Transcript of 606. Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood

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After a sentence or two about the weather, 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 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. How 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, his 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 is MP for Wolverhampton Southwest, and he is beginning what is perhaps, in fact, I would say certainly the single most incendory speech in British political history.

He was speaking on the 20th of April, 1968, to conservative activists at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His subject was, of course, as you could tell from that extract, the ever sensitive topic of immigration. The speech became associated with one phrase above all. It was a quotation from Virgil's great epic poem, The Aneerd, spoken by the Sybil. The Sybil said in Powell's translation of it, Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. Dominic, that speech ever since has been remembered as the Rivers of Blood speech. Yes.

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. Actually, this speech made Enoch Powell a household name in Britain for the next 25 years. He was the politician. He was the public figure I think that almost everybody had heard of. His name became a shorthand for the issue and for a particular politics.

His name, Enoch, is so striking, isn't it? It became a shorthand.

Exactly. To a lot of people, he was the walking embodiment of nativism and English nationalism, I suppose. A lot of people, including many of our listeners, would probably go further than that, and they'd say he was an out and out racist. 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. I think you can argue that his influence is far greater than that of many people who actually became Prime Minister. Einaut Powell's name is remembered today in a way that, frankly, Harold Wilson's or even Jim Callan's, Tom, are not.

I mean, he's remembered overwhelmingly today for the Rivers of Blood speech. But Dominic, he was also a huge influence on Mrs. Thatcher's economic policy. Also, he was virulently opposed to the Common Market, which the European Union. In a sense, also, he was the godfather of Brexit.

He completely was. I think so many of the arguments that Brexiteers make when they're more cerebral arguments can be traced back to Powell. Even today, to Liberals, his name is shorthand for what they see as the ugliness of populism. 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. It's a fair guess that those of our listeners who vote liberal, or Labor, 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.

Conservatives are divided. I think, 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. Actually, there is an argument, which we'll perhaps come to later in in the program, that one of the effects of Powell's speech, unexpectedly and perhaps inadvertently, is that it actually muffles the political debate at Westminster, to some degree, because politicians are nervous about following in his 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. Because we are a history podcast, we should begin with the historical figure. There's a great book on Enoch Powell, Like the Roman, by Simon Heffer. Now, Simon Heffer is himself a man of very robust opinions, but his book is really, really… It's great. I shouldn't say but, as though there's a contradiction. His book is really, really good. He really gets under Powell's skin. 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 man, J. R. 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 his parents call him the Professor.

Do you know what he was called at school? What was he called at school?

Scowly-powly. Yeah, because 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 assemble, and then he would give them a lecture about all the books that he'd read that week. And then when he goes to school, Tom. 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 Speaking 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 Herodotus?

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 Edward's 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. He 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 five o'clock in the morning. Again, like you, he would work until nine 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.

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 he is an astonishingly brilliant man.

There's no doubt about that. Whatever you think of as politics, there's no denigrating his intellectual caliber. 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 on a revised edition of Thucydides. He's also writing these very deeply wrought poems under the influence of AE Haussmann. He's a massive, massive Haussmann fan. Yes.

Like Haussmann, he has unrequited crushes on beautiful young men, doesn't he? And writes lots of poetry about it.

Yeah, I think at this stage, insofar as he's a sexual creature at all, he's gay. 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 thing. That's his vibe.

Exactly. All that stuff. He actually writes to his parents at one point. He says, I have absolutely no interest in women at all. There's no doubt. He does actually later on get married and has children. So here's 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 not by much. So at 25, he has made professor of Greek at the University University of Sydney. So this is in 1937. At this point, he's the youngest professor in the British Empire. Number two, talking the British Empire, he wants to be vice-roy of India. 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. 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 from listening to his Desert Island Disks 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 Fagner. So four of his eight disks are from Faulkner Wagner, one from each of the operas in the Ring cycle. And one of them is a bit of Fagner 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's it it 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 a desert on this talking about each of the Wagner extracts, he's choking back tears. He's astonishingly romantic with a capital R.

