‘Rivers of Blood’
Enoch Powell
• 1912-1998
• Professor of Greek,
University of Sydney age 25
• Turns against Empire after
Indian Independence 1948
(vs Suez intervention)
• Conservative MP 1950-74
• Condemns racism of British
treatment of Mau Mau in
Kenya, 1959
• Conservative Shadow
Defence Minister 1965-68
‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech
• 20 April 1968
• Conservative Party
meeting at Midlands
Hotel, Birmingham
• "As I look ahead, I am
filled with foreboding;
like the Roman, I seem
to see 'the River Tiber
foaming with much
blood.“
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Content of the Speech
Context/Background
Impact
Significance
CONTENT OF THE SPEECH
Speaking for his (Wolverhampton)
constituents
• Distances himself from
racist statements by use
of constituents’ language
(& classicism)
• Presents himself as
speaking for ‘ordinary’
citizens (whose voices
have been ignored)
• Personalises via eg story
of widow (Druscilla
Cotterill)
Language of race
• ‘the black man will have
the whip hand over the
white man’
(constituent)
• In 15-20 years will be
3.5m Commonwealth
immigrants (Powell)
• Absence of biological
language
• ‘decent ordinary
Englishman’ (Powell
describes constituents:
‘ordinary, decent,
sensible …’)
Language of nation
• Reaches out from Wolverhampton to national
statistics.
• Mentions Wales, Scotland, Britain, but talks
about England and English culture
• Language of national peril: ‘It is like watching a
nation busily engaged in heaping up its own
funeral pyre’.
• No sense of a vision now of a greater Britain:
Commonwealth a problem
Targets of attack
• Rising immigration and long-term implications for
population: states that reducing inflow and
encouraging re-emigration is Conservative policy
• Entry of dependents
• Flips on its head policy of anti-discrimination to
argue for protecting rights of ‘existing population’
(‘persecuted minority’)
• ‘Dangerous delusion’ of integration
• Prospect of violence (as in USA)
CONTEXT/BACKGROUND
Race Relations Bill 1968
• First Race Relations Bill
1965: prohibits
incitement of racial
hatred
• 1968 proposal to
extend to include
housing, employment,
and public services
• Context of
discrimination (Keep
Britain White)
International Awareness
• Images via television
• Violence of end of
Empire (eg Mau Mau,
Kenya, 1950s)
• Civil rights and race
riots, USA (eg Watts,
Los Angeles, 1965)
Politics and Race
• Powell’s leadership ambitions
• 1964 General Election, Conservative MP Peter
Griffiths wins in Smethwick with swing of 7.5%
(vs national swing to Labour of 3.2%):
supporters use slogan of ‘if you want a nigger
as a neighbour vote Labour’
Post-War Immigration Policy
• 1948 Nationality Act: citizens of Commonwealth
• 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act: vouchers
• 1965 Labour White Paper looks to further restrict
immigration
• 1967 Kenyan Independence; rejection of British
passport holding Asians
• 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act: no entry
to British passport holders unless parent or
grandparent were born or naturalised in Britain
End of Empire
IMPACT
Powell sacked as minister by leader
Edward Heath
• Heath describes speech
as ‘racialist in tone and
liable to exacerbate racial
tensions’
• The Times describes as
‘an evil speech’: ‘the first
time that a serious British
politician has appealed to
racial hatred in this direct
way in our postwar
history’
Wave of popular support
• March by dock workers
on parliament;
Smithfield (meat)
workers also publicly
support
• Polls indicated high
level of support for
Powell (Daily Express:
79%)
• Vast number of letters
(50,000 to Powell)
Why support?
• Cultural racism: belief in
link whiteness and
national identity/decency
• Powell seen as speaking
out for ‘ordinary’ people;
populism
• Linkage to feelings of
decline of Empire and
now being pushed around
• Linkage to broader
feelings of moral decline:
‘liberalism gone berserk’
• Amy Whipple, ‘Revisiting
“The Rivers of Blood”
Controversy: Letters to
Enoch Powell’, Journal of
British Studies, 48 (2009),
717-35.
• Sample of Powell letters
in Staffordshire Records
Office
Impact on policy and politics?
• 1968 Immigration Act tightens restrictions (just
31 MPs vote against)
• 1961: 136,000; 1972: 68,000
• 1970 Election victory of Conservatives (seen as
stronger on immigration)
• Or marginalises race from British politics?
• Rise of National Front in 1970s.
• Return of language of Powell only with Margaret
Thatcher speech on danger of ‘swamping’ 1978;
and further restrictions on immigration 1981
SIGNIFICANCE
• Is Powell best regarded as a maverick?
• Or is it the language that marks it out, with
the content more representative of the trend
of policy and the trend of national feeling?
• Is it Powell’s legacy to side-line race from
British politics and debate on national identity,
or does his populist discourse of colour and
the ordinary, decent (but threatened) English
point to the influence of a more mainstream
cultural racism?
• Is the appeal of Powell and this cultural racism to
be understood in relation to decline: of
Empire/national standing; but also moral decline,
and a feeling of liberalism gone berserk; and even
of a working-class threatened by longer-term
structural changes in economy
• A shift in the concept of ‘the people’ from
something associated with the war, welfare state,
and Labour in the middle of the century? Links to
Thatcherism?