- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Admin Super
Enoch Powell gave the speech that was to define him, on 20 April 1968, at a Conservative Association meeting at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham.
Flanked by two stony-faced colleagues, Powell told his audience about what he said was an exchange with an unnamed constituent.
“If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country,” the MP claimed he had been told.
“In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
And Powell didn’t stop there.
“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,” Powell said – his own words, this time.
It was “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre,” the MP continued.
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding: like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
With the television cameras filming – ATV had been tipped off about the contents of the speech – Powell went on to tell his audience of the only white woman remaining in a Wolverhampton street.
A war widow, he said, who was abused by “negroes”, had “excreta pushed through her letterbox” and would be taunted by children he described as “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies”.
The impact of the speech was explosive.
Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Edward Heath, although he received strong support from the public, with dockers and meat packers marching in support of him.
For the immigrant community, Powell’s rhetoric – and the reaction to it – was terrifying.
