, R.A. Butler. And obviously why the Conservatives? Because king and country, romantic traditionalism, the empire, all of that. So you can imagine how shocked he was when Clement Attlee, in early 1947, unveiled the Indian Independence Act. Powell said later he was so upset that he couldn't

sleep. He spent the whole night walking the streets of London. And then he came back and he drew a plan to retake India to 10 divisions. And this plan actually got onto Churchill's desk, because Churchill's still Tory leader. And Churchill sort of very sorrowfully said to Powell, it's far too late and we need far more divisions than this. So Powell then did what he often does. He goes completely to the other extreme. He says, the empire is meaningless without India, liquidated at once. It's a great sham. forget all this business about being a great power. He becomes a proper little Englander in the true sense. He believes, you know, England is what matters.

We have come home from our wanderings abroad. We should abandon all our pretensions and just get on with being basically English nationalists. Can I just ask, is it an English nationalism, not a British nationalism then? I mean, what is the attitudes to the United Kingdom? Yeah, this is really interesting. So I think there is always a tension in Powell between, he believes, for example, in the sovereignty of parliament. He thinks Northern Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom like anywhere else. He doesn't believe in Stormont.

Well, he'll end up an MP for the Ulster Unionists, aren't he? Exactly. But I think Powell is a very, very English figure. All his references are to England. Of course, in the mid-century, people don't often distinguish between England and Britain in the same way they do today. But I think, I mean, I don't just think Powell is the godfather of Brexit or indeed of Thatcherism. I think he's also one of the intellectual godfathers of the kind of revived English nationalism that you've seen in the last 50 years or so. Anyway, Combs MP for Wolverhampton Southwest in February 1950, immediately becomes well known in the House of Commons for the style that I think you captured really well.

It's a kind of hypnotic drone, isn't it? It's this kind of West Midlands drone that he does. It's sort of relentless. And he has these speeches which appear to be very coldly, ruthlessly logical. But often underneath there is this kind of simmering passion. I mean, he has these icy, vampiric eyes, doesn't he? Astonishing effect, if you've never seen him speak. Hypnotic is the word.

Exactly. You know, he's not, he's on the right of the Conservative Party economically. He's a laissez-faire kind of classical liberal. but he has lots of friends in the Labour Party. Most famously, Michael Foote and Tony Ben, the two kind of standard bearers of the left famously sort of labour in the 1960s and 70s. And here's a really surprising thing about Powell,

which I imagine those of our listeners who say, oh gosh, she's a terrible man, he's the devil, will be surprised at this. The most famous speech he made before the Rivers of Blood speech was a condemnation, a blazing condemnation of British behaviour in Africa. So in 1959, the British had been, fighting the Mao Mao uprising in Kenya, and 11 Kenyan prisoners have been beaten to death

in the Holah-Hola camp. There's a big outcry, and some Tory MPs try to defend it and say, oh, well, it's Africa, you know, who cares what goes on in Africa. And Power gives this blistering speech in the Commons. He says, it's absolutely indefensible. It doesn't matter that it's Africa. Wherever it happens, you know, standards are the same. African lives and worth just as much European lives. This is absolutely intolerable and we should be ashamed in all of this. And loads of MPs on the left at the time came up to him afterwards and said, what a brilliant speech there was. In his memoirs, Dennis Healy, big figure in the Labour Party, said it was, and I quote, the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard with all the moral passion and rhetorical force

of Demosthenes. So Powell would have liked that comparison, wouldn't he? Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator. Yeah, Demosthenes, not a reference, I think, that loads of modernies. and MPs would band it around, don't you think, Tom, slightly depressingly. So you might think, oh, he's a great rising star of the Tories, but actually he's always flouncing out of sort of government, having massive spats with the people running the Tory party. So in 1957, 1958, he has this great row with Harold McMillan

about inflation and about spending. He walks out because he says spending is too high. McMillan ends up bringing him back as Minister of Health, but deliberately puts him at the far end of the cabinet table because he said, and I quote, I can't stand those mad eyes staring at me a moment longer. So there's always a sense that people are, people are slightly amused by him at this point.

They see him as a character. You know, he's a bit bonkers, but they think he's very clever. And he's not unclubble, right? Because he's got these friends, both among the Tories, but also in the Labour Party. Then there's another massive row in 1963. Sir Alec Douglas Hume becomes,

Prime Minister, and Powell refuses to serve under him. And actually, one reason he did this, again, may surprise him of our listeners. Paul said of Sir Alex O'Glis Heem, how can I serve under a man whose views on Africa are positively Portuguese? But I suppose by this point, he's given up on the empire. So he would view colonial attempts to keep hold of it as not just immoral, but as a waste of time, as foolish. That's exactly what he thinks, exactly. So the Tories lose in 1964 and Powell seems to have a way back. They have their first ever leadership election in 1965. He stands, he wins only 15 votes, but he says afterwards,

I left my visiting card. The new leader, however, is Edward Heath. And Edward Heath, he is not a man for Wagnerian romantic nationalist passions, is he? He loves a committee meeting. Ted Heath loves a quango. But he does love his music too. He does. So that might have been a point of contact, but I can absolutely see your point that Heath is a technocrat and Powell presumably is the least technocratic politician imaginable.