I think he's the classic example, which you sometimes get of this incredibly bright, only child who just from the moment he can walk and talk, is like somebody from a different century and completely in habits that persona and just seems completely adrift in the modern world. Anyway, well, actually, I'm 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 very anti-appeasement. He saw the war coming. He always said he would join up straight away. He becomes a private in the Royal Warwickshire's. 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 Disks, he is guttaged that he hasn't been killed. So he never saw combat. 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 Desert Island Disks. It's in the context of the person that he's written his love poetry to. And so 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 young undergraduate called AWJ Thomas, who died during the fall of Singapore. I think his statement about he wish he died in the war is tied up with that. I mean, very, very deep waters, I think.

Yeah, 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 West Ruy of India. So he voted Labor in 1945 to punish the tourists for appeasement. But then he joins the Conservatives 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. 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. Then he came back and he drew a plan to retake India with 10 divisions. This plan actually got onto Churchill's desk because Churchill is still a Tauri leader. Churchill very He successfully 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 shame. Forget all this business about being a great power.

He becomes a proper little Englander in the true sense. He believes, 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? What is his attitudes to the United Kingdom?

Yeah, this is really interesting. 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 Elster Union, won'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 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 revived English nationalism that you've seen in the last 50 years or so. Anyway, he becomes 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 hypnotic drone, isn't it? It's this West Midland drone that he does. It's relentless. And he has these speeches which appear to be very coldly, ruthlessly logical. But often underneath, there is this simmering passion.

I mean, he has these icy, vampireic eyes, doesn't he? Astonishing effect if you've never seen him speak. Hypnotic is the word.

Exactly. He's on the right of the conservative Party economically. He's a laissez-faire classical liberal, but he has lots of friends in the Labor Party. Most famously, Michael foot and Tony Ben, the two standard bearers of the left, famously, labor 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 a terrible man. He's a devil, we'll be surprised at this. The most famous speech he made before the Rivers of Blood speech was a condemnation, a blazing condemnation of British behavior 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 Hola Hola camp. There's a big outcry, and some Taury MPs try to defend it and say, Oh, well, it's Africa. Who cares what goes on in Africa. And Powell gives this blistering speech in the Commons. He says, It's absolutely indefensible. It doesn't matter that it's Africa. Wherever it happens, standards are the same. African lives are worth just as much as European lives. This is absolutely intolerable, and we should be ashamed in all of this.

Loads of MPs on the left at the time came up to him afterwards and said, What a brilliant speech that was. In his memoir, Dennis Healey, big figure in the Labor Party, said it was, and I quote, The greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard with all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenies.

So Powell would have liked that comparison, wouldn't he? Demosthenies, the great Athenian orator.

Yeah, Demosthenies. Not a reference, I think, that loads of modern MPs would bandy around, don't you think, Tom? Slightly depressing me. You might think, Oh, he's a great rising star of the Tories. But actually, he's always flouncing out of government, having massive spats with the people running the Tories Party. So in 1957, 1958, he has this great row with Harold MacMillon about inflation and about spending. He walks out because he says spending is too high. Macmillan ends up bringing him Minister of Health, but it 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 slightly amused by him at this point. They see him as a character. He's a bit bonkers, but they think he's very clever. And he's not unclubbable, right? Because he's got these friends, both among the Tauriers, but also in the Labor Party. Then there's another massive row. In 1963, Sir Alex Douglas Hume becomes Prime Minister, and Powell refuses to serve under him. Actually, one reason he did this, again may surprise some of our listeners.

Powell said of Sir Alex Douglas Hume, 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 Tau is 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, socialist passions, is he? He loves a committee meeting. Ted Heath loves a quango.

But he does love his music, too. He It 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 Starmer 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. Powell, by this point, is really becoming a little bit of a professional heretic. On social issues, for example, he is not concerned conservative at all. So he is really at odds with the rights of the Tori Party. He supports legalizing homosexuality. He supports scrapping the death penalty. But on economics, he is way to the other extreme. So he says, The welfare state has a completely 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 free market values. So in that sense, he's very, very clearly anticipating thatterism in the 1980s. That means that he is increasingly a man alone in the Tori 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. Very Southerner roller, actually.

