IT was 50 years ago today that Enoch Powell didn’t quite say that immigration would lead to Rivers of Blood on the streets of the UK, but that was what he implied in probably the most controversial speech in British political history.

It is important to know that Powell (pictured below) knew exactly what he was doing. Ever ambitious and a self-publicist, he tipped off the media about his intentions.

The speech was ostensibly to protest against the Race Relations Bill which was then going through Parliament and became law in October that year. He meant to provoke outrage – “all I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal” was the closing line – and he definitely succeeded.

WHO WAS POWELL?
BORN in 1912, he was a classical scholar who was a professor of Ancient Greek in Australia at just 25, then a brigadier in the wartime intelligence corps, rising from the rank of private. He was also an author of poetry and wrote several works on the classics. Once a Labour voter, he joined the Tories as a researcher and became MP for Wolverhampton South West in the 1950 general election.

The National:

His powerful oratory became his most noted trait as he moved through the ministerial ranks in the late 1950s and early 60s. When Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won power in 1964, Powell became shadow transport spokesman and then shadow defence secretary in 1965, the post he still held on April 20, 1968. But for several years he had been hugely concerned that immigration would create civil strife in Britain and he went in front of a Conservative association in Birmingham to say so.

DID HE ACTUALLY SAY RIVERS OF BLOOD?
NO. The shorthand cliche has been used almost from the day he spoke, but his actual words were a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid. Ever the classicist, Powell said: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

It gave an intellectual veneer to the content which, despite many apologists saying otherwise, was racist in its views on immigrants. Take this one section: “It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. 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 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiances whom they have never seen.”

Or this: “If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected.”

HE DID REALLY SAY PICCANINNIES?
INDEED he did. His excuse was that he was quoting from a letter from a constituent about the proverbial little old lady in his street: “She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is 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.”

WHAT WAS THE PUBLIC REACTION?
DAYS afterwards, London dockers went on strike and marched on Parliament in support of Powell. Similar protests backing Powell erupted all over England.

The National:

The overwhelming reaction in England and certain parts of Scotland was in favour of Powell, as various polls discovered. Out of the Shadow Cabinet, he did not relent in his attacks on the Race Relations Act and became even more popular.

Heath’s Conservatives surprisingly won the 1970 general election against the odds. More than a few pundits and researchers speculated that their overall majority was gained by Powell’s popularity.

WHAT WAS THE POLITICAL REACTION?
THE speech was made on the Saturday. Ted Heath sacked him on the Sunday. Powell and Heath hated each other, and Powell eventually left the Tories and joined the Ulster Unionists, becoming MP for South Down.

The Sunday Times and The Times said the speech was ‘racialist’ and ‘evil’ respectively. Most of his party shunned him, but Teddy Taylor, then the MP for Glasgow Cathcart, was prominent among those who stayed his friend.

WAS THE BBC RIGHT TO BROADCAST THE SPEECH EARLIER THIS WEEK?
AS the Daily Telegraph thought so, it must have been right.

There is a direct link between the Radio 4 broadcast and Scottish playwright Chris Hannan’s recent superb play What Shadows which considers immigration and identity through the prism of reaction to the speech back then and in the 1990s – Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid played Powell on stage and on radio.

The Times reviewer gave What Shadows huge praise and wrote: “Powell seems from another age except that some of his concerns, Islamic fundamentalism and the disenfranchised working class, are the stuff of Brexit Britain.”

Now note this line from the Rivers of Blood speech: “The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.”

After the Brexit vote, we can more than imagine it, and immigration sadly remains a determining issue 50 years on from Powell’s notorious speech. The question is, did Powell’s speech merely predict the future or did he cause it?