Yeah, you're basically asking Richard Wagner and Keir Stama to work together. And I don't feel that's a marriage made in heaven. No. Now, Powell, by this point, it's not just about personalities with Heath, it's also about policy. Power by this point is really becoming a little bit of a professional heretic. So on social issues, for example, he is not conservative. at all. So he is really at odds with the right at the Tory party. He supports legalizing homosexuality. He supports scrapping the death penalty. But on economics, he is way to the other

extreme. So he says, you know, the welfare state has a complete bloated monolith. We were spending too much money. We should cut taxes. We're far too left wing. The conservatives have been far too left wing for too long. We should get back to kind of free market values. So in that sense, he's very, very clearly anticipating thatterism in the 1980s. And that means that he is increasingly a man alone in the Tory party. The Sunday Express in 1965 said

he has the taut, pale face of a missionary and the zealous energy of a man who's not afraid of the stake. So very savenorola, actually. Yeah. And actually, I was thinking a lot about savenorola, a man whose voice you also did very entertainingly, I have to say.

Thank you, Dominique. That sense of burning, of austerity and burning passion. You know, you see that so often, don't you, with kind of figures who see themselves as prophets in history? Yes. Ted Heath does not care for this at all. And as the months go by, they become increasingly strange. Powell is his defense spokesman. Powell also, actually, I forgot to mention this in the notes, Powell really alienates Heath by coming out massively against the war in Vietnam. Well, he would absolutely come against the war in Vietnam, wouldn't he? Because one of the great themes of his life, which we haven't touched until now, is that he's massively anti-American.

And that I think stems back to his time in North Africa during the Second World War and his dealings with America. You could argue actually one of the single driving forces in his life is his attitude to America. His hatred really of America and Americanism and his determination that Britain not become in any way American. And we'll come to this in the context of race in the second half. Anyway, it's by about 1966. Powerless becoming increasingly outspoken. He says, it's time for some harsh, fierce, destructive words aimed in defiance and contempt at men and policies we detest.

I mean, Heath is very shocked at this. And Heath says, come on, calm down. To the line, please. And Powell basically ignores him. And it's now that he begins to speak out about one issue above all, which is immigration. And to make sense of this, we need to give a bit of context. So in the first half of the 20th century, I would say, maybe some historians will disagree, but I would say Britain was not by any means a country of immigrants.

Of course there are some black and brown people in port cities and in London and so on and so forth, but they are pretty rare. They are tens of thousands at most in a country of tens of millions. And actually, we did an episode with Trevor Phillips, didn't me, when he was talking about exactly this. And the moment it began to change, the so-called windrush moment in the late 1940s, when you get thousands of immigrants arriving in Britain, basically from the Caribbean and what become India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

All of them, parts of the British Empire and then British Commonwealth. Exactly. So most of these people go where the jobs are. So they go to industrial cities and manufacturing towns. London at this stage still at an industrial city. They go to Birmingham. They go to the textile towns of Lancashire. And they go, a lot of them go to Powell's own constituency, which is Wolverhampton.

By the way, for our overseas listeners, Wolverhampton is to the sort of northwest of Birmingham. It's part of the West Midlands conurbation, basically slap bang in the middle of England. Does I have a football team? It has a brilliant football team which invented European football, Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the oldest and most important football teams in the world. So I'm glad we've mentioned that. Now, right from the start, lots of people were very hostile to immigration on this scale. When the sort of iconic ship, the windrush, arrived in 1948, the Labour government, as we've heard with Trevor Phillips in our episode, was very anxious about it.

Some Labour MPs complained about it. There are lots of hotels and restaurants that don't allow black or Asian people in. There were always issues with them finding housing. So there was a survey of London landladies in 1953 found that fewer than two out of ten were prepared to let rooms to West Indian immigrants. leaflets that were given by the Ministry of Labor to immigrants made this very clear. You may be refused because you're coloured. You must expect to meet this in Britain. And sometimes, indeed, many people listen to this who remember these years, and we will say often, there is violence.

So you often read about attacks on boarding houses where, for example, Caribbean or Asian people are living. There are racist riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958. And under all this sort of pressure, the Tory government of the days decides to change the system. So, Tom, you mentioned that they're coming from places within the empire, and often they've been invited to come. Under the British Nationality Act in 1948, 800 million people had the right to come and live in Britain. And nobody had anticipated there would be a massive influx. Am I right that one of the things that Powell starts to obsess about is the fact that people who live in the United Kingdom have exactly the same legal status as subjects under the crown

as people in kind of overseas territories, and that therefore there is no kind of British citizenship in the way that there's American or French citizenship. And therefore, he comes to worry about what is it that distinguishes people who live in, say, England from people who live in the Caribbean, legally. Yeah, he's obsessed with all the sort of legal details of these kinds of things. So a really good example, actually. Slightly tangential to what you're talking about is he has a massive being his bonus about the queen's official title because it says that she's the queen of her other realms and territories. And he says, well, does this mean? It's meaningless. Her other realms and territories. It could mean anything. Remorseless logic, driving him mad.

And everyone's kind of like this and like with the citizenship stuff, everybody else is sort of saying, pipe down, Enoch. You know, it's fine, it's a fudge. Don't worry about it. You're overthinking it. But he's a massive overthinker. I mean, he really, you know, he will spend ages obsessing about these kinds of details, the details of citizenship and stuff. Yeah, if there's a rabbit hole, he'll go down it. Well, he does that later on, doesn't he with the, is it the New Testament or something? He writes all this biblical scholarship with other people, biblical scholars, I think is a bit bonkers.

Anyway, by the late 50s, it's very clear that most people in Britain hate immigration on this scale. I mean, there's no other way of putting it. Polls show that about three out of four people strongly dislike it. they want the government to shut the doors. So in 1962, Harold McMillan did shut the doors. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act brings in controls for Commonwealth citizens who haven't been born in Britain. The unanticipated consequence is that in the months before the Act becomes law,

there's a huge rush for people to get into Britain. 150,000 people arrive from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan to beat the deadline. And then another unanticipated consequence, I think Trevor Phillips talked about this in the episode we did with him. The people who have arrived have been predominantly young men. And they've now settled down. They haven't gone home, as many of them expected to. They decide they quite like it.