Actually, I was thinking a lot about Southerner roller, a man whose voice you also did very entertainingly, I have to say. Thank you, Dominic. That sense of burning, of austerity and burning passion. You see that so often, don't you? It's the figures who see themselves as prophets in history. Yes, Ted Heath does not care for this at all. 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 on till now, is that he's a massively anti-American. 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. We'll come to this in the context of race in the second half. Anyway, it's by about 1966, power has 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, he is very shocked at this. And he says, Come on, calm down. Toe 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 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.

Actually, we did an episode with Trevor Phillips, didn't we? 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. Most of these people go where the jobs are. They go to industrial cities and manufacturing towns. London at this stage is still an industrial city. They go to Birmingham, they go to the textile towns of Lancashire, and a lot of them go to Powell's own constituency, which is Wolverhampton. By the way, for our overseas listeners, Wolverhampton is to the northwest of Birmingham. It's part of the West Midlands Conurbation, basically slap bang in the middle of England.

Does it 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 iconic ship, the Windrush, arrived in 1948, the Labor Government, as we've heard with Trevor Phillips in our episode, was very anxious about it. Some Labor MPs complained about it. There are lots of hotels and restaurants that don't allow black or Asian people There were always issues with them finding housing. There was a survey of London land ladies in 1953 found that fewer than 2 out of 10 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 colored. You must expect to meet this in Britain. Sometimes, indeed, many people listen to this who remember these years, we will say often, there is violence. 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 pressure, the Tori 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 of 1948, 800 million people had the right to come and live in Britain, and nobody had anticipated there It 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 overseas territories, and that therefore there is no British citizenship in the way that there's American or French citizenship. Therefore, he comes to worry about what is it that distinguishes people who live in, England from people who live in the Caribbean, legally.

Yeah, he's obsessed with all the legal details of these kinds of things. A really good example, actually, slightly tangential to what you're talking about is he has a massive be in his bonus about the Queen's official title because it says that she's the queen of her other realms and territories. And he said, What does this mean? It's meaningless. Her other realms and territories, it could mean anything.

Remorseless logic, driving him mad.

And everyone's like this, and like with the citizenship stuff, everybody else is saying, pipe down, Enoch. 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 will spend ages obsessing about these kinds of details, the details of citizenship and stuff.

If there's a rabbit hole, he'll go down it.

When he does that later on, doesn't he? Is it the New Testament or something? He writes all this biblical scholarship that other people, biblical scholars, 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 MacMillan 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 dependents with them, wives, children, aged parents, and so on and so forth.

You get a continued influx in the 1960s. By the late 1960s, the Caribbean and South Asian born population has risen 10 times in 20 years. It's 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. That's what we see today, The higher the immigration figures go, the more populist parties thrive. But at the time, I think the remarkable thing, having written about this, is how muted the reaction is. Most MPs, I think, recognize that they think immigration is a regrettable necessity because the economy needs this cheap unskilled labor. I think also a lot of labor MPs are committed to a slightly wooly, Citizens of the world internationalism. That's why Harold Wilson loves the Commonwealth, for example.

Well, it's interesting that you aligned the two because I wonder whether that is the wooly internationalism is a 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.

That is something that Powell would despise.

Exactly. I think he has no time for any of this stuff because once he realizes he can't become vice-Roy of India, it's over. Why are you still persisting in this ridiculous charade? Yeah. And of course, Tori MPs, most Tori MPs, or at least a lot of Tori MPs, are still stirred by the Raj and General Gordon and all this thing. And for that reason, they don't want to turn their backs on relics and memories of empire. The idea, Kivas Britannica sum, actually, you hear that phrase in the 1950s and 1960s.

Powell, precisely perhaps because he can still feel the tug of that, is all the more contempluous of it. He's 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 probably an for all that, and he's fighting against it. I think you're absolutely right. Immigration isn't really a massive national issue until 1964. 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. Smethwick was a town of about 70,000 people, run down, manufacturing town, very limited housing. One in 10 of its population are immigrants. In 1964, the Tories picked as their candidate a local councilor called Peter Griffiths, who had already made a stir in the constituency by saying, and I quote, Labor are the immigrants' friends. During the campaign, posters and stickers go up across the constituency with the incredibly inflammatory slogan, If you want a neighbor, vote liberal or labor. I think the listeners can probably forgive me for not using the word. The result is a swing to the Tories of more than 7% in an election that nationally, the Tories lose, and Griffiths wins the seat.

