THE TRUTH ABOUT ENOCH'S RIVERS OF BLOOD

The son of a headmaster, Powell read Greek at the age of five, routinely scored 100 per cent in school exams and was a professor of Greek by the age of 25 (failing in his aim of beating the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a professor at the age of 24). He ended the war as the youngest brigadier in the British army.

The scholar usually got what he set out to achieve but he misjudged the mood of his masters when he warned of an apocalyptic social catastrophe if the rising tide of immigration was not halted. And despite huge public support for his views, his ambitions were destroyed.

Central to his thesis was his concern about the “sense of alarm and resentment” felt by the indigenous population as the incomers arrived.

“The discrimination and deprivation… lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming,” he said.

He illustrated this claim by reading from a letter he’d received about a pensioner running a boarding house in a once-quiet street. She had lost her white tenants but refused to take immig­rant families moving into the area. In response, she had been victimised and was worried the new race relations bill would see her castigated as a criminal.

Much of the rest of the speech was equally inflammatory, including Powell’s highly emotive reference to “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” – a classical allusion to Virgil’s line in the Aeneid. Following the Bristol, Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth riots in the Eighties, Powell claimed his “rivers of blood” prediction had indeed come true.

Druscilla Cotterill could have had no idea what she had started when she complained to a friend that life had changed beyond recognition as her white neighbours moved out and were replaced by immigrant families.

In making his at times abhorrent argument, Powell described the children who followed her to the shops as “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies”.

“The speech was hostile in tone to immigrants and didn’t allow for the fact that black or Asian people could come and contribute in a praiseworthy way to British society,” says Daily Express chief political correspondent Patrick O’Flynn. “While he may have been right about the difficulties of not assimilating, Powell was too pessimistic about a multi-racial society. A lot of people thought he was coming from a perspective where Anglo-Saxon culture was seen as superior.”

O’Flynn concedes that elements of the speech would be accepted today, though its content still has the power to rattle his former party. “Powell anticipated the rise of the ghetto but the impact of his speech has been to render taboo any serious discussion about immigration in the Con­servative Party,” adds O’Flynn.

The events of this weekend certainly seem to be evidence for that. Nigel Hastilow, a Tory candidate who said he believed that Powell was right about immigration, was forced to resign having shared his perspective in the Express & Star newspaper in Wolverhampton – the very same publication where Enoch Powell’s friend Clement Jones worked and to whom he confided in 1968: “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”.

ALTHOUGH the newspaper is the same, the fallout could not be more different in scale. For Hastilow, it is the end of a political career that never got started; for Powell it was the end of a glittering career that could have taken him to the pinnacle of political success.

So what became of the politician who never retracted his views – and was he really a racist?

The day after his speech, Powell went to church. As he viewed the crowd of journalists waiting for him as he left, he asked: “Have I really caused such a furore?” The answer was yes.

Three members of the Shadow Cabinet threatened to resign from the front bench unless he was sacked – and later that night it happened. Edward Heath phoned Powell and told him his services as Shadow Defence Secretary were no longer required as his stance was liable to damage race relations.

The irony is that Powell was transformed into a national public figure. Within hours of his sacking, 1,000 dockers went on strike in protest and marched from the East End of London to Westminster.

The following day, workers around the country voted to strike. Before his speech, Powell was favoured to replace Heath as leader by one per cent; afterwards, 24 per cent favoured him. A poll showed that 83 per cent now felt immigration should be restricted, compared with 75 per cent before the speech.

Within the next few weeks, Powell received a wave of public support including 43,000 letters and 700 telegrams backing his ideology, with only 800 letters and four telegrams against.

He defended his speech a few days later and said: “What I would take ‘racialist’ to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of man­kind to another… the answer to the question… is ‘no’ – unless, perhaps it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects – intellectually, for example – to Europeans.”

The legacy of his speech is also believed to have led to the surprise Conservative election win in 1970, which showed a late surge in support in the West Midlands, surrounding his constituency.

But though he always denied being a racist, Powell did have imperialist sympathies. As well as his classical education at Cambridge, he had taken an Urdu course as he had long aspired to be Viceroy of India. He was crushed after it was announced that Indian independence was imminent. Three years later he was elected as MP for Wolverhampton South West and, two years after that, he married.

After his sacking, he became an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, siding strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to maintain British rule and, in 1974, he returned to Par­liament as an Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the National Front.

In 1979 he recommended people vote Labour rather than vote for Margaret Thatcher, who supported Europe, largely because he felt she was tainted by Edward Heath. Later, however, he came to respect her.

“Powell became a maverick lost voice whose ideas could not be accommodated by the party system in Britain. But his name still has totemic power,” says O’Flynn.

He lost his seat in the 1987 general election, a fact that devas­tated him, and in the autumn of 1992 was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
 
During the final years of his life, he published a translation of St Matthew’s Gospel and died on February 8, 1998.

He had once remarked that “all political lives end in failure” and did not hesitate to agree that this also applied to himself.