And they want to bring their family dependence with them, wives, you know, children, aged parents, and so on and so forth. And so you get a continued influx in the 1960s. And so by the late 1960s, the Caribbean and South Asian-born population has risen 10 times in 20 years. now, what is it, about 700,000, and it'll be around about a million by the beginning of the 1970s. Now, you might expect a populist reaction to all this. You know, that's what we see today, right? The higher the immigration figures go, the more that kind of populist parties thrive. But at the time, I think the remarkable thing, having written about this, is how muted the reaction is. You know, most MPs, I think, recognize that they think immigration is a regrettable

necessity because the economy needs this cheap, unskilled labour. I think also a lot of labour MPs are committed to a kind of slightly woolly, you know, citizens of the world, kind of internationalism. That's why Harold Wilson loves the Commonwealth, for example. Well, it's interesting that you allied the two, because I wonder whether that is, you know, the kind of the woolly internationalism is a kind of slightly distorted form of the imperial impulse that inspired so many generations of upper class and middle class Britons to go abroad? I think it absolutely is. And so that is something that Powell would despise.

Exactly. I think he has no time for any of this kind of stuff because he is, once he realizes he can't become viceroy of India, it's over. Why are you still persisting in this ridiculous charade? Yeah. And of course, Tory MPs, most Tory MPs, or at least a lot of Tory MPs, are still stirred by, you know, the Raj and General Gordon and all this kind of. of thing. And for that reason, they don't want to turn their backs on relics and memories

of empire. The idea, you know, Kivas Britannicus sum, actually, you know, you hear that phrase in the 1950s and 1960s. And Powell, precisely perhaps because he can, he can still feel the tug of that, is all the more contemptuous of it. He's kind of guarding against his own romantic impulses, perhaps. I think that's very astute. I think that there is a bit of him, I always think that they're probably nostalgic for all that, and he's fighting against it. I think you're absolutely right. So immigration isn't really a massive national issue until 1964,

and it happens literally on the road between Birmingham, where Powell was born and Wolverhampton, the town he represents just up the road, in a place called Smethwick in the West Midlands Manufacturing Heartland, which had been known since Victorian times as the black country. So Smedic was a town of about 70,000 people, run down, manufacturing town, very limited housing, one in ten of its population are immigrants. In 1964, the tour is picked as their candidate, a local councillor called Peter Griffiths, who had already made a stir in the constituency by saying, and I quote, Labour are the immigrants friends. And during the campaign, posters and stickers go up across the constituency with the incredibly inflammatory slogan.

If you want a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour. I think the listeners can probably forgive me for not using the word. And the result is a swing to the Tories of more than 7% in an election that nationally the Tories lose. And Griffith wins the seat. And this is a big shock to people. You know, when he arrived in the House of Commons, a lot of people turned their backs on him, wouldn't shake his hand, all of this kind of thing. Harold Wilson said he was a parliamentary leper. But at the time, some of the papers, for example, at the Times says, this has been coming.

You know, the Times says, on this subject, immigration, there is a great gulf between the ordinary man in the street and the leaders of public opinion in Parliament, the churches, the intelligency of the press and so on. And some people in the Labour Party, like Richard Crossman, who's one of Wilson's ministers, say, you know, we should be careful about this. Because if we don't, you know, if we're not seen as being on the right side of public opinion, we could be swept away on this issue. I mean, definite echoes with the present, I think, Tom. But, you know, the months go by, the issue seems to calm down. Griffith, but ultimately is a nobody. You know, he's a mediocrity.

He's not remotely capable of the national campaign. But then a much more serious politician decides that he is going to embrace the issue. And this man, of course, is Enoch Powell. Well, Dominic, you have set up the context for Powell's most notorious speech, and after the break, we will come to the rivers of blood. Hello, everyone, welcome back to The Rest is History, and we are in mid-60s Britain. Everything's groovy, or is it? Because Enoch Powell, who I think is definitely not groovy, he's a brilliant classicist, as we've heard, At one point, he wanted to be the viceroy of India. He's also a blistering critic of imperial atrocities committed by Britain.

He is preparing to give the speech that will make him a hero to the far right in Britain. And Dominic, how do we get there? How does Powell get there? Right. Well, first of all, Powell in the 50s and early 60s had never seemed very interested in race, in the politics of immigration. But his constituency, Wolverhampton, is right at the heart of the immigration issue. You know, it's a kind of Midlands, industrial, metal-bashing town. It had boomed in the 50s.

There was a massive demand for labour. And in had come thousands of young men from the Caribbean, from India, from Pakistan, working in their local factories and the foundries. So by the mid-1960s, Wolverhampton had a higher concentration of immigrants than any other town or city apart from London. And at first, there was remarkably little pushback, I would say, from the sort of town's opinion formers. So the local Express and Star still exists. It was the biggest regional paper, and I think it still is, by far, in Britain. And it was a conservative

supporting paper, as I think it still is. The Express and Star said, these people are British citizens, this is going back to Akivas Britannicus stuff, Tom, British citizens with a perfect right to come here and try and earn a living. Many of them are better behaved than some of their white cousins in this country. You know, it's like patronising language, but it could be worse. It could be a lot worse. But over time, you start to see some tensions growing. What's happening in towns across Britain and cities is older working class residents

are moving out to the suburbs, to the counties. Immigrants move in. The house prices start to fall. And those residents who haven't moved out start to feel jittery, that their house price is going to fall and they're surrounded by people they don't know and so on and so forth. So white flight is the phrase, isn't it? White flight. I mean, it's a very, very familiar story. Now, most of the newcomers are young single men. We've already made that point. Inevitably, you know, they want to play their music. They want to have a good time. They have parties. So you start

to get all these stories, you know, oh, they don't behave. Oh, they play their music. Oh, they they drink and all this kind of thing. And you get local residents associations complaining. But what does Enoch Powell do? At first, he does absolutely nothing at all as one of the town's MPs. So in 1959, his beaten Labour opponent in the general election actually went out of his way to say, I respect Mr Powell for not exploiting the immigration issue. In 1961, a group of anti-immigration residents went to ask for his support.