This is a big shock to people. 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 thing. Harold Wilson said he was a parliamentary leper. But at the time, some of the papers, for example, the Times says, This has been coming. 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 intelligence, the press, and so on. Some people in the Labor Party, Richard Crossman, who's one of Wilson's ministers, say, We should be careful about this because 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 the months go by, these The issue seems to calm down. Griffith, but ultimately is a nobody. He's a mediocrity. He's not remotely capable of leading a 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. After the break, we will come to the Rivers of Blood.

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Uber, on our way. Download the app today. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Rest is History. We are in mid '60s Britain Everything's groovy, or is it? Because Einok 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 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. Dominic, how How did we get there? How does Powell get there?

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. It's a middle England's industrial metal bashing town. It had boomed in the '50s. There was a massive demand for labor, and in had come thousands of young men from the Caribbean, from India, from Pakistan, working in their local factories and the foundries. By the mid-1960s, Wolverhampton had a higher concentration of immigrants than any other town or city apart from London. At first, there was remarkably little pushback, I would say, from the town's opinion formers. The Local Express and Star still exists. It was the biggest regional paper, and I think it still is by far in Britain. 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 your Keefus 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. It's like patronizing 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.

White flight is the phrase, isn't it?

White flight. I mean, it's a very, very A familiar story. Now, most of the newcomers are young single men. We've already made that point. Inevitably, they want to play their music, they want to have a good time, they have parties. So you start to get all these stories. Oh, they don't behave. Oh, they play their music. Oh, they drink, and all this thing. And you get local residents associations complaining. But what does E. Not Powell do? At first, he does absolutely nothing at all as one of the town's MPs. So in 1959, his beaten labor 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 Jacker. Yes, like Mick Jacker. 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 color question in this country.

So it's for the immigrants' own good that we start to bring in controls.

And by the color question, by that, is he thinking the United States?

I think you cannot understand this issue without realizing that in an age when for the first time, I think about 1964, when he makes the speech, is the point at 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, from Montgomery, from all these kinds of places. This is on their mind the whole time because it's making the headlines. Martin Luther King's campaigns, the racist backlash in the formerly Confederate South, all of that stuff. That's in the ether. It's absolutely 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 he backs away from that position later on. 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 It's not important at all. Anyway, I'll just leave that hanging.

In the next few years, as he is falling 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, It's not color prejudiced or racially intoler to ask for strict controls. Now, at first, I think people don't really notice because he's saying all kinds of eccentric things. Let's not help the Americans in Vietnam. Let's cut all the spending on the welfare States, all of this stuff. But if you track what he's actually saying month by month, it's clearly becoming more and more aggressive. By 1965, in the spring of 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. I think there is, to be fair to him, an element of truth in this.

A lot of manufacturing towns in mid '60s Britain If you forget about immigration, just look at what's happening in these towns. They're quite run down. The the the the the Victorian fabric of these places is visibly fraying. Their industries are running into foreign competition. British This productivity is atrocious. People are becoming increasingly anxious about rising prices and losing their jobs. 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.

Basically, hard times breed hardening opinions.

I think so. I think this is where I think I would have, I would argue, flattering myself, a more nuanced attitude to how people think about immigration then they're all just racist or they're antiracist. 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 generalized 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. 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 incoate.

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 loud speaker for opinions of constituents.

Well, this is one of the issues, right? That he owes his electors. He owes them his judgment. As you say, he's not just a loud speaker for them. The thing is, Powell doesn't live in Wolverhampton. Powell lives in Belgravia, the swankiest part of London. He has never really shown that much interest in what... The men who stand on the Molenue terraces on a Saturday cheering the finest team in the Midlands, they They are the finest team in the Midlands, by the way, at this point, Tom. They're not really 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 time, so we need to move on. But that is an outrageous and ludicrous statement.

He's not really interested in what they think, I would say, up to this point. He's never been the tribune of the Plebs. 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. 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 in its island home. This idea of the united people in the island home, he comes to think that the advent of so many newcomers is diluting and undermining that. I think what happens is once he's first articulated the idea, it clearly chimes with a lot of people, and he almost self-radicalises. It's like the process that you see on social media. He makes the speech, he gets a better reaction than for any other speech he's ever made. And then he thinks, well, I'll give people more people. 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 logical extreme.

