When Enoch Powell was asked in his old age whether he regretted his explosive speech in 1968, when he, as a Conservative MP for Wolverhampton in central England, had conjured up a vision of the Tiber frothing with blood to warn of what he considered to be the catastrophic consequences of immigration, he joked that he should have quoted Virgil in Latin. But, said the classicist, he had not wanted to sound pedantic. His audience in a Birmingham hotel may not have known where the Tiber quote came from, but Powell’s statement in the intervention that went down in history as the “Rivers of Blood” speech that ordinary English people sometimes feel like a persecuted minority made the unlikely populist overnight the most popular and controversial politician in the country. In polls at the time, 74 percent of the population approved of Powell.
He is credited with helping the Conservative Party win the election in 1970 and then defeat it in 1974 by supporting Labour. The Guardian wrote at the time that Powell had capitalised on the widespread perception “that politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is run by men who have no idea what interests or worries ordinary people in the poorer areas of Wolverhampton”. Half a century later, politicians and columnists are now commenting on current British events in the same words.
“An evil speech”? Or not?
To this day, Powell is seen by some as a prophet and by others as a leper. In a conversation recorded immediately before the recent riots, the conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg said that Powell had made civilized conversation about immigration difficult for decades with the “hysterical tone” of his “Rivers of Blood” speech. As editor-in-chief of the “Times”, Rees-Mogg’s father William had titled his editorial on Powell’s dismissal from the Conservative shadow cabinet “An evil speech” and accused the speaker of racism: Powell was out to stir up racial hatred. The more carefully one reads the text, the more disgraceful it seems, “the language, the allusions, the constant appeals to self-pity, the anecdotes”. Editor-in-chief Rees-Mogg saw this as a deliberate incitement to racial prejudice.
In the show he hosts on the right-wing TV channel GBNews on Tuesday, Jacob Rees-Mogg repeated his accusation that Powell had stifled open debate on immigration with inflammatory rhetoric, as if he was blaming him for the fact that the issue was never properly addressed out of consideration for liberal sensitivities – as is now being criticized. With the result that Britain now faces a shambles.
All over Britain, the memory of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech is still alive: protesters on August 4 in Kingston upon Hull.Picture Alliance
As always, a red stripe was emblazoned at the bottom of the screen with the broadcaster’s warning to viewers not to be silenced: “Don’t let them silence you.” By “them” is meant the “liberal elite,” who are repeatedly accused of denigrating those who draw attention to the failure of multicultural politics as culture warriors or right-wing extremists. This makes organs such as GBNews, TalkTV (“the home of common sense!”) and the social media platform X all the more defiant in stylizing themselves as advocates of free speech. The right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson, who denies directing the unrest from his vacation in a luxury hotel in Cyprus, thanked X owner Elon Musk profusely in a disgusting conversation with the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for getting his voice back thanks to him after other networks had blocked him.
Abuse of the largest platform in the democratic world
Musk, who now touts his social media platform as the “best source for UK news,” gleefully forwarded a tweet from Financial Times journalist Edward Luce, who denounced him as an intolerable threat to democracy and accused the entrepreneur of using the “largest and most influential platform in the democratic world” to “foment racial conflict and civil breakdown.” Musk also cited two Financial Times assessments from 2022 and 2023, which said he had failed to convince doubters that Twitter could be saved and that the platform was “dying a slow and tedious death,” for which, the Financial Times said, we should perhaps be grateful.
Musk’s alarmist claim that civil war in Britain was inevitable provoked opposition not only from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but also from historian Robert Tombs, who acknowledged that certain parallels could be drawn with the civil war that broke out in England in 1642. But at the time, hardly anyone wanted it. Nevertheless, the worst internal conflict in English history had broken out. Tombs referred to the fear at the time of losing rights, freedoms and being handed over to papism or Puritan fanaticism. As dissatisfied as people are with their politicians today, and as much as mass immigration and imported religious fanaticism are causing unrest, the level of fear and paranoia today is less – despite the conspiracy theories spread on social media.
Tombs’ most important argument was the current disproportion between the power of the modern state and that of potential rebels, which makes civil war unimaginable. A spontaneous uprising today has no chance against police forces, let alone armies. Governments do not have to fear that they will be defeated by rebels, but that they will kill too many of them. People have always rebelled or rioted when they feel ignored, writes Tombs. What protects democracies is that they listen and act.
What is currently being debated on X
However, the complaint that has been repeated like a refrain in the British debate on immigration since Powell’s speech is that the suffering of the majority of the population is simply not being heard, that politicians are meeting the needs of migrants to the detriment of the white working class, and that the police are now cracking down harder on right-wing extremists than on Black Lives Matter rioters or criminal Muslim sex offenders. Musk has even branded Starmer, who took a knee to show solidarity at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, as a “TwotierKier” with a hashtag. And X is full of references to the discrepancy between the treatment of white rioters who received prison sentences and Muslim offenders who are allowed to do community service instead of being locked up.
Since the race riots in London’s Notting Hill in the late 1950s, ten years before Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic warning, run-down areas have repeatedly become flashpoints of ethnic conflict that only needed a match to cause an explosion. In Leeds, it was the decision of the social services a few weeks ago to take the children of a Roma family into care. In Dublin, it happened after an Algerian attacked two children and a carer with a knife – a case that bears an eerie resemblance to the murder of the three little girls in Stockport. But the current perpetrator, contrary to what was reported on X, is not a Muslim asylum seeker who entered the country illegally, but the British-born son of a couple who immigrated from largely Christian Rwanda, the very country to which the Conservative government wanted to deport illegal immigrants.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the poet Cinna falls victim to the mob because he has the same name as one of Caesar’s murderers. “It doesn’t matter,” shouts the mob, “his name is Cinna.” Although the identity of the Stockport perpetrator has long been known, the rioters and the voices that incite them continue to shout: “It doesn’t matter.” In the summer heat, they give vent to their anger at the grievances and dangers that Powell drew attention to in 1968. Over time, the belief that multiculturalism is preferable to social consensus has only deepened these grievances.