And one of them, a welder, said afterwards, He was all for the immigrants. We had a lot of examples of their dirty, filthy habits, and we asked him to make a fuss about them, but we didn't get any satisfaction from him. Like Mick Jagger. Yes, like Mick Jagger. Then in 1964, you get the first sign of him making a change.

He says, it is essential to have strict controls if we are to avoid the evils of a colour question in this country. So it's sort of, it's for the immigrants' own good that we start to bring in controls. And by the colour question, By that, is he thinking of the United States? I think you cannot understand this issue without realizing that in an age when for the first time, I think about in 1964, when he makes the speech, is the point of which TV ownership has reached saturation point, everybody who's ever going to get a TV has got one, and they are watching the news from Selma, Alabama, you know, from Montgomery, from all these kinds of places, this is on their mind the whole time.

because it's making the headlines. You know, Martin Luther King's campaigns, the racist backlash in the, you know, formerly Confederate South, all of that stuff. That's in the ether. It's absolutely there. Now, at the same time when he writes that in 1964, he also writes a piece for the local paper that's often quoted later.

I always will set my face like Flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on the grounds of his origin. Now, that's a phrase that I think, I think he backs away from that position later on. I think because I think he comes to think that where people have come from is tremendously important, but the implication here is that he doesn't think it's important at all. Anyway, I'll just leave that hanging. In the next few years, as he is fording out with his new leader, Ted Heath, he's sharpening

his tone. He starts to say, there's a taboo on this issue. And to talk about immigration, you know, it's not color prejudice or racial. intolerant to ask for strict controls. Now, at first, I think people don't really notice because he's saying all kinds of eccentric things. You know, let's not help the Americans in Vietnam. Let's cut all the spending on the welfare states, all of this kind of stuff. But if you track what he's actually saying month by month, it's clearly becoming more and more aggressive. So by 1965, in the spring in 1965, he starts saying two things. One, we should stop allowing people's

wives and children to join them in Britain. And two, it's time for some people to go home. We should start encouraging them to go back home, basically not forcing them, but with systems of subsidies and whatnot. Why is he doing this? Why has he adopted this issue and why is his tone becoming harder? Powell always said, I'm simply reflecting the views of my Wolverhampton constituents. And I think there is, to be fair to him, an element of truth in this. A lot of manufacturing in towns in mid-60s Britain. If you forget about immigration, just look at what's happening in these towns. They're quite run down.

You know, the sort of, the Victorian fabric of these places is visibly fraying. Their industries are running into foreign competition. British productivity is atrocious. People are becoming increasingly anxious about rising prices and losing their jobs. The sort of, yes, the swinging 60s is going on in Carnaby Street. but actually a lot of people feel very shut out and left behind, as they do today, actually. So basically, hard times breed, hardening opinions? I think so.

And I think this is where I think I would argue in flattering myself a more nuanced attitude to how people think about immigration than they're all just racists or they're anti-racists. I think it's not necessarily that people blame immigrants personally for these things, but I think they see immigration and the presence of immigrants. as yet another symptom of a more generalised kind of decline. And a symptom that maybe means an awful lot to them. But I think they would say a lot of people, you see it again and again in interviews actually. People, especially older people, will say, everything is changing.

You know, the street feels different, the town feels different, no one cares about us. And so they care about immigration both in and of itself, but also as a symbol of something deeper and more kind of inchoate. And does Powell share these opinions? because he's a very romantic, conservative, adores Parliament, and the great conservative, romantic opinion of Parliament expressed by Edmund Burke is that the duty of a member of parliament

is to speak his own opinions and not just to serve as a kind of loud speaker for opinions of constituents. Well, this is one of the issues, right? That he owes his electors, he owes them his judgment. He's not, as you say, he's not just their sort of, a loud speaker for them. And the thing is, Powell doesn't live in Wolverhampton. Powell lives in Belgravia,

in the swankiest part of London. He has never really shown that much interest in what, you know, the men who stand on the Molyneux terraces on a Saturday cheering the finest team in the Midlands. They actually are the finest team in the Midlands, by the way, at this point, they're not merely the finest team in the Midlands. They became champions of the world in the mid-1950s. So, yeah, you can suck on that just for a second.

Well, we're running out of times. We need to move on, but I mean, that is an outrageous and ludicrous statement. He's not really interested in what they think, I would say, up to this point. You know, he's never been the Tribune of the Plex. He's always been a man apart. So why is he doing it? I think it's complicated. I think Powell has always been obsessively interested in English identity.

And he has this idea, to use his own words, he says, Our national identity is based on, and I quote, the continuous life of a united people and its island home. And this idea of the united people and the island home, he comes to think that the advent of so many newcomers is diluting and undermining that. And I think what happens is once he's first articulated the idea, it clearly chimes with a lot of people,

and he almost self-radicalizes. It's like the process that you see on social media. He makes the speech, he gets lots, He got a better reaction than for any other speech he's ever made. And then he thinks, well, I'll give people more. People clearly want this. And I like doing this. And he goes further and further.