Driven mad by his own remorse as a 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 Mr. Boring, Ted Heath, the Kier Starmer of Tori politics in 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 Tori grassroots people who are not really interested in his views on Herodotus or Nietzsche or E. E. Hausman, but they really respond to all this stuff.

At this point, he still wants to be Prime Minister? Oh, yeah.

I think he's very ambitious, his pal. Very ambitious. By 1967, he's now making comparisons with America all the time. He says, Look at the riots in American cities. This is what is coming to Britain if we're not careful. He actually uses some phrases that I think even his defenders will say, Oh, hold on. 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 insulence by colored against white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white. I have to say, when I came across that word, I mean, I wrote about this 20 years ago. Then when I was preparing this episode, I was rereading the stuff, and that word insulence just jumped out. That is a word that you use in the American South when you're saying the black bloke hasn't doffed his hat to the white woman or whatever. It is so loaded.

What's interesting is, 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. 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. It is 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. I think this starts to make much more sense, this whole view, 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 Kenyata, the President of Kenya, decides to kick the 200,000 Kenyan Asians, originally Indian merchants and laborers 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 furore. Powell speaks out. He says it's mad to let these people into Britain. They should return to the country where they belong.

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. Powell 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 Labor, the Harold Wilson government, are 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 Tori press at the time, actually the Tori press, not just the Labor press, said this was unbelievably, this was unconscionable. The spectator said it was one of the most immoral pieces of legislation ever to go through Parliament, but it went through all the same.

Why is Labor doing this? Are they responding to grassroots pressure in their constituencies?

Yes. Right. There's a very famous... Everyone listened to this podcast for a long time, and I'm a big fan of James Callahan. This is not Callahan's finest dad by any He's home secretary. There's a point at which, I think one of his colleagues, Richard Crosman, writes in his diary, and he says, Jim's making a big name for himself in the Labor Party because he is determined. The message that Jim is sending to our supporters is, and I quote, no more bloody immigrants, whatever happens. The thinking is, Labor will do very well with this message. Lots of working class people will like it.

Right. Again, not unknown in current politics.

But of course, they see themselves as the good guys, the Labor Party. 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 kindly, cuddly Race Relations Bill. Ted Heath says to his colleagues, Okay, well, we're not racists, so 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. All the other Taurus 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. Powell sits in that meeting. He's the Shadow Defense Spokesman. He sits there steaming with rage because he thinks we should be fighting labor on this issue. He doesn't believe in a Race Relations Bill. He says it's time to start encouraging people to go home. This is our chance to make a stand. 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 I quote, Fizz like a rocket, but whereas all rockets fall to Earth, this one is going to stay up. He's actually sent out copies of the speech to the media. 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, 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 had, 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, Edmund Burke's famous argument. Every time an MP gets a mad letter, they don't have to read it out in the House of Commons. 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 the speech said, This is disgraceful scam munkering 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 Registrar General's office. So he is actually quoting official figures with that.

But people were 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 heping up its own funeral pyre. Now, that language, I think, definitely reflects the fact that he's been watching the riots America, 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. Then he goes on to say, This is a good example, he says, of how ordinary English people are now a persecuted minority. The politics of grievance, 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 excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shop, she's followed by children, charming, wide-grinning picaninnies. 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 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 this subject. So he says he's picking it out. On the other, I mean, it is, as you said, inflammatory. But I mean, I would go so far as to say wicked. I use the word advisedly because Powell is a man steeped in biblical prophecy. He knows the of words and of stories and of anecdotes. 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 a house surrounded by immigrants and People are pushing excreta through her letter box, and kids are chanting at her in the street. Some of Powell's critiques said, This is a textbook far-right image. This is the folk tale that is being spread by the 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 Cotteril, Brighton Place, Wolverhampton, aged '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 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 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 he 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 increase his appeal to the Torrey 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. 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 '80s and '90s. Clem Jones had been a really close friend of Powell and his family, and he basically broke off their relationship after 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. It's utterly irresponsible. But he was a newspaper editor. He asked his readers, Tell us what you think. He said, We got 35,000 postcards in favor of Powell. We got 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 Caban as a Shadow Defense 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. 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, if people are interested in grassroots this opinion by a journalist called Jeremy Seabrook, called City Close Up. 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. These are people who don't follow Westminster politics. Very, very small, ordinary people. 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 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 wintery and esthetic lover of dead languages.