And the point about Powell is he will always pursue an idea to its absolute kind of logical extreme, driven mad by his own remorse. That's logic. Exactly. And then the other element, and an element I think that is often missing from a lot of accounts. This is personal for him and it's political. It's a way for him to distinguish himself from, you know, Mr. Boring. Ted Heath, the Kirstarmer of kind of Tory politics and the 60s and 70s. So a committee man, a pragmatist, somebody who loves a bit of a fudge and a compromise. This is a brilliant way

for Powell to tell the world, I'm not Ted Heath, and to appeal to Tory grassroots people who are not really interested in his views on Herodotus or Nietzsche or A.e. Houseman, but they really respond to all this kind of stuff. And at this point, he still wants to be prime minister? Oh, yeah. I think he's very ambitious, his pal, very ambitious. So by 1967, he's now making comparisons with America all the time. And he says, look at the riots in American cities.

This is what is coming to Britain, if we're not careful. And he actually uses some phrases that I think even his defenders will say, oh, hold on, this is. So he says to Heath at one point, he says, in Wolverhampton, I've seen, yes, I've seen white racism, and that is terrible. but he also says I have seen insolence by coloured against white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white and I have to say when I came across that word I mean I wrote about this 20 years ago and then when I was preparing this episode I was rereading the stuff

on us that word insolence just jumped out that is a word that you use in the American South when you're saying the black bloke hasn't dothed his hat to the white woman or whatever it is so loaded I mean, what's interesting is, I mean, I always remember the episode we did on the King of Hawaii, who was very struck crossing Britain by rail, that there was no sense of that he was being insolent by sitting in a British railway carriage if he'd bought his ticket. And then he goes across America and gets chucked out because as someone who is taken for black, he's not allowed to be in it. So it is kind of quite alien to the British sense of themselves. I mean, British people are often proud that they don't treat black people in the way that. people in the American South do. But what Powell is doing there, ironically, considering his anti-Americanism, is to adopt an American tone. I think so. I think so. And I think this

starts to make much more sense, this whole view of Rory, when you view it in the context of what's going on in America. Also, actually, what's going on in Africa. Because at the end of 1967, events in Africa come into play. Because Jomo Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, decides to kick out the 200,000 Kenyan Asians, originally Indian merchants and labourers who have come to Kenya during the British Empire. Where are they going to go? Many of them got British passports. The obvious place to go is Britain, the old imperial motherland. There's a massive furority. Powell speaks out. He says it's mad to let these people into Britain. They should return to the country where they belong. And where is that? The implication of that is what? India,

maybe, although, of course, many of them have never, they've never set foot in India. Pals is not a lone voice at this point. Late 1967, so we've just been through what's called the Long Hot Summer of 1967 in America, hundreds of cities consumed by rioting and arson and so on. So Labor, the Harold Wilson government, are kind of very alarmed by this. They rush through an emergency bill to basically stop the Kenyan Asians coming to Britain, to strip many of them of their right to come to Britain, with strict quotas, a lot of the Tory press at the time, actually the Tory press, not just the

Labour press, said this was unbelievably, this was unconscionable. The spectator said it was one of those immoral pieces of legislation ever to go through Parliament, but it went through all the same. Why is Labour doing this? Are they responding to grassroots pressure in their constituencies? Yes. Right. So there's a very famous, everyone in this, you listened to this podcast for a long time, I know I'm a big fan of James Callaghan. this is not Callahan's finest dad by any means. He's home secretary. There's a point at which, I think one of his colleagues,

Richard Crossman, writes in his diary and he says, Jim's making a big name for himself in the Labour Party, you know, because he is determined the message that Jim is sending to our supporters is, and I quote, no more bloody immigrants, whatever happens. And the thinking is, Labour will do very well with this message. Lots of working class people will like it. Right. So again, not unknown in current politics.

But of course, they see themselves as the good guys, right, the Labour Party. So they want to counterbalance this with a bit more progressive legislation, which is a race relations bill to stamp out discrimination in housing and employment. Now, this is important because this is going to be the trigger for Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech. They want to introduce this sort of kindly, cuddly, race relations bill. Ted Heath says to his colleagues, okay, well, we're not racists. So we're not going to, we don't want to come out madly against this. What we'll do is we will quibble about the details of it because that's what oppositions do,

but we'll agree with the principle. And all the other Tories say, brilliant. They have a last meeting before Easter, 1968. They said, brilliant, what a great plan that is. Have a great Easter. See you after the break. And Powell sits in that meeting. He's the shadow defence spokesman.

He sits there steaming with rage because he thinks we should be fighting labour on this issue. He doesn't believe in a race relations bill. And he says it's time to start encouraging people to go home. should, this is our chance to make a stand. So this is the context for the speech. He goes to Birmingham on the 20th of April, to the Midland Hotel to speak to local conservative activists. He knows this is going to be really controversial. He said to the editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star beforehand, the speech would, and they quote, fizz like a rocket, but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up. And he's actually sent

out copies of the speech to the media. And that is why. ATV, the local television company, have sent a TV crew to film extracts, which you can see online. So let's get into the speech. He begins with the story that you read, Tom. A working class constituent has written to him, he says he wants to get out of Britain because, and I quote, in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. What an unbelievably loaded thing to say. The whip hand, you know, that's the image that you choose to kick off with? And again, redolent of the American South. Exactly. Powell then says that line that you read, I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I stir up trouble by

repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Now, you can quibble about that, I think, because as you said, Tom, you know, Edmund Burke's famous argument, you know, every time an MP gets a mad letter, they don't have to read it out in the House of Commons. I mean, if they did, they'd never stop. Anyway, Powell says this point, I think you ended with when you did that introductory reading. It's a transformation unprecedented in a thousand years of English history. He goes on to say by 2000, there could be seven million children of immigrants in this country, one-tenth of the whole population. Now, at the time, every critic of a speech said, this is disgraceful scaremongering to inflate the numbers in this

way. I have to say he was dead right. When you look at the 2001 census, seven million people non-white in Britain, 11% of the entire population. I mean, in his speech, he says that that is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registair General's office. So he is actually quoting official figures with that. But people will like, oh, no, no, that can't be right. That's not right at all. His tone then gets harder.

He says, these people are, and I quote, an alien element, and we should be encouraging them to go home. Then a very famous line, those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad. literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents. That's the wives and children and grandparents and whatnot. It is like watching a nation busily engaged and heaping up its own funeral pyre. Now, that sort of language, I think, definitely reflects the fact that he's been watching the riots in America, no?

The funeral pyre, the sense of impending dissolution, all of this. Then he turns to the race relations bill. He says, I'm dead against this. Ordinary people can rent their rooms, sell their houses to whoever they like. If they want to discriminate, it's not the government's right to stop them. And then he goes on to say, you know, this is a good example, he says, of how ordinary English people are now a persecuted minority. The politics of grievance, you know, we're very familiar with that.

Now the really, really, really inflammatory bit of the speech. He reads out a letter, he says, A woman in Northumberland has written to me telling me about an elderly landlady in Wolverhampton, She's the only white woman left in her street. It has been, and I quote, taken over by immigrants. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreter pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she's followed by children, charming, wide, grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. Racialist, they chant. When the new race relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced

she will go to prison. And is she so wrong, I begin to wonder. Now, these are not Enoch Powell's words. He is reading a letter, of course. Now, listeners can decide for themselves, I think, whether or not he was right to read the letter. Yeah, I mean, just to say, on the one hand, in his speech, he claims that it's one of hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received on the subject. So he says he's picking it out. On the other, I mean, it is, as you say, well, inflammatory. But, I mean, I would go so far as to say, wicked.

You know, and I use the word advisedly because Powell is a man steeped in biblical prophecy. He knows the value of words and of stories and of anecdotes. And I think that judging him by his own moral standards, those are wicked things to say. Well, do you know what? Let's just go into this story a little bit. The idea of the old woman, and she's sitting in her house surrounded by immigrants, and people are pushing excreter through her letterbox, and kids are chanting at her in the street. some of Powell's critics said

this is a textbook far right image this is the kind of folk tale that is being spread by the kind of national front and by the little far right racist groups in Britain his defenders said no the woman is a real person

he's got every right to read this story it's a terrible story at the time the newspapers went to enormous efforts to try and find out if this woman existed and they decided that there was no such woman Now, in 2007, it seems a long time afterwards, frankly. But anyway, the BBC did their own investigation, a radio documentary, and they came up with a woman called Drusilla Cotterill, Brighton Place, Wolverhampton, age 61 at the time.

However, as you say, well, again, I think it's up to the listener. Is it right to read out a story that you know, well, you know, is perhaps exceptional or misleading, or is bound to bring out the worst in some of your listeners. Let's look at what he then goes on to say, because this is the famous climax, isn't it? Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,

but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the states itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. He is warning essentially of a kind of race war. Yes, exactly. That's the phrase that people used at the time. The language that he is using is calculated to make that likelier not to diminish it, I would say. Well, that's what the Times editorial said on the Monday. An evil speech calculated to inflame hatred between the races. And that is what his conservative colleagues thought. So this is the thing. He'd been great pals with this guy Ian McLeod mentioned him already. One of his oldest friends. They've been friends since

they'd met in the Conservative Research Department. McLeod said to his colleague, rang his colleagues up that night, and he said to them, Enoch has gone mad and hates the blacks. And Heath sacked him as defense spokesman that evening. I think Powell probably knew that he might get sacked, possibly wanted it to happen because it would make him a martyr and would, you know, increase his appeal to the Tory grassroots. And an awful lot of people, including people on the right, including people who've been Powell's friends, Tom, completely agreed with you.

you. The editor of the local paper, the guy he had said, it will fizz like a rocket, Clem Jones, the father of the future BBC political correspondent, Nick Jones, from the sort of 80s and 90s. Clem Jones had been a really close friend of Powell and his family, and he basically broke off their relationship after this speech because, like you, he said, you knew exactly what you were doing. It is so inflammatory to choose that language and those examples. You know, it's utterly irresponsible. But he was a newspaper editor. He asked his readers, send in, you know, tell us what you think. He said, we got 35,000 postcards in favour of power. We got none, virtually none against. Same story nationally. Three out of four people said they supported him. The post office had

to give him a special van because he had so many letters of support. Tens and tens of thousands of letters. And most famously, hundreds of dockers from the East End marched on Westminster, with placards, don't knock Enoch, or indeed, back Britain, not black Britain. And what they were calling for was for Heath to bring him back to the shadow cabinet, a shadow defence spokesman. Can you imagine any other point in British history where dockers have given a damn about who was in the shadow cabinet? They're not even the real cabinet.

I mean, it's mind-boggling. And we can talk in a few minutes about where this leads politically. So Powell himself, this makes him, of course, a pariah to liberals, but this really does make him the tribune of the plebs to people who agree with him. Polls again and again in the next few years find that he's one of the most admired politicians, if not the most admired politician in the country. There's a brilliant book, actually, of people who are interested in kind of grassroots opinion by a journalist called Jeremy Seabrook, called City Close Up,

and he went to Blackburn at the end of the 60s, early 70s, and interviewed loads of people, hung around working men's clubs and stuff. And these are people who don't follow Westminster politics. You know, very, very sort of small, oh, ordinary people. And Powell's name came up again and again. He's the finest man in the country. He should be prime minister.