But in a weird way, I think that contributes to the appeal, right? 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 foot, in particular, in the future leader of the Labor Party, who actually makes a point after the speech of going and shaking his hand and being friendly to him, showing other MPs that he still is going to be Enoc's friend. Isn't that interesting? Anyway, two things that actually get lost in the talk about immigration, we mentioned at the beginning. In the next few years, Powell establishes what becomes the economic gospel of Thatcherism, criticizing Ted Heath, for example, in the early '70s for spending too much and whatnot. Then when Britain joins Europe in 1973, Powell is the chief critic. He's the guy who basically invents Euro-skepticism. So as his biographer, Simon Heffer, says, If you judge a politician by his intellectual legacy, then he 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 Tauri MP.

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. 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. Powell returns to the issue again and again in the next few years. A good example, really good example, 1972, Iddi Amin kicked out Ugandaasians from Uganda, and Powell led the campaign to stop 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. 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 Tori politician Priti Patel, her parents were Uganda-asians. Actually, some listeners, even listeners sympathetic to power, 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 Uganda Asian community proved enormously successful, assimilated very smoothly. He talks about the white people, frightened and powerless, but he doesn't really talk about the Ugandaians who've been kicked out of their country, have nowhere to go, are frightened and powerless refugees. I think that would be one of my main criticisms of Powell, 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 his image, struggling for possession of land with these people.

Again, presumably, he's saying this because he fears, well, rivers of blood. But the language he's using is making that more likely, isn't it?

I mean, it's- Yeah, I would say so, actually. To put my cards on the table, I always slightly sigh and roll my eyes when people just say in a very blanket, condemnatory way, Oh, Eina Powell, terrible racist, end of Story. Because I always think, No, it's never the end of the story. There's always more nuance, 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. Actually, to go to this question of, is Einaut 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's hardly going to be teaching himself all these languages if he hates foreigners. Is he prejudiced against individual people based on their skin color? 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, you'll be able to tell that the focus of my research for this episode has very much been desert island bisks. 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 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 Sunak 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 Kemi Badenok or Rishi Sunak, I think they are English. I mean, it's an interesting question. 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.

He never really seemed to consider the impact of his words. 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. 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 had 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? 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 promote it. I mean, that's basically what being a preacher is. 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 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. That, I would argue, leads him to take positions that would cause me concern if I was taking them. 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 were right to be afraid of me, I would be really troubled by that. I would be desperate to show people that I wasn't racist, that 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. 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 Fiorore is that his exile, as it were, is so complete that it deters other politicians from even mentioning immigration.

I think in the '70s and '80s, the potential for populist anti-immigration politics was always there. But it's really remarkable how nobody exploits it. Margaret Thatcher, who in many ways is a 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 furore, 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 in 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. They don't want to damage their own names or reputations. But I think it's much more likely that they are genuinely afraid of pandering to the worst instincts in people. 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. 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.

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 criticize 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 that there would be American style. We're talking about 150 cities in 1967, 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 not talking about religious groups, he's talking about people from the Caribbean. In other words, fellow Christians who just happen 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. I would say that's clearly not happened.

Powell has a long legacy, right? And these issues have never gone away. And let's just end with one aspect in which I think Powell 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. This is coming, I think, after a period in which politics has been quite decarious and deferential, and the populist element has been very much downplayed. But I think that's Pal's real legacy. It's a politics that was completely unfamiliar in late '60s Britain, that is very familiar today. It's the politics of identity. What is it to be English or to be British? 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.

In that sense, Tom, I don't know if you agree, I think we are still living in Enor Power's Britain today.

Well, thanks, Dominic. Yes. This has been a very long episode, maybe the longest episode we've ever done. I think that reflects both with the inherent fascination of the topic and the sensitivities of the issues that it provokes. Thank you, everyone who has made it this far. Thank you, Dominic. We will be back very soon with something completely different, namely, Nelson's Mistress: The Scandalous Life of Lady Hamilton.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.