He speaks the mind of all the white, well, three quarters of the white people in this country. You know, you see this again and again. He wins polls. He won a BBC poll twice in the 1970s, man of the year. I mean, this is BBC listeners. And he is a wintry and ascetic lover of dead languages. But in a weird way, I think that kind of contributes to the appeal, right? That this guy has descended from an ivory tower on top of Mount Olympus to come down to speak for the masses.

The flip side is he destroys his political career forever with this speech. So a lot of MPs shun him, actually not his mate Michael Foote in particular in the future leader of the Labour Party, who actually makes a point after the speech of going. and shaking his hand, you know, and being friendly to him, showing other MPs that he still is going to be Enoch's friend. Isn't that interesting? Anyway, two things that actually get lost to me in the talk about immigration. We mentioned at the beginning.

In the next few years, Powell establishes what becomes the sort of economic gospel of Thatcherism, criticizing Ted Heath, for example, in the early 70s for spending too much and whatnot. And then when Britain joins Europe in 1973, Powell is the chief critic. He's the guy who basically invents Euroscepticism. So, you know, as his biographer, Simon Heffer says, if you judge a politician by his intellectual legacy, then he kind of stands alone in his generation because he basically bequeaths two things that are massively important in changing Britain. But he does it from the wilderness. Indeed, he ends up becoming an Ulster Unionist MP, not a Tory MP.

And I suppose this idea of a politician being massively influential on British history, despite not holding high office or becoming prime minister or whatever, that is also what a lot of people say about Nigel Farage. And I suppose the contrast with Farage and Powell is precisely that Powell is a massive intellectual, as well as someone who is capable of serving as a lightning rod for opinions that otherwise are not being articulated. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. Now, I think some people listening to this would say, look, it's very unfair to just do this all about immigration. You're distorting Powell's record because he has so much more to offer. I have to say I don't think it's unfair because the point about the rivers of blood speech is not that it's just one speech. Power returns to the issue again and again in the next few years. A good example, really good example, 1972, Idi Amin kicked out Ugandan Asians from Uganda. And Powell led to the campaign to stop them. them coming to Britain. And he said, many white people in Britain feel as if they are tied to a stake in the face of an advancing tide. You know, the advancing tide image, really. That's the one you go for.

Now, we're talking about 27,000 people, middle class people by and large, who became one of the most successful of all immigrant communities. So the Tory politician, Priti Patel, her parents were Ugandan Asians. And actually, some listeners, even listeners sympathetic to people, Powell, I would say, might well ask themselves, was he right to say that none of these people should have been allowed in? Because actually the Ugandan Asian community proved enormously successful, assimilated very smoothly. And why did he, you know, he talks about the white people frightened and powerless. But he doesn't really talk about the Ugandan Asians who've been kicked

out of their country, have nowhere to go of frightened and powerless refugees. I think that would be one of my main criticisms of Powell. That's sort of the lack of empathy, if you like. Anyway, he keeps beating this drum throughout the 1970s. I mean, he uses some pretty striking language. When he looks into the eyes of Asia, the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land. Again, you could hardly choose a more emotive and incendiary image, right?

struggling for possession of land with these people? Again, I mean, he presumably he's saying this because he fears, well, rivers of blood, but the language he is using is making that more likely, isn't it? I mean, it's... Yeah, I mean, I would say so, actually. To give, put my cards on the table, I always slightly sigh and roll my eyes when people just say in a very sort of blanket, condemnatory way, oh, in a pal, terrible racist, end of story.

Because I always think, no, it's never the end of the story. There's always more nuanced and there's always an interesting history behind this. But when you read those words, I think it's very, very hard to defend these choices. And actually, to go to this question of, is Enoch Powell a racist? The word racist is so loaded and so complicated. It depends what you mean, of course. Its meaning has evolved quite drastically over the past decades. It's become a far more capacious, hasn't it?

Yeah, it's capacious. Does he hate all foreigners? Clearly, no, he was hardly. going to be teaching himself all these languages if he hates foreigners. Is he prejudiced against individual people based on their skin colour? There's actually no evidence of that. He seems to have treated his foreign-born constituents exactly the same as his native-born constituents.

So again, and you'll be able to tell that the focus of my research for this episode has very much been Desert Island Discs. But Sue Lawley puts that question to him, and he says, no, he'd feel just the same about a load of French people coming over. So maybe that's expressive of his views on the Norman conquest, I don't know. Does he believe in racial hierarchy? He says very clearly, no, I do not. I do not believe that one race is superior to another.

Does he believe there are such things as races? Yes, he absolutely does. Racial difference is an undeniable truth. Now, here's something I would absolutely disagree with him about. He says, I think it is impossible that black and Asian people can become English. He says that they have no investment in England and its history. They can't be English. They'll never be English.

their children will not be English. They are, you would often use the words, an alien element. Now, in other words, he would say that Rishi Sunag, or the current conservative leader, Kemi Badenock, cannot be English. Now, listeners, I think, can decide for themselves whether they agree with him or whether they think that's racist. It's not for me to tell them what to think. I mean, I don't agree with him.

I think Kami Bidnok or Rishi Sunak, I think they are English. I mean, it's an interesting question. And there's another dimension to this that personally I find impossible to ignore. He always talked about the feelings of his white constituents, but almost never those of his black and Asian ones. And he never really seemed to consider the impact of his words. So there are lots of stories about incidents after his speech. Just one. There was a christening party in Wolverhampton, 10 days afterwards, so at the end of April, 1968, for a black family.

and the christening party was attacked by white youths with knives who were chanting Enoch Powell's name. The grandfather was a guy called Wade Crooks and he had to be taken for treatment because he needed eight stitches after being slashed over his eye. And he said he'd lived in Wolverhampton since 1955, nothing like this has ever happened before. And there are lots of incidents like this.

Now on television, David Frost, big interview of the day, asked Enoch Powell to condemn these incidents. And Powell said, no. I'm not going to start condemning the behavior of people who are condemned by their own actions. It is not for a politician to be a preacher. I would say, is it so difficult really to condemn these actions? You know, clearly it's incumbent on you at this point if you have some responsibility to say, I would, if people are chanting your name, Tom, I mean, come on, would you not feel, of course you'd feel terrible about that. But it's interesting also that

essentially the implication of that is that a politician should not have a moral perspective and promoted. I mean, that's basically what being a preacher is. And he is, I mean, he does all the time. I mean, his speech about Kenya was an example of preaching. The reason he doesn't want to do it, it's so, it's obvious and it's so familiar. He doesn't want to condemn it because he doesn't want to give an inch to his critics. I think it's pride and stubbornness. And that, I would argue, leads him to take positions that would call. me concern if I was taking them, right? If I knew that people on the far right, gangs of skinheads were chanting my name as they attacked immigrants, if I knew, to quote a Times

editorial, that people had the impression that I hated black and Asian people, that they had a, they were right to be afraid of me, right? I would be really troubled by that. And I would be desperate to show people that I wasn't racist, you know, that I was a, I was a kindly person. I mean, even if I'm not a terribly kindly person, I'm definitely not a racist person. Anyway, I wouldn't want people to come to that conclusion, but Powell never seems to give their anxieties any thought. And I think that is a massive failure of empathy, personally. Anyway, what about his legacy? I think an obvious, unanticipated consequence of this speech in the furorre is that his exile, as it were, is so complete that it deters other politicians

from even mentioning immigration. So I think in the 70s and 80s, the potential for kind of populist anti-immigration politics was always there, but it's really remarkable how nobody exploits it. Margaret Thatcher, who in many ways is a kind of pal disciple, does it just once. In 1978, in the Ilford by-election, she gave an interview and she said, People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture. There's a massive furority, backlash among her senior colleagues. She never does it again.

That is surely the overwhelming impact of his speech. It completely contradicts what I assume was his aim, which was to get the issue of immigration on the political agenda. The way that he frames it and the language that he uses ensures that politicians view it as toxic. And they may be reluctant to talk about it out. of political self-interest, you know, they don't want to damage their own names or reputations. But I think it's much more likely that they, they are genuinely afraid of, of kind of pandering to the worst instincts in people. And the fact that it is remembered as

the Rivers of Blood speech, what Powell does is to give a very resonant phrase, which dramatizes, I think for politicians across the parties, for decades to come, it dramatizes what has been the great moral anxiety ever since the Second World War and the discovery of what had happened in Nazi Germany, the anxiety that distinctive ethnic or religious minorities will be targeted in pogroms or worse. And that is the great shadow that hangs over the whole of Europe, really, after the war. But what Powell does is to give a distinctively British and poetic formulation to what politicians are then anxious to avoid. And the corollary of that in turn is that when there are obviously genuine issues around cultural differences that arise,

mainstream politicians are reluctant to engage with it. and to criticise them. Yeah, I think he's an example that people don't want to follow, right? I mean, so people, they just say, well, stay clear. Don't talk about this. I mean, the irony is, of course, it feels to me like we've talked about nothing else for about the last 15 years or so. But I'll tell you one thing, one thing that people don't often say about his speech,

that people talk about it in terms of, do you agree with it or not? Is he a racist or isn't he? I mean, one obvious point, it seems to me, is that he's just wrong, that he said he was convinced. convinced that there would be American style, you know, and we're talking about 150 cities in 1967, you know, dozens of deaths. He thinks there will be unending racial conflict because, and don't forget, he's talking about this, partly based on skin color. He's talking about, he's not talking about religious groups, he's talking about people

from the Caribbean. In other words, fellow Christians who just happened to be from Jamaica or Barbados or whatever and that they will fight with the indigenous people of England for possession of their native land and I would say that's clearly not happened Power has a long legacy right and these issues have never gone away and let's just end with one aspect in which I think power was ahead of the game I mean I think he really is a prophet the Guardian had a brilliant columnist in the late 60s called Peter Jenkins and he wrote a really good piece on this after the speech. He said Powell has discovered something that we have not seen in British politics for a long time. He says what Powell exploits is,

and I quote, a sense that the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is led by men who have no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the back streets of Wolverhampton. And this is coming, I think, after a period in which politics has been quite decorous and deferential. And the populist element has been very much downplayed. But I think that's, you know, Powell's real legacy. It's a kind of politics that was completely unfamiliar in late 60s Britain that is very familiar today. It's the politics of identity. You know, what is it to be English or to be British? And it's so charged, the politics of grievance, of feeling yourself part of a persecuted group. And above all the politics of populism, the idea of the masses

against the elite. And in that sense, Tom, I don't know if you agree. I think we are still living in Enol Powers Britain today. Well, thanks, Dominic. Yes. And this has been a very long episode, maybe the longest episode we've ever done. And I think that reflects both the inherent fascination of the topic and the sensitivities of the issues that it provokes. So thank you, everyone who has made it this far. Thank you, Dominic. And we will be back very soon with something completely different, namely Nelson's mistress, the scandalous life of Lady Hamilton. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.